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Search For ET To Look Again At 150 Signals
Science Daily ^ | 3-14(15)-03 | Editorial Staff

Posted on 03/14/2003 6:07:27 AM PST by vannrox

Source:

University Of California, Berkeley

Date:

2003-03-14

Search For ET To Look Again At 150 Signals

BERKELEY ? After more than a million years of computation by more than 4 million computers worldwide, the SETI@home screensaver that crunches data in search of intelligent signals from space has produced a list of candidate radio sources that deserve a second look.

Three members of the SETI@home team will head to Puerto Rico this month to point the Arecibo radio telescope at up to 150 spots identified as the source of possible signals from intelligent civilizations.

SETI@home is a computer program disguised as a screen saver that pops up when a computer is idle and analyzes radio telescope data in search of strong or unusual signals from space. The candidates for re-observation are particularly strong signals or ones that have been observed in the same spot more than once, some of them five or six times.

"This is the culmination of more than three years of computing, the largest computation ever done," said UC Berkeley computer scientist David Anderson, director of SETI@home. "It's a milestone for the SETI@home project."

SETI@home users should find out the results of the re-observations - what The Planetary Society, the founding and principal sponsor of SETI@home, is billing as the "stellar countdown" - within two to three months.

Though excited at the opportunity to re-observe as many as 150 candidate signals, Anderson is cautious about raising people's expectations that they will discover a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization.

"If there is any possibility at all of finding an extraterrestrial signal, it's probably much less than one percent," he said.

UC Berkeley physicist Dan Werthimer, SETI@home chief scientist, isn't getting his hopes up, either. He has conducted a Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) for 24 years - 11 years using Arecibo's 1,000-foot diameter radio dish - and has returned several times to look again at promising locations and frequency ranges to determine if a strong radio signal is more than random noise, a glitch or a passing satellite. He has been disappointed each time.

On the other hand, SETI@home has mobilized so much more computing power than has ever before been thrown at signal analysis, that the team has been able to perform much more detailed and complicated computations on the radio data than now possible with Werthimer's ongoing SETI project, called SERENDIP IV (Search for Extraterrestrial Radio Emissions from Nearby Developed Intelligent Populations).

"I give it a one in 10,000 chance that one of our candidate signals turns out to be from ET," said Werthimer, who will head for Puerto Rico on March 16.

"Whether or not SETI@home succeeds in finding evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence at this early date, this project has already made history," said Bruce Murray, chairman of The Planetary Society's board of directors. "SETI@home has performed the most sensitive and detailed SETI sky survey to date, has demonstrated the power of the Internet for doing scientific distributed computing, and has allowed the general public to participate directly in an exciting research project."

To acknowledge the 4,287,000-plus users who have analyzed radio data, the SETI@home team will post on its Web site the names of those participants who flagged the candidate signals as a result of data analysis on their home computers. Each candidate signal was analyzed by several people, because SETI@home sends the same data to more than one person to double-check results.

The list of candidates is far longer than 150, but Werthimer suspects that 150 is the maximum he and two colleagues will be able to observe during the 24 hours total available to them at Arecibo Observatory on Mar. 18-20. Criteria for inclusion in the list include not only a strong radio signal and a signal observed more than once in the same spot and frequency range, but also the signal's proximity to a known star and whether that star is known to have planets.

"These factors let us estimate the probability that a candidate is noise," Anderson said. "We're interested in the candidates that are least likely to be noise."

Limited analysis of the signals will be done while the team collects the data, so that observations can be halted and repeated if a very strong signal reappears. Werthimer will be assisted by graduate student Paul Demorest and project scientist Eric Korpela.

A more detailed analysis will be conducted later, Anderson said, ideally with a new version of the SETI@home screensaver based on a new distributed computing platform called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing).

SETI@home offered its screensaver to the world in May 1999 as the first example of wide-scale distributed computing - linking idle computers through the Internet to tackle large computational problems. The key to its success was a fruitful collaboration between Anderson, a computer scientist who was one of the principal developers of distributed computing, and Werthimer, a physicist with two decades of experience collecting radio data and parsing it in search of unusual signals from space.

Together, they have drawn in not only sci-fi fans and computer geeks, but many others interested in offering use of their computer to benefit worthwhile projects. SETI@home has spawned numerous other distributed computing projects, including Folding@home to calculate the three-dimensional structure of proteins and climateprediction.net to improve scientific forecasts of 21st century climate.

However, scientists interested in launching similar projects have been daunted by the time and money needed to create the software. To address this problem, Anderson developed BOINC, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. In addition to being a general purpose platform, it allows users to partition their computer time among several distributed computing projects.

"BOINC makes it easy for scientists to set up new SETI@home-type projects, and to update their applications on the fly," he said. "Each change to SETI@home required all our users to download and install a new program version, but BOINC manages this process without user intervention."

BOINC also has the capacity to store data in participants' unused disk space, much the way Napster, Gnutella and Kazaa take advantage of PC hard drives to store MP3 music files.

"The amount of unused disk space out there is staggering," Anderson said. "BOINC will let us experiment with new ways of handling data, like sending it through high-speed Internet connections straight from telescopes to PCs and archiving it redundantly on PC disks. This will greatly expand the scope of our SETI research."

The test case for BOINC is Astropulse, which is designed specifically to re-examine SETI@home data in search of short radio pulses, something neither SETI@home nor any other SETI project currently can do very well. According to Werthimer, Astropulse can detect pulsars, which blink on and off at periods up to nearly a millisecond; evaporating black holes, which should emit a brief pulse of radio waves as they blink out of existence; as well as messages from extraterrestrials.

"Astropulse will be the first big test of BOINC," which also provides enhanced, more realistic 3-D graphics, Anderson said. "If we get maybe 1,000 people participating in the first BOINC trial, we could analyze the re-observation data in just a few days."

"This is a whole new way to look for ET," Werthimer said.

He and Anderson emphasize that, while the re-observations are the culmination of nearly four years of data crunching, SETI@home is not coming to an end. Werthimer hopes to set up a southern hemisphere SETI program at Parkes Observatory in Australia, the data to be fed into SETI@home. And data still comes in from the SERENDIP IV instruments on the Arecibo dish, which will soon use upgraded receivers to record data from more than one area of the sky at once.

"This is a milestone, but SETI@home will go on," Anderson said.

In addition to The Planetary Society, other major funders include Sun Microsystems, the University of California, Quantum Corp., Fujifilm Computer Products and Network Appliance.

Editor's Note: The original news release can be found here.


Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued for journalists and other members of the public. If you wish to quote any part of this story, please credit University Of California, Berkeley as the original source. You may also wish to include the following link in any citation:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/03/030314071113.htm


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Extended News; Foreign Affairs; Government; News/Current Events; Philosophy
KEYWORDS: alien; crevolist; explore; gravity; mystery; nasa; people; radio; seti; signal; space; telescope; time; wave; world
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To: CHICAGOFARMER
Totally cool - Congratulations.

I did SETI@home for a while, but I had a slow computer. When I got this faster one, I had completely forgotten about the project.
21 posted on 03/14/2003 12:35:25 PM PST by berkeleybeej
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To: stanz
Thanks, we aim to please. Have a good weekend.
22 posted on 03/14/2003 12:44:15 PM PST by ScholarWarrior
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To: PatrickHenry
Everyone knows that finding a 'made' thing like a signal from outer space or DNA shows Intelligent Design and I think that is against the Established Darwinite Religion.
23 posted on 03/14/2003 1:48:21 PM PST by metacognative
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To: metacognative
Why do you always start your posts with, "everyone knows" or "logic would tell us" or "any reasonable person would..."? It's really annoying.

Semantic tricks are evil.

Why would that be against the "Established Darwinite Religion"? I'm interested in how life on another plane would disprove evolutionary theory but not the creation stories of the Bible. This ought to be interesting.
24 posted on 03/14/2003 3:45:23 PM PST by Buckeye Bomber (Any reasonable person knows that metacognative is a witch!)
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To: Wright is right!
The book was stupid. And the movie sucked.

Just my opinion.

25 posted on 03/14/2003 3:47:43 PM PST by Psycho_Bunny
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To: vannrox
Yeah, but will it run Powerpoint?

If we can listen to some other planet's transmissions some day, I sure hope their TV shows are better than ours. Just think... all this time and energy and we and up watching "Survivor - Alpha Centuri". [sigh]

All that aside, I still think that the distributed processing idea behind Seti@Home is about the coolest thing we've ever done with computers. A million years of computer time. "Just damn..."
26 posted on 03/14/2003 4:09:11 PM PST by Ramius
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To: Ramius
Ok, OK... Centauri.
27 posted on 03/14/2003 4:09:56 PM PST by Ramius
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To: vannrox
I would think that they would need to dedicate a continuous watch on several star systems for several years to realistically determine if there were any signals coming from them. The famous "WOW!" signal might have been a spurious transmission from a planet that could have an orbital period of a few years. If we just caught a glimpse of this signal as it swept past the Earth, it would take time for it to be in the same orbital position around it's parent star. Even then, the odds would be against us picking up the signal again if it was a tight transmission beam.
28 posted on 03/14/2003 4:16:44 PM PST by Brett66
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To: vannrox; Ramius; All
Here's a cool site that gives info about the stars within a 20 LY radius of us. Amazingly the star nearest to us, Alpha Centauri A & B (definitely not C) would be excellent candidates for life bearing terrestrial planets.

The Universe within 12.5 Light Years

29 posted on 03/14/2003 4:20:45 PM PST by Brett66
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To: Buckeye Bomber
Always...semantic tricks...evil? Huh? Whoa! I think life on other planets would be great. What's that got to do with intelligent messages from our past?
30 posted on 03/14/2003 5:47:50 PM PST by metacognative
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To: vannrox

31 posted on 03/14/2003 5:56:47 PM PST by Nick Danger (Liberty Weekend March 22-23 www.freeper.org)
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To: theDentist
Yeah, it had the "feel" of a press release.

I like it, but did it seem to anyone else that the article was more of an advertisement than news?

32 posted on 03/14/2003 5:58:35 PM PST by GOPJ
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To: vannrox
Intelligent life, huh? I don't know. We're either alone or the first ones to look. I agree with Fermi. It's quite telling that we havn't made contact with or detected any other civilization yet, if there is, in fact, other intelligent races out "there".
33 posted on 03/14/2003 6:03:40 PM PST by realpatriot71 (legalize freedom!)
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To: PatrickHenry
Thanks for the ping :-)
34 posted on 03/14/2003 9:42:21 PM PST by RadioAstronomer
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To: L,TOWM
A ping for your thoughts... (?)

My radio telescope is used for SETI. :-) I sure hope we are not alone in this universe!

What a find this would be. It would change everything!

35 posted on 03/14/2003 9:44:44 PM PST by RadioAstronomer
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To: RadioAstronomer
My radio telescope is used for SETI

Yeah, yeah. But most of the time it's a prop for attracting stary-eyed girls into that control room of yours.

36 posted on 03/15/2003 4:03:37 AM PST by PatrickHenry (The universe is made for life, therefore ID. Life can't arise naturally, therefore ID.)
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To: PatrickHenry; Piltdown_Woman
But most of the time it's a prop for attracting stary-eyed girls into that control room of yours.

Yup; RA brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "Control room":

Starry-eyed but clueless babe: "Gee. RA, what are all the leather straps and handcuffs for in your 'Control Room'?"

RA: "Allow me to demonstrated; if I could just have your arm for a moment......CLICK!"

Clueless Starry-eyed babe: "Gee, I can't seem to move my arms or legs..... and what's with the leather outfit you're wearing?"

RA: "Mwwwaaaaahhhhhhhhhh-hah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!!!!!!!! Now you will experience the FULL POWER of my 'Control Room'!!!!"

37 posted on 03/15/2003 2:57:49 PM PST by longshadow
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To: longshadow; RadioAstronomer
And this little fella here ... I call him "ET". Hee hee.
38 posted on 03/15/2003 3:15:07 PM PST by PatrickHenry (The universe is made for life, therefore ID. Life can't arise naturally, therefore ID.)
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To: longshadow; RadioAstronomer; PatrickHenry
and what's with the leather outfit you're wearing?"

Oh no, he doesn't wear leather...ooops! LOL!

39 posted on 03/15/2003 10:03:15 PM PST by Aracelis (Oh, evolve!)
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