> "Michael S. Lorrey" <mike@lorrey.com> wrote:
>
> Just got started with seti@home (here at work),
> How do I join the exi seti team?
> Jonathan Reeves <JonathanR@mail.iclshelpdesks.com> wrote:
> Go here
>
> http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cgi?cmd=team_show&id=393
I can't believe this. I looked and there are 35 people that have been hoodwinked into this effort (not that RC5 seems that much more justifiable), but at least RC5 is guaranteed to produce a result (if it gets enough computers/time), while SETI@HOME never will.
Perhaps these people were not at the Extro3 conference or
perhaps they never read the J-brain discussions of many
years ago, or perhaps they simply want to believe that those
benevolent little green men want to talk to us. Or perhaps they
are simply nano-alien clones spreading confusion on the issue
to keep us from looking in the right places or perhaps they
simply can't follow a logical argument when presented with one.
At any rate...
A 10^40th to 10^50th Instructions Per Second SuperIntelligence
(compared with a 10^12 to 10^14 IPS human { leaving out those
on the SETI@home lists where I believe there may be a "-" sign
in front of the "10" :-)} ) that has the capacity of building
100 billion telescopes (or radio transmitter/receiver dishes)
the diameter of the moon and has an internal communication bandwidth
so large I can't even begin to compare it to a human brain
*ISN'T GOING TO COMMUNICATE WITH US*! Paraphrasing what
We don't begin to become interesting until the post-singularity era arrives. Until that time, perhaps the best they could do is guide us towards that point (as lightly as possible), making sure that we don't get too depressed beforehand by discovering them and plunge like lemmings into the sea when we realize how very far down on the evolutionary tree we actually are.
That brings us to what happened to the WIRE mission, launched
in March, which was supposed to conduct a really good
infrared survey of the entire sky. NASA has attributed the
mission failure to a design "flaw":
http://origins.jpl.nasa.gov/library/pressreleases/99-74.html
It could be sloppy engineering or it could be alien SIs being really clever at hiding themselves... You be the judge.
In the mean time, since there aren't any good space based IR telescopes going up in the near future, the best use of your computer time would be in processing the 2MASS survey data [http://pegasus.phast.umass.edu:80/2mass/pub/overview.html] trying to identify very cold objects that could be further examined for a lack of a stellar spectral fingerprint. The 2MASS survey has about 10 terabytes of data at this point, so there is plenty of work to be done. Even if you didn't come up with SIs, you would come up with brown dwarfs, proto-planetary dust clouds, asteroids or comets that might be on Earth-impact trajectories, etc. (in contrast to SETI@home which does nothing but pollute the planet). Unfortunately, they haven't written any software to let you work on the data yet and if they did have it would have to overcome the used-car sales job the SETI@home people have done.
Robert Bradbury