Possible Signal


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Stargazer100
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Message 1335176 - Posted: 6 Feb 2013, 18:07:37 UTC

Experts say that for a signal to be considered interesting, the same signal must be picked up at least 2 times. There is only a 1% chance of this happening, but if an advanced plant sent a signal only 1 time, it would not be considered important. Maybe some of the Spikes on the science status page are from advanced planets that sent only 1 signal. A spike is a strong signal that is picked up.

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Message 1335184 - Posted: 6 Feb 2013, 18:23:36 UTC - in response to Message 1335176.
Last modified: 6 Feb 2013, 18:24:09 UTC

Maybe, but about 99.9999% of the time, it's going to be something else, ie terrestrial radio or interstellar noise, or even a hoax.

Only way to eliminate those is through reobservation, preferably from multiple receivers spaced widely enough to show parallax if the source is close.
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Message 1335214 - Posted: 6 Feb 2013, 19:52:21 UTC - in response to Message 1335176.
Last modified: 6 Feb 2013, 19:53:41 UTC

If the strong signal came from an intelligent ET society, it would contain some sign of intelligence. Either counting out the first 100 primes or the first 50 digits of pi.

It would seem to me that all signals strong or weak should be scanned for this type of content. Anything non Gaussian, with repeating "Beeps" etc should be looked at and compared with a "Clutter Map" of known terrestrial sources , pulsars etc.

I trust that the signal processing is much more sophisticated than what we surmize is actually happening.

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Message 1335234 - Posted: 6 Feb 2013, 20:34:17 UTC

Very much doubt that it would be an "interpretable" signal, more likely to be a very consistent noise type signal such as earth has been emitting for about 100 years - ever since Marconi first pounded the key...
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Message 1335321 - Posted: 7 Feb 2013, 1:05:58 UTC
Last modified: 7 Feb 2013, 1:07:40 UTC

The Science status page demonstrates why every signal isn't checked. Currently:

Table # Last 24 hours
Spikes 3,604,522,513 1,855,793
Gaussians 590,955,345 206,870
Pulses 1,700,282,859 1,139,935
Triplets 1,547,444,710 790,328
Workunits 1,302,786,897 621,056
Results 1,291,971,534 506,762


There are about two million spikes received daily. Today there are almost four per work unit. Gaussians are a better probability, but almost half of all work units have one. There's just too much to look at. It's computationally infeasible.

The only way to pare them down is to find correlating observations of the same place showing the same result. This is exactly what NTPCKR is supposed to do. And, it was finding them when it was first being implemented, but it doesn't seem to be run nearly as much as it should be. Again, it all comes down to a lack of funding.
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Message 1335324 - Posted: 7 Feb 2013, 1:10:11 UTC

Do you think that some of the Spikes on the science status page are signals from Aliens?

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Message 1339925 - Posted: 21 Feb 2013, 18:32:04 UTC

Most probably not. They are usually earth based RFI, which Seti allows for.

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Message 1342472 - Posted: 2 Mar 2013, 20:46:27 UTC - in response to Message 1335324.

Do you think that some of the Spikes on the science status page are signals from Aliens?

probability > 0 !!!

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Message 1342646 - Posted: 3 Mar 2013, 10:30:59 UTC

i am wondering if the famous WoW signal would have been processed by one of our computer, with the applications we are presently using...

what kind of graphic (screensaver ones) we would get ?
and what kind of results we would get ? 30 spikes and rejected cause overflow ?
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