The proposition is simple Blue Alien,

The whole of the Seti program and the distributed network are doing the best they can with their resources and time and funds available.

If in your opinion this is not enough then suggest an alternate more efficient approach then help impliment it or otherwise just quit and go watch the Simpsons. :) Such is freedom

Des,

I think what SETI is doing is very good, I am just putting the idea of transmitting up here for consideration..that's all.

I am not even sure how to start implementing the idea of transmitting.

If I had a couple of spare billions I would gladly put up the money to start.

However I am just a simple peasant.

now assume you are dialing a phone here on earth and want to call a specific person but you don't know their phone number. You also don't know when they aren't home to answer the phone. You also don't know if they want to actually talk to you. Oh and any reply that this other person might want to make to you would take at least 12 years for a response. Now start dialing

We are not dialling a specific person..we are dialling all life forms, that's everyone in the gawd damn phone book.

Yes we don't know when they are home, we are phishing for life.

We just want to know if there is life out there, if they don't want to talk we will never know, if they are intelligent they will understand our need to know we are not alone.

12 years is nothing, to find out that there is life in the universe with radio signals.. that's worth waiting thousands of years for.

OK you got me its not dialing but if you look at what it takes to predict where a star will be when the signal gets to it you'll see its a bit of dialing in the coordinates. Remember we aren't sitting still in the galaxy and neither are other stars in the Galaxy.

Pointing a device at a star and shouting at it means you are shouting at a star where it was when the light it emitted left the star. That star is no longer in that position in the sky.

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

In principal I have no problem with "shouting" at star systems but I believe both shouting and listening will become more targeted as the decades pass. If we are going to shout lets shout at something like the Gliese 581 system which apprently may contain an earth like planet (Gliese 581g) , possibley abundant in water and apprently in the "habitable zone." Plus it s only 20 or so light years away.

If life exists there and is in the up stage of the evolutionary curve we might expect an answer to a signal produced by us now any time in an interval ranging from 40 years to geological epochs from now.

The habitable zone hypothesis is hard to resist based on what we know about the biological factors here on earth which have led us to some understanding of the conditions and factors necessary that eventually lead to organisms capable of science and "shouting".

I suppose the punch line is keep on going and getting better at what we do :)

The song track to go with our thread here, but wishes can come true.

I'm wishing on a star

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The Kite Fliers

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Kite fliers: An imaginary club of solo members, those who don't yet
belong to a formal team so "fly their own kites" - as the saying goes.