Possible Signal

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Message 1179572 - Posted: 20 Dec 2011, 16:15:06 UTC

I have been reading information on the website, and I have found that a signal must be seen with the telescope at least 2 times to even be considered a signal of interest. This is because the random noise in space can also produce such a signal. If an advanced planet sent a strong signal only 1 time, it would be missed. The chance of this happening is only 1%, but it can't be ruled out.
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Message 1179786 - Posted: 21 Dec 2011, 19:23:20 UTC - in response to Message 1179572.  

If an intelligent alien society sent a signal they would hopefully know that for science any test or signal needs repeatability. So that society would be doing itself a disservice by only sending a blip in our general direction


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Message 1179801 - Posted: 21 Dec 2011, 19:49:59 UTC - in response to Message 1179786.  
Last modified: 21 Dec 2011, 19:53:51 UTC

Perhaps sending only one blip in our direction, from an advanced world may be a test if this were so? If they were well advanced they could already be aware of other inhabited worlds at various levels of evolution and they could be staying away from us for a reason? perhaps until such time, the inhabitants of earth can understand enough so as not to venture to far from our home planet and cause a trail of devastation every where we venture ? we still cant manage our own world effectivel! The damage we could do to other life we may encounter! I can only assume that any advanced civilisation looking our way would do every thing in its power to prevent us from knowing to much until humanity grows up a fair bit more!
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Message 1179835 - Posted: 21 Dec 2011, 21:29:37 UTC

Should I show up here being a little more enthusiastic?

Anyway, got a spike score of -0.08611 in one of my running tasks.

I guess this number comes up at the start of a given task and for some reason gets higher in value in order to be updated.

But I am still waiting for the rest of the numbers to be coming up, which eventually gets finalized when the score becomes uploaded to the server and ends up in my log as well.

Should I still be looking for something better than +0,05 (or maybe even +0.35) when it comes to the spike score? The latter number seem guite hard to be able to obtain, nowadays.
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Message 1179980 - Posted: 22 Dec 2011, 15:40:33 UTC - in response to Message 1179835.  

There is a 99% chance that a strong spike is just random noise from space. There is a 1% chance that an advanced planet is sending a strong signal only 1 time. Still, the stronger the spike, the better.
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Message 1179993 - Posted: 22 Dec 2011, 16:43:59 UTC - in response to Message 1179980.  

not really since we are talking a minimum 6 light years so anything too strong would indicate local interference


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Message 1180003 - Posted: 22 Dec 2011, 17:39:45 UTC - in response to Message 1179993.  

There is a 1% chance that a very strong spike is a very strong signal sent by an advanced planet only 1 time. There is a 99% chance that it is a signal of no interest.
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Message 1180007 - Posted: 22 Dec 2011, 18:18:46 UTC

Whether or not a Seti@home is a CUDA-based task, or a non-CUDA based task, think about ever getting a result which is not being thrown out, but ends up either in the BOINC master database and / or possibly in the Seti@home science database if there should be any difference there.

Because the task may get a pulse, a gaussian and a triplet of some interest.

But the spike score could still be "nominal", about -0.20. This element still is missing from the result.

Should it be perhaps end up the opposite way for something to possibly be of any interest?
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Message 1180041 - Posted: 22 Dec 2011, 21:32:03 UTC - in response to Message 1180007.  

A signal weakens as it goes a long way in space, so a signal may not be strong by the time it reaches earth. An advanced planet may send a very, very strong signal, so by the time it reached earth, the signal would still be very strong and the signal would cause a big spike.
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Message 1180068 - Posted: 22 Dec 2011, 23:27:04 UTC - in response to Message 1180041.  

Most likely a transmission from an alien civilization would be a one-time, weak signal that would contain an unmistakeable sign of intelligence and a "we are here" type of message. I hope that we are looking for this type of scenario, Fear that we are not.
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Message 1180185 - Posted: 23 Dec 2011, 13:45:51 UTC - in response to Message 1180068.  
Last modified: 23 Dec 2011, 14:02:51 UTC

There is only a 1% chance of this happening, but I think that a very strong spike we see on our screen could be from an advanced planet. There is a 99% chance that it is a signal of no interest.
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Message 1180204 - Posted: 23 Dec 2011, 15:33:35 UTC - in response to Message 1180185.  

There is only a 1% chance of this happening, but I think that a very strong spike we see on our screen could be from an advanced planet. There is a 99% chance that it is a signal of no interest.


I think the chance is worse than that.
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Message 1180208 - Posted: 23 Dec 2011, 16:05:36 UTC - in response to Message 1180204.  

It is an extraordinarily small chance that it is an alien transmission; If we cast away single examples of strong signals without trying to decode them and look for a message then the chance is zero in my opinion.
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Message 1180215 - Posted: 23 Dec 2011, 16:25:04 UTC - in response to Message 1180208.  

It is an extraordinarily small chance that it is an alien transmission; If we cast away single examples of strong signals without trying to decode them and look for a message then the chance is zero in my opinion.

Any STRONG signal comes from earth. A weak signal might come from ET.
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Message 1180236 - Posted: 23 Dec 2011, 17:33:24 UTC

I have suggested on another forum that it is very unlikely that any other group of intelligent beings in our galactic neighborhood would be sending any greetings signal specifically in our direction, especially if they have been conducting any passive monitoring of what we've been broadcasting over the last 100 years or so.

So really the only signal we are likely to intercept is one of a random nature similar to those sent from earth. I think it is much more likely that we may some day indirectly detect the presence of another civilization via the chemical signatures of elements in a planet's atmosphere that indicate the activity of a non natural nature.
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Message 1180310 - Posted: 23 Dec 2011, 22:19:40 UTC - in response to Message 1180236.  

Considering we've only started making electronic transmissions that could reach space in the last 80 years it is unlikely that any civilization would have received and then sent us a message back. If they had gotten the messages from the earliest days of transmissions they would know they were getting accidental and incidental transmissions and that we were still electronically in our infancy.

Even if they were dumb enough to send something back our way and we were to get it today that would mean the civilization is less than 40 light years away. Still a very large leap to attempt in space travel.


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Message 1180366 - Posted: 24 Dec 2011, 3:34:37 UTC - in response to Message 1180215.  
Last modified: 24 Dec 2011, 3:35:39 UTC

By strong we would mean any signal significantly above the noise and therefore all signals that do not represent noise should be scanned for intelligence regardless of other ideas about strength. A Clutter Map could easily be built to screen out much of terrestrial (or satellite, or known radio sources in space) originated signals.
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Message 1180383 - Posted: 24 Dec 2011, 5:50:24 UTC - in response to Message 1180366.  

By strong we would mean any signal significantly above the noise and therefore all signals that do not represent noise should be scanned for intelligence regardless of other ideas about strength. A Clutter Map could easily be built to screen out much of terrestrial (or satellite, or known radio sources in space) originated signals.

STRONG signals frequently are so strong, say 100,000 times the background, that they overload the equipment. These have to be earth signals. There is no need to check these signals. We are looking for weak signals because they will be very very weak after a trip from anywhere else. They will be weaker than the signals from the Voyager spacecraft for instance. Remember the inverse square law!

That doesn't mean we won't put a signal detected in the bin for that location if there is something that strong, but 99.999999% if it is that strong it originates with earth.

IIRC someone posted a signal path loss calculator and given an Arecibo transmitter on ET's planet we could only hear that if it was within 200 light years or so. We are very very deaf.

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Message 1180835 - Posted: 26 Dec 2011, 22:16:41 UTC - in response to Message 1180383.  
Last modified: 26 Dec 2011, 22:21:54 UTC

Based on Gary Charpentier's post here, this makes me in fact believe that I actually have been found something.

Because most of the numbers I now have in my logs are supposed to be "poor numbers" or being of little significant value.

On the other hand, the WOW signal was a strong narrowband signal. It was detected in 1977 by Jerry H. Ehman and was supposed to be coming from space.

But back in 1977 we did have satellites in space and planes could very well have been flying overhead.

So, therefore I have the following questions:

In the graphics for a running task, the uppermost line is supposed to be showing the pulses marked in red, the gaussian drawn through that particular series of pulses in white. My earlier graphics showed the possible triplets in green color, apparently only the same color as the pulses (red) right now.

For the display of the the gaussians, what I assume to be the pulses these gaussians are made up of is being shown in red. When only the pulses are searched for in a particular task, these pulses (starting at 0.50 in score) shows up in red.

This means that the spikes are not being displayed there.

The gaussian low or lows lies around -12 to -13 (-12.946 in one of my current tasks).

Some of my tasks are not having pulses all the time, at times nothing seems to be passing through. For the gaussians in the running, it may seem that something is being calculated all the time, at least you get a -4 score for even the not so good results.

Whether or not you may get a gaussian score better than 6 at times, the score runs close to the bottom of the scale (that mentioned -12 to -13) most or almost all the time. Still the client supposedly detects the few ones which are slightly better than the rest when it comes to the scores.
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Message 1180986 - Posted: 27 Dec 2011, 19:01:21 UTC - in response to Message 1180236.  

I have suggested on another forum that it is very unlikely that any other group of intelligent beings in our galactic neighborhood would be sending any greetings signal specifically in our direction, especially if they have been conducting any passive monitoring of what we've been broadcasting over the last 100 years or so.

So really the only signal we are likely to intercept is one of a random nature similar to those sent from earth. I think it is much more likely that we may some day indirectly detect the presence of another civilization via the chemical signatures of elements in a planet's atmosphere that indicate the activity of a non natural nature.


Or the light.

http://www.space.com/13514-alien-city-artificial-lights-extraterrestrial-planets.html

Regards,

A
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