A radio signal does not have to be aimed. Broadcasts go in every direction.

We are doing the experiment already with every commercial radio or TV broadcast.

We have yet to find any exoplanets similar to earth. We are getting closer, but we are not there yet.

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BOINC WIKI

Thanks for the reply john. I did not realize that you were broadcasting messages already. (Unless you are talking about Earths every day broadcasts). One of the other reasons why I suggested the microwave wavelength is because it can be directly targeted.
We are finding more and more expolanets as time goes on and a couple of those are supposedly good candidtes for life. But I suppose there is the factor of funding first the investigation of sentient beings on these planets and then funding a microwave pulse to these planets timed correctly so that there will be no interference for the direct beam as microwaves are effected by solid bodies.
But one would have thought a proposal that would increase the chances of recieving a message from ET could be presented to large corporations (such as NASA) for funding, as long as it was proven to increse the chances.

I was talking about earths every day broad casts. However, there was signal sent out a few years ago by a different SETI group from the Aricebo telescope.

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BOINC WIKI

I propose that we should aim a data stream on a microwave ranged signal at various exoplanets that hold a high possibility of developing life ensuring that a signal is indeed returned to us rather than wait for something that may or may not happen....Bring the signal to us.

The major problem on that is distance. It would take years for a signal to reach even the closest systems. And after the signal would reach them, we would have to wait many years for a reply, provided that there was someone with the technical ability to receive such transmission, provided that they just happened to point their telescopes at us at right moment, provided that they would actually send a reply, after all, many people here on Earth would choose not to reply, fearing that the aliens might not be friendly. So a scenario where aliens do receive transmissions from Earth, and determine that they are alien, and choose not to respond is not impossible.

Personally I don't believe that a some sort of list of candidate exoplanets would be particularly usefull, because the list of all exoplanets is quite short, and consists largely of planets considered unsuitable for life.

And its not just that, I have allways believed that most stars have planets, discovery of first exoplanets merely confirmed what I had allways "known", the fact that it took so long on the other hand, proves that detecting exoplanets is extremely difficult, not that they would be extremely rare.

Maybe even life is much more common than we think. Maybe the "cosmic haystack" is not just a very large haystack with wery few needles, maybe there are a lot of needles, maybe the needles are right under our noses, we just can't tell the difference between hay and needles.

S@H databases are full of signals, it is possible that most or all are from natural sources, or maybe those databases are full of alien transmissions, it would be impossible to tell the difference, what we need is a confirmed signal source.

Since we do not know where to look, the logical approach is to look everywhere, it will just take a lot of time to get enough scans to confirm a signal source. This work will propably take years before we can expect to see any results, but on the other hand, confirmimg the first exoplanets took a very long time, but it happened, now there are many known exoplanets.

It is possible that after a couple more complete scans we start to find multiple signals from same location, which would indicate a signal source, after detecting one or few possible signal sources they would propably begin to actively observe these targets, propably with multiple telescopes to verify the results. But all of this will take time. However, the new multibeam receiver will cut this time, so maybe discovery of first possible signal sources is allready quite close.

And after the first "hit" in those databases, more will probably follow quite soon, because at that point we have enough data to compare to, a signal will not be just a signal anymore, but one of many,

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