Might be a mistake to assume that E.T. wants to phone home.
Well this is actually a question of resources. It is only possible (at least with the current amount of resources) to monitor a very narrow band of frequencies at the same time. The recorder at Arecibo records a bunch of frequencies around a particular central frequency that scientists think that communication is most likely to be on. Part of the work your SETI client does it to break this into even finer frequency steps when scanning for signals.
A system that scans the entire radio spectrum and analyses the scanned data like the current client is not feasible at the moment.
However, it is possible that a signal is not sent on a single frequency but on a broad range of frequencies at the same time. An upcomming project is going to look for this kind of signals. Keep an eye out for Astropulse.
Might be a mistake to assume that E.T. wants to phone home.
Well this is actually a question of resources. It is only possible (at least with the current amount of resources) to monitor a very narrow band of frequencies at the same time. The recorder at Arecibo records a bunch of frequencies around a particular central frequency that scientists think that communication is most likely to be on. Part of the work your SETI client does it to break this into even finer frequency steps when scanning for signals.
A system that scans the entire radio spectrum and analyses the scanned data like the current client is not feasible at the moment.
However, it is possible that a signal is not sent on a single frequency but on a broad range of frequencies at the same time. An upcomming project is going to look for this kind of signals. Keep an eye out for Astropulse.
