SETI... What do we look for?

To be honest, I like the information that was displayed with the SETI@home classic software. I forget exactly what was displayed, but it was in my opinion as informative as it could be about the task you analyzed, but the same results were that you still wouldn't know if your computer(s) ever detected anything unless you were told. You still get a bit of information from these tasks with third party programs aka SetiMapView or BoincLogX etc.

SETI@home, to my knowledge has not detected anything yet. Einstein@home has discovered a few pulsars: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=61049
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"By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible". Hebrews 11.3

So all we are doing is using our computers to help try and find something coming from space... but we never know if we found anythign or not. I find this interesting but I think once we run this we should be able to see the information for the projects we helped with. I think that would maybe attract more people and broden the chances of finding something. IDK maybe not... I know I would like to see anything that is found from my computer. Thanks for your feedback.
Trista

There is no way for the SETI@home algorithms to prove from any single work unit that a signal came from a distant civilization. The method being used is to select out signals which may not be due to random noise, thereby reducing the huge amount of data which has been recorded to a manageable data set in the science database. Then those signals are compared to others when the telescope was looking at the same point, and if several such comparisons turn up a persistent signal that's considered a candidate. The positions of the best candidates will eventually be reobserved as a final check, and then we may have found something.

The project does keep records so that those who were lucky enough to crunch the work units involved can be congratulated.

Although the science database is far smaller than the full raw recorded data, it isn't any small task to do the reduction to candidates. Also, there's all too much RFI which can easily affect the telescope frequently enough to seem to satisfy the persistence checks. The project has adopted several methods of trying to identify which candidates are due to RFI, and has made steps toward getting volunteers to use human judgement to recognize what is and isn't RFI. Our pattern recognition is far better than what can be done with a computer.

An important aspect is that we are searching a very narrow band of radio frequencies for anything that appears to be "not natural". A set of assumptions and criteria are used for deciding what might be "not natural".

The very small radio band being searched is considered significant due to those frequencies can travel far across space without significant attenuation, and they are between two natural oscillation frequencies for parts of the water molecule. (We believe water is essential for life, and intelligent life would know that and so see a similar significance for those frequencies.)


If you like, we are trying to 'second guess' what an alien civilisation would/might do to make itself noticed.

s@h is one of a number of projects to analyse radio data to try to find anything that stands out from the natural background radio noise. I'm sure others can direct you for the details of what s@h does to search the radio data recorded from Arecibo.

Your small part is to analyse a small chunk of that radio data to list anything that stands out from the background radio noise. that gets listed as 'spikes', 'triplets', and 'gaussians'. A spike is a single pulse waveform, a bit like a single flash of light or a 'click'. A pulse is a broad click :-) Triplets are where you get a regularly spaced series of three 'flashes' (a bit like morse code, or the ticking of a clock). A gaussian can be expected to be seen as Arecibo sweeps across a point in the sky that is the source of a continuous transmission.

If you look at your task results on the s@h website for your account, you'll see the summary such as:

Spike count: 0
Pulse count: 2
Triplet count: 1
Gaussian count: 0

So that last is a 'quiet' one. If that point in the sky shows more results multiple times, then that becomes more interesting to look there again.


And then there is also the 'social' aspects that s@h and more recently Boinc has promoted. Welcome to the forums!

Keep searchin',
Martin
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considering we are looking at the 1420Mhz bandwidth is very clean and we'd expect Others to actually transmit at that frequency to stand out from the background

....... So far 50 years and nothing.