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| Personal background |
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| I'm currently a grad student in geophysics at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. I got my BA in physics from UC Berkeley, which is where, of course, I learned about the SETI program. I've been running it on several computers ever since, though loss of email accounts and other such mishaps have resulted in the fragmentation of my total results returned. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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Even though I'm a bit skeptical of SETI@home's ability to discover alien life, I certainly believe it's out there, and there's no harm in searching for it. But I think the science behind the search is fundamentally flawed. Stars and galaxies are constantly moving away from each other as the universe expands, so any signals coming from distant alien civilizations are going to be significantly redshifted. That means, even if the aliens are transmitting at 1420 MHz, we're not going to receive the signal at anywhere near that frequency. By only looking at a certain frequency band, we are limiting ourselves to stars that are not moving relative to us. Now, this of course does not mean anything other than this: the SETI project is a much bigger one than just scanning a narrow band around one frequency. When we're done with this one, we'll have to begin again.
Also, what about starts that are at later stages in stellar evolution? After a sun eats up all its hydrogen, it's going to start fusing some other element, and the baseline frequency of that emission is again going to be different than 1420 MHz. Same result as before: scan more frequencies, rinse, repeat.
Keep watching the skies. |
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