SETI@home papers accepted for publication
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SETI@home papers accepted for publication
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| Author | Message |
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 David Anderson  Send message Joined: 13 Feb 99 Posts: 176 Credit: 502,653 RAC: 0 |
Great news! Two papers on SETI@home will be published in The Astronomical Journal, a well-regarded scientific journal: It took a long time to write the papers. We started in 2018. In March 2024, after a two-year hiatus, Eric and I resumed work on them. We met twice a week, in person (that was key). By December 2024 the papers were in pretty good shape, and we submitted them to the journal. The referee reports came back the following month. They were positive, but had long lists of suggested changes and additions. The referees did an excellent job; they deserve big thanks. We revised the papers, addressing all the referees' suggestions. These changes greatly improved the papers. We resubmitted them in April 2025, and they were accepted in June 2025. They'll appear together in a future issue of the journal, TBD. There will probably be another paper at some point. Using the FAST observatory in China, we're reobserving the 92 top-ranking candidates found by Nebula. Eric Korpela, Dan Werthimer, and Wei Liu are working on this together with colleagues in China; I don't think they'll need my help. BTW: I think it's unlikely that an ET signal will emerge from this; none of the candidates found by Nebula really stood out. There are two general kinds of science papers. A "technical report" describes an experimental setup and the data it produces. The paper graphs the data. It suggests conclusions but doesn't prove them. It presents engineering, not science. On the other hand, a "research paper" poses and answers scientific questions. These answers must be proved, or at least backed up, with statistically valid data analyses. Eric and I tried to write research papers, not technical reports. The central thing we tried to prove: if there were certain types of ET radio signals, above certain power levels, in certain areas of the sky, SETI@home would have discovered them. Making this rigorous was tricky. To do so, we made the distinction between: For the purpose of finding ET signals, candidate sensitivity is what matters. As far as I know, SETI@home is the first radio SETI project to define this quantity, much less estimate it (which we did). As we worked on the papers, we decided that each Conclusions section should have three parts: This helped bring our ideas into focus. We did lots of brainstorming, from which new ideas magically emerged. Super fun. I encourage you to read the Conclusions sections of each paper. They're fairly non-technical. One conclusion of the Nebula paper (as mentioned in previous blog entries) is that commensal observing — recording data while the telescope is being used for other purposes — isn't ideal for radio SETI sky surveys. The telescope often moves too fast to provide the long observations needed for narrow frequency channels (which are needed for high sensitivity). Also, the slew rate varies widely during commensal observing, and it's hard to develop RFI-removal and candidate-finding algorithms that work for a wide range of slew rates. It's better if the telescope moves in a slow, regular pattern. We concluded that future SETI@home-type projects should ideally get at least two years of dedicated telescope time (this is unlikely in the near future). I'm very happy about how the papers came out. Maybe I'm biased, but I think they're the best radio SETI papers ever written. The publication of the papers gives a purpose and meaning to the vast volunteer effort (and electric bills, and carbon emissions) that went into SETI@home. For me, it's a deeply satisfying conclusion to 25 years of hard work. This includes 15 years developing the original SETI@home, then developing BOINC and porting SETI@home to it. This was a lot of work, but it was fun; I enjoy developing new software. I spent the next 7 years (2016 to 2022) developing Nebula. I've written a lot of code in my life, but this was the hardest thing I've ever done (see earlier blog entries for details). My brain-power, patience, concentration, and motivation were pushed to their limits. Eric and Dan helped a lot with developing RFI and candidate scoring algorithms, but the programming and debugging was a solitary endeavor. There were some fun Eureka! moments, but mostly it was a long, hard slog. I haven't forgotten SETI@home's original spirit and ideals; they kept me going through all this. Intelligence and its products (science, philosophy, arts) are the greatest things I know of. Hence the question of whether intelligence exists outside Earth — and if so, the nature of its civilization and collective knowledge — is the most compelling one I can imagine (more so, for example, than the various open questions in physics and cosmology). Lots of people feel the same way. There's a species-wide eagerness to find other intelligent life and transcend the loneliness of our tiny planet drifting in the void (see Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot essay). I think of SETI@home as a million people reaching out together into space, hoping to find other minds. SETI@home is perhaps quixotic, but it's unparalleled among human endeavors. Let's reflect on this, and be proud of what we accomplished together. |
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SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.