Please Read First!

Maybe details will become availible when the RFI processing is done. Any idea how long that could take? Or is this process not automated, yet? In this case: Just take your time...

Great to see that the public face of the NtPCKr is back in action (as of Oct 13), complete with data, statistics, and much-improved waterfall plots. Things are looking up!

Many thanks to all involved, especially considering all the other fire-fighting you have to do at the moment.
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Now that the NTPCKr is running again, any estimate as to when we'll see some updated candidate stats?
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Many thanks (to Matt, I guess) for publishing the Top 50 candidates.
These all seem to be from the same part of the sky. I'm guessing that we'll be called on to do some manual RFI detection on these plots?
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Oh. Well that was short-lived. Seems like we've reverted back to just 10 candidates now.
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It occurs to me that the notion of persistency would indicate that we could eavesdrop on recurring emissions. It is not likely that we could detect emissions similar to our own very far out. In this region we will probably find no planet suitable for intelligent life. Time and telescopes may prove me wrong.

I do not think that anyone would be able to detect the fact that we are here. They would be too far out. Therefore they wouldn't be sending a constant, directed high power signal from thousands (millions ?) of years in the past.

It is more likely that a serious alien community (if one exists) would be beaming in random or promising directions an extremely high power "we are here signal" likely with no hope of receiving one in return. This would probably be a burst sent and focused in random directions. They would know that many thousands of years would transpire before a return could be received. The idea behind this type of signal is then to simply announce and affirm ( unlike a persistent one that we couldn't hear) that there is other intelligent life in the universe.

I would think therefore that a single WOW-type event would be of more interest and would be more fruitful to possibly contain a signal that indicates intelligence. If we have searched with the current idiom for 50 years and have found nothing then one would wonder how many promising candidates have we discarded because they occurred only once ??


What do you think??

What are we doing to be able to identify intelligence in a signal once we have pulled it up out of the noise? There are too many natural phenomena that produce a strong, constant and alternating signal in frequency and intensity.

What are we doing to be able to identify intelligence in a signal once we have pulled it up out of the noise? There are too many natural phenomena that produce a strong, constant and alternating signal in frequency and intensity.

The explenation is much simpler. They have no money to hire more programmers, so everything is developing really slooow. I'm not even sure if they have one full-time programmer on the project, maybe all their programmers are doing that only part-time.

The top candidates somehow were staying the same without any new data for 4 months when the list was still continuously updated. Furthermore the last data for all of them was from the same day. So I guess the scoring algorithm was buggy, somehow preferring the candidates that have been watched this day.

I highly doubt that the government has any motivation to threaten SETI projects. Usually they do quite the opposite: If someone accidently sees a secret military project, they rather have people believe in UFOs instead.

But I'm optimistic. It looks like they're working on it right now. The server status page indicates that ntpckr is running and they temporarily turned off the public mode, so I guess they are testing several algorithms without us seeing possible buggy results and ntpckr creating hundreds of senseless signal discussion threads.