SETI claims we will make first contact with ET in less than 20 years (Discuss SETI etc)

we can spread the human virus thru-out the galaxy!

"Soylent Green™ is made out of..."

Oh, wait...

"Get your stinkin' paws off me, you damned dirty ape!"

Or better yet:

"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace, but a sword."

Not too cheery, but has anyone looked closely at that photo? What's she got in her left hand there?

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_1030197.html

I also think that there are probably complications in the observational setup of the SETI radio experiment. You have to remember that they are only looking over a relatively finite and small section of the radio spectrum, which incidently has large chunks missing due to federal/international regulation and assignment of our radio waves. It is not exactly ideal.

In terms of risk vs. reward, I think it would be stupid not to do the experiment. I just not optimistic about it.

It looks a bit like a remote control...

Space isn't the only place to look for proof of extraterrestrial life, writes Paul Davies.

The question of whether we are alone in the universe is one of the biggest of the Big Questions of Existence. One way to settle the matter is to find some cosmic company. A direct approach to this problem is to scan the skies with radio telescopes in the hope of stumbling across a message from an alien civilisation.

It is a long shot of literally astronomical proportions, but that hasn't deterred a dedicated band of radio astronomers from trying.

Known as SETI - the search for extraterrestrial intelligence - this project has been running for 40 years. So far the silence has been deafening. There could be all sorts of reasons for this, including the obvious one that ET simply doesn't exist. But while the radio astronomers seek to beef up their efforts, it seems worth asking whether other approaches should be tried.

Put yourself in the situation of the aliens, out there somewhere in the galaxy. They surmise that Earth looks promising for the emergence of intelligent life one day, but they have no idea when. There would be little point in beaming radio messages in this direction for eons in the vague hope that one day radio technology would be developed here and someone would decide to tune in.
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A better plan would be to leave a message for us to find when we are ready. The trouble with this set-and-forget strategy is the time factor. Life takes billions of years to evolve intelligence. Even if ETs figured there was animal life on Earth, they could be faced with a wait of tens of millions of years. That is a long time for an artefact to survive.

Putting the text inside a large metal object and plonking it on the Earth's surface is expensive in transportation costs, and risky. Our restless planet leaves nothing untouched for long. The artifact could easily end up buried or drowned or eroded to scrap.

The ideal solution would be to encode the message inside a large number of self-replicating, self-repairing microscopic machines programmed to multiply and adapt to changing conditions.

Fortunately such machines already exist: they are called living cells. The cells in our bodies, for example, contain genetic messages written by Mother Nature billions of years ago.

DNA, the molecule that contains the script of life, encodes its data in a four-letter alphabet. This would be an ideal medium for storing a cosmic calling card. In many organisms, humans included, genes make up only a tiny fraction of their DNA. Much of the rest seems to be biological gobbledygook, often called "junk DNA". There is plenty of room there for ET to etch a molecular message without damaging any vital genetic functions.

How long would such a message survive? Mutations continually scramble sequences of DNA, especially the junk part. Recently, however, scientists in the United States have discovered whole chunks of human and mouse junk DNA that seem to have remained virtually unchanged for tens of millions of years. That would be a good place to store a message.

The beauty of this scheme is that ET wouldn't have to visit Earth to implant the message. A lot of junk DNA consists of genomic fragments inserted by viruses over the course of evolution. An alien civilisation could, for negligible cost, dispatch tiny packages across the galaxy, loaded with customised viral DNA. The cargo would be designed to infect, without harm, any DNA-based life it encountered.

How would we know if there was a message in our genomes? Presumably ET would make it easy for us to spot. Some sort of in-your-face pattern would be best, something that stood out from the random scatter of genetic letters.

A good way to do this would be to use the letters to represent pixels on a screen tracing out a shape like a circle - an idea mooted in a different context by the late Carl Sagan in his novel Contact. That way, the artificial nature of the pattern would still be apparent even if a few pixels got scrambled.

The arresting pattern would serve to flag the message itself, which would otherwise be overlooked as a meaningless jumble. The message would then need to be decoded with the help of a computer. What would ET have to say to us? Most likely, any message in the genome would be rather basic, like people waving between mountain tops.

It might contain the co-ordinates and transmission times of a conventional radio message, broadcast every century, perhaps. Or it could direct us to a larger artefact located safely in the fringes of our solar system, in which we would find the entire contents of an encyclopedia galactica, including the rise and fall of ET's civilisation, which may have died out long before human beings even existed.

I have to admit that my proposal is at the extreme end of the spectrum of speculation, but genomic SETI is probably no dafter than radio SETI, which has the blessing of the US space agency, NASA, and the scientific community. And I am certainly not advocating that we abandon radio SETI just yet.

The co-founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen, recently gave $US35 million ($49 million) for an array of radio telescopes being constructed in northern California and dedicated to expanding the search for alien signals. Other scientists think ET would prefer to use lasers to beam messages and have started a search using optical telescopes.

But the advantage of genomic SETI is that scientists are sequencing and analysing genomes like crazy anyway. For little extra cost they can scan the burgeoning database for signs of alien tinkering. Given the momentous nature of finding a message from ET, a bit of effort seems worthwhile.

Radio SETI generates such huge amounts of data that scientists have enlisted the public to help analyse it on their desktop PCs. So successful has this SETI@home project become that molecular biologists have emulated it with Genome@home.

It would be simple to merge these projects under the catchy slogan: The truth is inside us.

Paul Davies works at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology, Macquarie University. This article is adapted from an essay in New Scientist, August 7.

Mysterious signals from 1000 light years away

In February 2003, astronomers involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) pointed the massive radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, at around 200 sections of the sky.

The same telescope had previously detected unexplained radio signals at least twice from each of these regions, and the astronomers were trying to reconfirm the findings. The team has now finished analysing the data, and all the signals seem to have disappeared. Except one, which has got stronger.

This radio signal, now seen on three separate occasions, is an enigma. It could be generated by a previously unknown astronomical phenomenon. Or it could be something much more mundane, maybe an artefact of the telescope itself.

But it also happens to be the best candidate yet for a contact by intelligent aliens in the nearly six-year history of the SETI@home project, which uses programs running as screensavers on millions of personal computers worldwide to sift through signals picked up by the Arecibo telescope.

Named SHGb02+14a, the possible alien communication has a frequency of about 1420 megahertz - one of the main frequencies at which hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, readily absorbs and emits energy.

Some astronomers have suggested that aliens trying to announce their presence would be likely to transmit at this frequency, and SETI researchers regularly scan this part of the radio spectrum.

The unexplained signal appears to be emanating from a point between the constellations of Pisces and Aries, where there is no obvious star or planetary system within 1,000 light years, and the transmission is also very faint.

BREAKING NEWS: SHOCKING NEW DISCOVERY - ALIENS R LEET!!

[Seti Dude 1] Woah i think i just received some alien communication!
[Seti Dude 2] Dude! Awesome!
[Seti Dude 1] I'm trying to decode it! It's like "SHGb02+12a"
[Seti Dude 2] Hey I think I got it... it starts with "I"
[Seti Dude 2] "R"
[Seti Dude 2] "L"
[Seti Dude 2] "3"
[Seti Dude 2] "3"
[Seti Dude 2] "7"
[Seti Dude 2] "U"
[Seti Dude 2] "R"
[Seti Dude 2] "S"
[Seti Dude 2] "U"
[Seti Dude 2] "X"
[Seti Dude 1] "IR1337.. U R SUX..." OMG Earth just got pwned!

Summary: If an extraterrestrial civilization wanted to maximize its chances of being discovered by another civilization, the best bet may not ride on radio waves. Instead Rutgers engineers make the case for a 'message in a bottle' SETI strategy. Their conclusions, reported in Nature magazine, are similar in spirit to what motivated the golden disc carried by the 1970's Voyager spacecraft.

I declare world contact day!

related stuff METI (Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence)
"There has been some outrage recently over attempts to contact intelligent aliens, where instead of hiding in the corner and listening real hard some astronomers beamed intense directional messages up up and away"

What? They're texting them?

Asking them to please phone home, obviously.

What're they thinkin', palling around with intelligent aliens like that! *wink*

What? Asking What're They're them thinkin' texting to palling them? Please around phone with home, intelligent obviously. Aliens like that! *wink*

"dear aliens I shagged your mum"

"lol more liek GAYliens amirite"

We got a reply! Woohoo!

http://i33.tinypic.com/35mntw4.gif

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