Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

[Osiris]

Astronomy and Science geeks!

SETI is an organized effort by humans to detect intelligent life beyond our planet. A number of efforts with "SETI" in the project name have been organized, including projects funded by the United States Government.

The generic approach of SETI projects is to survey the sky to detect the existence of transmissions from a civilization on a distant planet - an approach widely endorsed by the scientific community as hard science.

There are great challenges in searching across the sky to detect a first transmission that can be characterised as intelligent, since its direction, spectrum and method of communication are all unknown beforehand.

SETI is not generally viewed by scientists as a trivial task. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is 100,000 light years across and contains approximately a hundred billion stars. Searching the entire sky for some far-away and faint signal is an exhausting exercise.

The good news is that you can help! You can participate by running a free program called SETI@home that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data!

Check it out at: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/

[suomynona]

I don't recommend doing that in case you are paying for your Megabytes (check your ISP's fares...). SETI will constantly download data that will be analyzed by your machine.

--Suomynona

[Fragrance of Roses]

SETI is a great program!!! When I was in the States, I downloaded it and it ran as my screen saver.

In medicine, they have similar programs that rely on millions of computers to analyze the immense data available on Alzheimer's, Leukemia, and aids. It helps when one offers his computer for data analysis!

Now SETI is great and will get somewhere someday...

Based on statistics done at SJSU over 20 years by Professor Leslie Tomley of the Physics and Astronomy Department, people who venture deep into astronomy and study it well, believe better in the existence of Extraterrestrial Life... :D Isn't that weird??? You do not have to be an E.T. or Starwars Geek for you to believe in that!!! Just studying the facts and data available will give you hope that something out there exists!!!

This goes to show that scientific evidence makes it more probable that we are not all alone in this cosmos, and millions of other forms of life and intelligence does exist out there...

Also, many believe that the U.S. government is hiding tons of volatile data and contact info from the public... like the spaceship kept in Death Valley--Nevada in an undisclosed location... I am not saying that this is what I believe in, because I am not that kind of person who believes rumours especially when it comes to science... but this remains a probability--so go figure!

[Osiris]

Been looking for some ET life for a while now on my computer.. and nothing so far!

Yalla, install this program and help in searching for those green men!

[Salome]

Originally Posted by Osiris

Been looking for some ET life for a while now on my computer.. and nothing so far!

Yalla, install this program and help in searching for those green men!

Cant, wrong country:(( ET comes only to USA

Otherwise if anybody is out there, if they want to contact us they will...I believe they should be more developed than we humans

[Shah Massoud]

Originally Posted by Salome

Cant, wrong country:(( ET comes only to USA

Otherwise if anybody is out there, if they want to contact us they will...I believe they should be more developed than we humans

not necessarly....if there civilisation is younger then ours , maybe they are still in the age of discovering fire and dragging their women by the hair out of the cave ( hayde latche la salome )......

if you believe in the theory of randomness , this means that IF life exists elsewhere , it would exist in many places ( not one )...some places would be more developped then us and some would be less....

[Red Phoenix]

Originally Posted by Shah Massoud

not necessarly....if there civilisation is younger then ours , maybe they are still in the age of discovering fire and dragging their women by the hair out of the cave ( hayde latche la salome )......

if you believe in the theory of randomness , this means that IF life exists elsewhere , it would exist in many places ( not one )...some places would be more developed then us and some would be less....

and the long distances make sure the matter is problematic we might get tomorrow a msg from a far civilization that got extinct many many years ago.

but me i think there is also a really serious problem at stake here too, if we ever make contact where some aliens come or send a msg and nice vice versa, how on earth will we be able to actually know that they are indeed lifeforms

take this for instance, if we humans survive let's say 1 more million years, by then we wont be talking, probably we would be connected somehow to exchange info very very VERY fast, we also probably would look very very strange compared to now, there is even a chance that we might actually meld into something else, cyborgs, part machines part genetic code

what i am saying is this, i bet in a million years, the successors of humans can look like whatever they want, so if one of them decided to become a lion or a nimbus cloud and decided to jump back in time to see us, unless he wants to make his presence apparent, nothing on earth will identify him
(perhaps this can account for some ufo sightings)

he will be unrecognizable simple as that, he will just blend in

now aliens if they contact us and they do want to be apparent, if they dont adapt to something we can recognize we might actually never get the idea of wtf is going on

for instance, we might have a couple of sphere hovering over the cities of the world for 10 month or 10 years and no one would even know if that was a meteo phenomenon or aliens or witchs

i dont see contact always beeing straight forward

and now the scientists tell us our universe has more than 3 dimensions and i say sweeet, now it's really messed up ! hehe

[Osiris]

Originally Posted by Salome

Cant, wrong country:(( ET comes only to USA

Otherwise if anybody is out there, if they want to contact us they will...I believe they should be more developed than we humans

In fact, this software analyzes radio transmissions that are detected by the, 300 meters in diameter, Arecibo radio telescope (located in Puerto Rico). This telescope detects all sort of signals that are digitized, parsed into small chunks, and then sent to millions of home users for analysis to search for any 'intelligent' signal.

Hundreds of planets are now found outside our solar system.. could any of them be home to alien life? We still don't know whether our earth is a commonly occurring planet, or a 1 in a billion freak. But hey, in our galaxy alone, there are 100 billions stars with billions of planets orbiting them, and there are 100 billions galaxies.. So I say our chances in finding those well-advanced "green men" should be good. Or should I say, their chances in finding us is good.

[Red Phoenix]

Originally Posted by Osiris

In fact, this software analyzes radio transmissions that are detected by the, 300 meters in diameter, Arecibo radio telescope (located in Puerto Rico). This telescope detects all sort of signals that are digitized, parsed into small chunks, and then sent to millions of home users for analysis to search for any 'intelligent' signal.

Hundreds of planets are now found outside our solar system.. could any of them be home to alien life? We still don't know whether our earth is a commonly occurring planet, or a 1 in a billion freak. But hey, in our galaxy alone, there are 100 billions stars with billions of planets orbiting them, and there are 100 billions galaxies.. So I say our chances in finding those well-advanced "green men" should be good. Or should I say, their chances in finding us is good.

u talking about Seti@home ?

[Osiris]

Originally Posted by Red Phoenix

u talking about Seti@home ?

Yep.. no luck till now! :(