The interdisciplinary research on AI applied to SETI should, does and has produced results such as the recent detection of additional FRBs hidden in previously acquired datasets.

Now, if the AI machines of the future (or their owners) tell open democracies when they detect and interpret correctly the next extraterrestrial Encyclopedia Galactica to be received, everything should be hunky-dory.

Perhaps of some use looking for ET?
https://www.upi.com/Defense-News/2018/11/27/DARPA-BAE-to-develop-AI-for-interpreting-radio-frequency-signals/2371543335188/

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Apr 3, 1999 - May 3, 2020

Would be good to know if any SETI@Home datasets have, or are going to be, subjected to an AI 'signal agnostic search', as described in one of your links. The AI method is designed to search for any patterns in the noise, with no preconceived ideas about what types of signal we should be looking for.

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Defined: how to talk about ET - 12 Dec 2018
SETI Institute expert committee seeks consensus on astrobiology terms, with only limited success
https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/defined-how-to-talk-about-et
https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.06857
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1809/1809.06857.pdf

Whether or not you can hear people scream in space, there’s plenty of screaming, or at least disagreement, about space and the way we describe it. So much so, in fact, that California’s SETI Institute felt the need to convene an Ad Hoc Committee on SETI Nomenclature to make a few decisions on definitions.

The resulting recommendations, which are available online, make interesting reading, starting with what can only be described as a bit of a disclaimer; “This is a consensus document that the committee members all endorse; however, in many cases the individual members have (or have expressed in the past) more nuanced opinions on these terms that are not fully reflected here,” the document says. Then follow nine pages with 24 terms defined, ranging from the simple (alien, intelligence, extraterrestrial) to the complex (Schelling Point, Fermi Paradox, Drake Equation) to the acronym-heavy (CETI, SETA, METI, Active METI, Artifact SETI).

Committee participants: Jason T. Wright, Penn State University Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds and Department of Astronomy &, Astrophysics, PA, USA; Sofia Sheikh, Penn State University Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds and Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, PA, USA; Iván Almár, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary; Kathryn Denning, Associate Professor, York University Department of Anthropology, Toronto, ON, Canada; Steven Dick, Former NASA Chief Historian and Former Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology and Jill Tarter, Chair Emerita for SETI Research, SETI Institute, Mountain View, CA, USA.

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Apr 3, 1999 - May 3, 2020

I just knew I should have written my sentence with a big IF =:)

Now, if the AI machines of the future (or their owners) tell open democracies when they detect and interpret correctly the next extraterrestrial Encyclopedia Galactica to be received, everything should be hunky-dory.

Many of the big nations in the world are communist dictatorships.

The first country to contact ET and reverse engineer their technology will keep it to themselves (or try to) and use it for military purposes to rule the world. Dictators Freedoms Despite various initiatives like the $100 million Breakthrough listen, most major governments are carrying out their own secret communications, which if successful will not be made public. THe UN is just a talking shop and irrelevant in the 21st C. All we can hope for is that it isn't Russia that finds ET first and ends up with a global country wipe-out super nuke.

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Apr 3, 1999 - May 3, 2020

Would be good to know if any SETI@Home datasets have, or are going to be, subjected to an AI 'signal agnostic search', as described in one of your links. The AI method is designed to search for any patterns in the noise, with no preconceived ideas about what types of signal we should be looking for.

If Dr Siemion's (the director of the Berkeley SETI research center) enthousiasm for cutting-edge data analytics approaches (such as machine learning and AI) is to be trusted, it is just a matter of time before data coming from Green Bank, Arecibo (which partially feed SETI@home) and other sources gets increasingly processed that way, making the alien needles (if they exist at all) in the cosmic haystack easier to find. A question arises: for how much time will classical analytics (such as those used by SETI@home) and machine-learning/AI analytics remain complementary ?

“The kind of searches we do are motivated by what our technology does now,” Dr. Siemion says. “When we invented radio transmitters, we started looking for radio signals. When we invented lasers, we started looking for laser signals. When we invented AI, we started thinking about searching for artificially intelligent life. There’s a deep philosophical relationship, I think, between these two fields.” (...) “We need to make use of as much computing as we possibly can bring to bear on this problem,” he adds.” More recently, that’s been employing some of the modern data analytics approaches coming out of the Valley and bringing that back to SETI – things like machine learning and AI.”

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Apr 3, 1999 - May 3, 2020

"NASA Renews Interest in SETI" by David Grinspoon, January 4, 2019 - After a long hiatus, the space agency gets back into the SETI game https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-blogs/cosmic-relief-david-grinspoon/nasa-renews-interest-in-seti/

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Apr 3, 1999 - May 3, 2020

Technosearch: An Interactive Tool for SETI

Jill Tarter, an all but iconic figure in SETI, has just launched Technosearch, an Internet tool that includes all published SETI searches from 1960 to the present. A co-founder of the SETI Institute well known for her own research as well as her advocacy on behalf of the field, Tarter presents scientists with a way to track and update all SETI searches that have been conducted, allowing users to submit their own searches and keep the database current.

https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2019/01/10/technosearch-an-interactive-tool-for-seti/
https://technosearch.seti.org

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Apr 3, 1999 - May 3, 2020

SETI Institute in the news December 12 - January 2, 2019
https://seti.org/seti-institute-news-december-12-january-2-2019

SETI Institute in the news January 3 - January 9, 2019 (Jan 17, 2019)
What Does the Future Hold for New Horizons? - Innovations in the Search for Technosignatures - New Repeating FRB Stokes Excitement - Science Interrupted: The Government Shutdown Threatens Research, Disrupts Careers - Could Aliens Be Blindsided by Global Warming?
https://seti.org/seti-institute-news-january-3-january-9-2019

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Apr 3, 1999 - May 3, 2020

Advanced Extraterrestrials as an Approximation to God: Our first encounter with E.T. technology could be as baffling to us as a smartphone would have been to a Neandertal https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/advanced-extraterrestrials-as-an-approximation-to-god/

I think I've found the source of my headache; my first name quoted in conjunction with Von Daniken lol

Sorry Pierre, Von Daniken beat you to it with "Was God an Astronaut" in the 1968 Chariots of the Gods book :-)

___________________
"The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible." (Clarke's 2nd law)
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." (Clarke's 3rd law)
"Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God." (Shermer's last law)
"Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced." (Gehm's corollary)
"Be open minded, but not so open minded that your brains fall out." (Groucho Marx)
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it." (Terry Pratchett)
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." (Aristotle)

I think I've found the source of my headache; my first name quoted in conjunction with Von Daniken lol

Living in Quebec can't help any :-)))

Still, in-between quiet revolutions, we manage. Especially when it's cold, we like to recharge our batteries and take it easy.

Shhh - please don't scare the fishies.

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Apr 3, 1999 - May 3, 2020

Le même problème ici.
In English, magnitudes are referred to in a very different way than what we do in most European countries.
A milllion is the same but then it gets worse.
For example, an English Billion is for us a Milliard.
Which means that our Billion is 1000 times larger than an English Billion...

Merci à toi, Michel; grâce à toi je peux entâmer avec bonheur ma nouvelle bouteille d'aspirines ^^

I find that Petaflops supercomputers are sexy, and Petaplanets very much less so. For the latter, I'd prefer 10E15 or 10^15 (no aspirins required lol)

But really, I declare forfeiture and call upon the powers of Wikipedia :

Long and short forms
Échelles longue et courte

As long as you remember that the expressions millions, billions and billions and trillions are trademarked by Carl Sagan (almost).

so depending the system you use... or we can get 4 exa planets or you get 4 yotta planets thats a huge difference. how we know ? how we know ? each time a person writting the word "billion" in a post ... should i reply everytime asking which system they use ? short scale or long scale ? LOL

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Apr 3, 1999 - May 3, 2020

Now if 10x10 equals a hundred, 100x100 equals a thousand and 1000x1000 equals a million then shouldn't 1000000x1000000 equal a billion?

Cheers.

Now if 10x10 equals a hundred, 100x100 equals a thousand and 1000x1000 equals a million then shouldn't 1000000x1000000 equal a billion?

Under the original 16th century long scale French definition of billion, it does. But later on, it got complicated :

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word billion was formed in the 16th century (from million and the prefix bi-, "two"), meaning the second power of a million (1,000,0002 = 1012). This long scale definition was similarly applied to trillion, quadrillion and so on. The words were originally French, and entered English around the end of the 17th century. Later, French arithmeticians changed the words' meanings, adopting the short scale definition whereby three zeros rather than six were added at each step, so a billion came to denote a thousand million (109), a trillion (1012), and so on. This new convention was adopted in the United States in the 19th century, but Britain retained the original long scale use. France, in turn, reverted to the long scale in 1948.[4]

In Britain, however, under the influence of American usage, the short scale came to be increasingly used. In 1974, Prime Minister Harold Wilson confirmed that the government would use the word billion only in its short scale meaning (one thousand million). In a written answer to Robin Maxwell-Hyslop MP, who asked whether official usage would conform to the traditional British meaning of a million million, Wilson stated: "No. The word 'billion' is now used internationally to mean 1,000 million and it would be confusing if British Ministers were to use it in any other sense. I accept that it could still be interpreted in this country as 1 million million and I shall ask my colleagues to ensure that, if they do use it, there should be no ambiguity as to its meaning." (Wikipedia)

My opinion on all this ? For sanity's sake, politicians should be restricted to the word gazillions for anything beyond a million, and they would do well to keep an eye on those dangerous French turncoats.

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Apr 3, 1999 - May 3, 2020

The majority of the world has agreed to use the short scale (shown in red).
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d3/EScalas_corta_y_larga.svg/650px-EScalas_corta_y_larga.svg.png
Current usage

Very informative, thanks - but surely you aren't invoquing this (speaking specifically about the red colored countries) "majority" of closed democracies shackled by the uninformed or self-serving choices made by their dogmatic politicians over the last centuries, in defense of the short form ? *cough* *gasp* *lol*

A big mystery remains: Greenland. We really should poll those of our fellow SETIzens originating from that grey area, because not taking a stand in the age of Big Data isn't much of an excuse (or is utterly admirable, depending on how beneficial the absence of collected data can be).

My opinion on all this ? For sanity's sake, politicians should be restricted to the word gazillions for anything beyond a million, and they would do well to keep an eye on those dangerous French turncoats.

Does that include Quebec, who can't make their mind up so have hedged their bets? :-))

Guilty as charged :D But essentially, just keeping comm channels open (my pathetic attempt to turn back the topic to SETI & Radioastronomy issues) so that we can keep navigating from bloodless quiet revolution to bloodless quiet revolution toward a brighter and singing future for all good-willed and honest citizens, what else ? :)

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Apr 3, 1999 - May 3, 2020

A big mystery remains: Greenland. We really should poll those of our fellow SETIzens originating from that grey area, because not taking a stand in the age of Big Data isn't much of an excuse (or is utterly admirable, depending on how beneficial the absence of collected data can be).

LOL. Greenlandic is closely related to the Inuit languages in Canada such as Inuktitut.

But they also speak Danish since Greenland is part of Denmark.
I'm pretty sure they use the long scale as the Danes does but perhaps some other scale when speaking in Kalaallisut or West Greenlandic, that has been the official language of the Greenlandic autonomous territory since June 2009.

I am crunching Arecibo data from January 31. Amazing!
Tullio

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Notes on the Run: Put on your tinfoil hat because here we go…
(Jason Rhian, February 3rd, 2019)
https://www.spaceflightinsider.com/editorial/notes-on-the-run-put-on-your-tinfoil-hat-because-here-we-go/

I am crunching Arecibo data from January 31. Amazing!
Tullio

Old enough to be alive when Arecibo datatapes used to be Fed-exed to Berkeley : Check.

My opinion on all this ? For sanity's sake, politicians should be restricted to the word gazillions for anything beyond a million

They can always play the game :-)) gazillionaire

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Apr 3, 1999 - May 3, 2020