Talk:Search for extraterrestrial intelligence

Corrections/clarifications on META and BETA added

I fixed some wording and added details on the META and BETA searches. Darren, 20 November 2005.

Stopping condition

Quote: individual SETI projects have clearly defined "stop" conditions

What are the stopping conditions for the Allen Telescope Array?

Tom

Main condition is scarcity of funding.

Section on "Other grid programming projects" moved

The section "Other grid programming projects" doesn't belong in this article, it belongs with SETI@home. While SETI@home is mentioned in this article, this article is by no means about a grid computing project. Thus, a section on "other" such projects doesn't belong. I have moved this to the SETI@home article.

Detection Power Limits

Does anyone with more knowledge of antenna gains transmitters etc. know what power of transmitter we could expect to detect with the equipment we use on earth. My BS detector tells me that having a radio transmitter that requires a nuclear reactor to power would be a very strange thing to build no matter what planet you are on. Just by our own experience radio transmitters in common use are getting weaker not stronger. Perhaps seti needs to set its sights on detecting signals at the strength of a cellphone tower. This type of communication system may be common though harder to detect. Gigawatt transmitters may not exist in the galactic neighbourhood and may not exists on planets with intelligent life on them. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.250.99.163 (talk) 03:14, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

This is a good read on this issue http://stason.org/TULARC/science-engineering/astronomy/100-How-far-away-could-we-detect-radio-transmissions.html — Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.2.4.2 (talk) 17:45, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

www.wow-signal.com

http://www.wow-signal.com/ Why is this listed as an external link? It makes TimeCube look coherent and focused. As far as I can tell, it is a collection of random youtube clips and some rambling text scattered around. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.128.157.168 (talk)

Too much focus on messages and radio signals ???

SETI seems synonymous with searches for radio signals however it is simply about the search for, not communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence. With that in mind the article is far too biased for my liking. There are other methods being used to search which are barely even mentioned in this article. For example Dyson Sphere research, Optical seti and interstellar Spectroscopy to detect specific activity and biosignatures of extraterrestrial intelligence. --EvenGreenerFish (talk) 06:56, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Optical SETI is mentioned... and I agree in principle but SETI operates on the assumption that intelligent life is actively broadcasting messages - TV signals, for instance, are pretty much locked "down" to the surface and wouldn't be observable from afar. Alphachimera (talk) 04:37, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

Message decoding

Unsourced OR moved from article:

Any message determined to be SETI in origin would have to be decoded. Several tools are available to attack this problem. If the message is assumed to be digital data, it can be interpreted as either sequential, a 2D image, or 3D organization. Sequential data can be analyzed by searching for repeated patterns, or more complex patterns.

The application of the Markov process (or the Hidden Markov model) to the deciphering of SETI messages is centered on the idea of probabilistic relation between two words. These symbolic relations can be built into a tree of probabilities applied to a series of words. Markov Models can provide a clearer view of the probability of which one symbol will follow another in a sentence. Markov Models can be used to build tables of association of icons or bitstreams.

The ultimate goal of these information theory and cryptographic processes is to decode and understand the meaning of the message. All the tools contained in cryptanalysis and information theory can help to decipher the format and logic behind the symbols but nothing more. In other words, these tools may be used to build a list of symbols. Assigning meaning to the symbols probably requires a combination of linear data and 2D (or 3D, or 4D videos) images. The hope is that the images or videos may be reconstructed and recognized by a human. Once that recognition takes place, meaning may begin to be attached to the lexicon of symbols.

--109.57.69.1 (talk) 10:10, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

Cites needed

Things like this really irk me: "An alternate hypothesis is that evolutionary pressures in many environments favor species which rapidly consume available resources once they achieve dominance. By the time they have achieved sufficient technology to come to the notice of other civilizations, they are already well on their way to exhausting the resources of their host planet. Therefore the time period available for communication is finite, and very small compared with planetary timescales." Just because it makes sense, and is probably happening to *us* right now, doesn't mean it can just be thrown into an article. I google searched this (horrible, I know) and the only hits were from webpages that spider-crawl Wikipedia. So... I suggest a "citations needed" tag or that someone with more tact than me removes language like this unless anyone has a verifiable source. Alphachimera (talk) 04:40, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

Intro change

This line is awkwardly self-referential to the article itself:

Some of the most well known projects are run by the SETI Institute, but this article is about all efforts to find extraterrestrial intelligence.

Isn't this normally handled in the italicized notes before articles' beginnings? (I forget the wiki name for them.) - Anon98.92.. 98.92.188.252 (talk) 06:09, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

what happens if we find alien life?

Okay, imagine SETI found definitive proof of alien life tomorrow. Has SETI ever said what they would do if they did? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.61.117.69 (talk) 10:36, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

We need an article called First contact, which would be about scientific speculation about humankinds first contact with an intelligent species other than our own. This is different than fictional first contacts, or anthropological first contacts.75.61.135.225 (talk) 06:58, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Fermi paradox

It seems there is an important explanation missing from this section, which is that most scientists probably wouldn't consider the Fermi paradox a paradox at all. Even the abundant existence of intelligent life in the universe wouldn't mean it is abundant in the small neighborhood in which we are capable of communicating. Plus, communication would require not just technological advancement, but types of communication technology complementary to our own. Intelligent, multicellular beings wouldn't necessarily be into long range radio, for example. They might be a few hundred years away from discovering it, they might have abandoned it millenia ago and replaced it with something better, or they simply may have other things on their alien minds. SETI efforts are shots in the dark, so to suggest that their failure to hit anything contradict the idea that extraterrestrial intelligence exists is a bit odd. It's like saying, "I didn't catch any fish in the pond in my back yard, which is weird because I know aquatic creatures exist in the world. What a paradox!"