Volunteer tester, fair enough. Men in grey, etc. Someone will show up.

No, no one is going to show up to do anything like what has been suggested. That article you linked to does not support that statement or feeling. Taken from that page:

All information about the discovery will be made public, probably via the web. No country or individual would be allowed to jam the frequency the signal is observed on. Since the object will rise and set as seen from any given location, observations from radio observatories around the world will be necessary. This will, by necessity, be a multi-national effort. All this information will be made public.

(My emphasis added)

My bad, Did read it on seti somewhere. Sorry to have mislead you, and the other poster.

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Voyager 1 exits solar system, let's hope aliens bring it back.
Lynn

Volunteer tester, fair enough. Men in grey, etc. Someone will show up.

No, no one is going to show up to do anything like what has been suggested. That article you linked to does not support that statement or feeling. Taken from that page:

All information about the discovery will be made public, probably via the web. No country or individual would be allowed to jam the frequency the signal is observed on. Since the object will rise and set as seen from any given location, observations from radio observatories around the world will be necessary. This will, by necessity, be a multi-national effort. All this information will be made public.

(My emphasis added)

My bad, Did read it on seti somewhere. Sorry to have mislead you, and the other poster.

Likely it was from another individual; not a Project Administrator. No worries though - that's why discussion is good.

Alcoa stock just jumped 38% after your post...

If you are the one finding the ET signal, you will be whisked away by some Earthly security organization (probably a U.S one, like NSA or CIA), and hidden for the rest of your life in a secret cave or similar place (if not outright deleted), before you can say "hello ET", or utter a word about it to anyone.

Your name and everything that tells about your very existence on this planet, will be removed from every record in your own country, as well as from any country where any sign of your existence can be found.

The SETI lab will be demolished and all SETI staff will suffer the same consequence as you, and the record of the ET signal will be hidden from the general populace forever.

So, just hope that nobody will ever find a signal from ET, but if they do the first sign of it, if it isn't you, will be that this project will be shut down for good, with some excuse like "we can't keep this running any longer, because we've run out of money"

Don't think for one moment, that those that really runs this planet, will allow us peons to know for sure that we're not alone in the Universe.

EDIT: So the reason I run SETI, is to be able to know exactly when ET is found. That will be the moment SETI@home goes offline for good.

Let's say your idea of how things will play out is true. Let's assume there are men in black and plans to erase all traces of contact. If all that is true, the questions are:

Why are the world powers afraid of this knowledge getting out?
What would happen in society as a result of the information being disseminated?
Would there be riots?
Would there be attempts to overthrow governments?
Would there be economic chaos?
Why would those or other disruptions happen?
Why would people overthrow governments?
Why would they riot?
Why would world economies collapse?

If you can show why the big bad wolf is afraid of the news getting out, I might be more likely to believe you. But just saying there's some nefarious plot is as solid a statement as saying god created the Earth and the universe in six days.

Evidence of and/or motivation for such plans would help you convince people.

If you are the one finding the ET signal, you will be whisked away by some Earthly security organization (probably a U.S one, like NSA or CIA), and hidden for the rest of your life in a secret cave or similar place (if not outright deleted), before you can say "hello ET", or utter a word about it to anyone.

Your name and everything that tells about your very existence on this planet, will be removed from every record in your own country, as well as from any country where any sign of your existence can be found.

The SETI lab will be demolished and all SETI staff will suffer the same consequence as you, and the record of the ET signal will be hidden from the general populace forever.

So, just hope that nobody will ever find a signal from ET, but if they do the first sign of it, if it isn't you, will be that this project will be shut down for good, with some excuse like "we can't keep this running any longer, because we've run out of money"

Don't think for one moment, that those that really runs this planet, will allow us peons to know for sure that we're not alone in the Universe.

EDIT: So the reason I run SETI, is to be able to know exactly when ET is found. That will be the moment SETI@home goes offline for good.

I very much doubt that there is a worldwide or even national conspiracy to silence news of a SETI discovery. I can see, though, why governments might fear contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, especially if they are more powerful, more knowledgeable, and perhaps, wiser through longer experience that we are.
The history of contacts between cultures on our own planet, where one is more advanced in some of these respects than the other, suggests that the less advanced culture could be in a perilous situation. If only information is received, which is the common SETI assumption, this could still be very disruptive.
We have no idea what might be received, what its implications would be, or what use could be made of it. Such information might form the basis of substantial scientific, economic and social changes.
Suppose, for example, we learned that another civilization in space was based on a planet with no individual nations. What if they had a single planet-wide government, at peace with itself and its citizens, using its energies and resources for the common good, instead of mutual conflict.? Mightn't there be tendency in us to emulate such a system here? What would our current disparate governments make of that?

You put forth some understandable concerns that governments may have. (I almost wrote "reasonable" instead of "understandable," but we've seen lately that "reasonable" and "governments" are, together, like water and oil.)

Of course, learning things like this from alien civilizations would require that we be able to decode what they're saying, which I would imagine would be a huge undertaking, requiring many interim steps to create a translation database of sorts. Start with seeing eye-to-tentacle on things like constants in physics, etc., then move on to... who knows what? Of course, that requires, at best, decades for the messages to ping pong back and forth. I don't know how an alien civilization would be able to communicate with us in any meaningful way through their first transmission.

With those kinds of delays and stumbling blocks, the chances of us learning details of their cultural systems are pretty low, and that reduces the risk of upsetting the status quo. Any government afraid of first contact is a government based on paranoia. By my count, that would be all governments, but that's a topic for a different online forum...

Dave

The process of progressing from the probably relatively easy to understand commonalities of mathematics and science, to matters like society, history, philosophy, and esthetics would be an interesting one. Perhaps we'd be given a means of using the former to understand the latter, early on.
At some point a graphical system of symbols would probably be introduced. A symbol for a single extraterrestrial being would likely have been introduced fairly early, in connection with a discussion of biology. Perhaps a combination of many of these, making up a single larger figure of the same sort, and large enough to fill a symbol for their entire planet, might be used to suggest a universal planetary polity.

What if we do make contact. We would need SETI more to help translate the message. Governments, from around the world would help.

It could take weeks to understand the alien language.

If a ship is seen say, near Mars, and coming our way that would cause panic.

Aliens might not be friendly, then what?? Panic, they could wipe out the earth.


About Are We Alone? Aired on the science/discovery channel. Did anyone watch??

I feel we have more questions, than answers, when it comes to detecting a signal/aliens.

Right now we have no worries, but every plan imaginable, and the impossible should be taken into account.

__________________
Voyager 1 exits solar system, let's hope aliens bring it back.
Lynn

The universe wastes nothing, it's simply transferred.
Lynn

My thoughts are that the people in charge have a deeply seeded belief that the overwhelming majority of the public would panic when confronted with the reality of the existence of E.T. no matter what they look like or how they act. I am somewhat afraid that when and if E.T makes themselves known to us there will be some level of disruption of the daily routine for a while after the disclosure.

Those of us who populate this forum will be elated at the disclosure but I'm afraid we are a small minority of the world's population.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

I'd have to agree that whether ET makes themselves known or Seti@Home picks up a signal, while everyone else is running around like headless chickens proclaiming the end is nigh, there'll be us in this forum saying WOOHOO!

Related youtube clip.

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Member of the People Encouraging Niceness In Society club.

If a signal is found that is of obvious intelligence and not of local origin, it needs to be detected more than once to rule out an anomaly. Then it will be sent out to other SETI scientists to confirm (peer review and all that).

It will be about that time that the celebrations can begin. ...

Take a look for one real world example (possibly the first real discovery as opposed to the "Wow!" glitch):

Little Green Men - 1


Keep searchin'
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

In the case of the discovery of the first pulsar, the possibility was left open, for a time, that its extremely regular pulsing just might be due to extraterrestrial signaling, hence the 'little green men' designation. It was, of course, eventually ascertained that a newly discovered natural phenomenon in space was responsible.
The circumstances surrounding the Ohio State University 'wow signal' were somewhat different. It had all the basic characteristics that would be expected of a genuine SETI signal, including movement through the telescope beam at a rate consistent with a source at stellar distance. That movement was due to Earth's rotation.
Despite many attempts, the source of the 'wow signal' has never been satisfactorily explained as an Earth-launched satellite, a technical fault in the receiving equipment, Earth based interference, an astrophysical phenomenon or any other cause.
It was not possible to observe the signal long enough for it to be fully analyzed, and confirmed by independent observers. This prevents its being acceptable as definitive evidence of an extraterrestrial radio transmission.

Maybe I'm a little Pollyanna about the whole thing but I think that there would not be much panic about a verified ET signal.

Of course politicians around the world will use it for political gain and it is not terribly hard to imagine religious leaders (especially the Christian and Muslim nuts) using it to rile up the feeble minded but for the most part, I think that it will make people look up to the sky and think a little.

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There is a high probability that there is other intelligent life in the Universe that is equal to or more advanced than us, There is, however, (in my mind ) a low probability that we will ever prove or disprove this statement.

Let's keep searching and keep looking for a true "Earth-like " planet that has all of the many necessary parameters and time-lines for intelligent life to form and evolve.

I, too, doubt that there would be wide ranging panic at the announcement of the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligent life. There would probably be some incidents involving already disturbed persons, or those with extreme views that are, or could be connected to ETs. The more significant effects on society at large would probably be subtler and more gradual.
We might receive a beneficial does of humility in realizing that we are not unique, as intelligent life, in the universe Assuming we were able to understand enough about ET social arrangements, and these were viewed in a favorable light, we might try to emulate some of these. Even the simple fact that a civilization in space has managed to survive to maturity without destroying itself in war or ecological catastrophe might help us to do the same.

Maybe I'm a little Pollyanna about the whole thing but I think that there would not be much panic about a verified ET signal.

Of course politicians around the world will use it for political gain and it is not terribly hard to imagine religious leaders (especially the Christian and Muslim nuts) using it to rile up the feeble minded but for the most part, I think that it will make people look up to the sky and think a little.

Unfortunately, the feeble minded make up more than half of the worlds population and many of them are of Christian or Muslim faith. Those are the people to be afraid of if and when E.T phones earth.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

It is likely that we will discover primitive life here in our own solar system. I am talking about nothing more advanced than plant life. This should be the start of eliminating all notions of the Biblical accounts of creation. I think that is far as we can go with SETI.

I thought SETI stood for The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence? ;)

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rOZZ
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Pictures

I thought SETI stood for The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence? ;)

'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. I remain skeptical but hopeful none the less. I think it is there but too far away to ever find it. If we are waiting for a persistent signal to contain intelligence then I think that our chances are even less.

I thought SETI stood for The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence? ;)

'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. I remain skeptical but hopeful none the less. I think it is there but too far away to ever find it. If we are waiting for a persistent signal to contain intelligence then I think that our chances are even less.

True, SETI has very limited fundings and therefore very limited resources, and it's a big a** sky alright!

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rOZZ
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