> Date: Sun, 16 May 1999 00:14:18 -0600
> From: "Aaron Blosser" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: RE: Mersenne: SETI on ABC News last night
>
[.....snip.....]
> Then the odds of having planets suitable for life, such as earth. I'm
> certain there are only thousands of such planets out of possible billions.
That is just your opinion/belief, so it's not a basis for a scientific
discussion ;-)
> Then, whether you believe in evolution or not, there are still pretty big
> odds against life forming anyway, but I'll gloss over that and say it
> happens but it's rare (something I don't agree with anyway). And then,
> there are the odds against any such life evolving into a form intelligent
> enough to become intelligent enough to develop transmission mechanisms.
And those odds we don't know anything about which is why it would be so
interesting to find another sentient species (to investigate those odds)!
Lately, there have been many discoveries of life in very unusual places (hot
vents on the sea floor - no sunlight, no oxygen, temperature > 250F, and
still there are some critters....just one example), so I think we basically
have to say: we don't know about the odds (although to me it looks like life
is way more robust than we all thought).
> And then, barring any fictional FTL messaging, there is the incredible
> amount of time it would take for any signals to even reach our isolated
> planet, on a distant spiral arm of a remote galaxy. And any signals would
> be incredibly weak if they even did exist, and would be barely detectable,
> if at all, against the background radiation of space (big bang radiation).
Although you are correct with the time problem, the microwave background
from the big bang is not a problem, since it is in a way different part of
the frequency spectrum. The biggest interfering radiation sources are
military radar installations and the like....
> And the fact that there is just SO much area to cover, so many signals to
> analyze.
>
> And then the fact that we've only been scanning space for any kind of
> signals for only a few decades.
>
> It's like looking for a needle (that might not exist) in one of trillions
of
> haystacks, and expecting to find that needle in the first few tries.
Nobody is seriously expecting anything. The point is that the discovery of
another advanced civilisation would be a revolution, whereas the discovery
of another Mersenne prime is, while still a great accomplishment, an
evolutionary progress. Don't get me wrong (and flood me with flame mail
;-)) - I love GIMPS and have been participating in it for the last 2.5 years
(in the beginning, I had the computer in my dorm room and left it on 24/7
just for GIMPS), but SETI is just too fascinating for me personally and I
think even the slightest chance of the aforementioned revolutionary
discovery is worth the effort.
I case I insulted/offended anybody reading this, my apologies, that was not
my intention (don't want this discussion to become emotional!)
> Naturally, I'd be blown out of my socks if we found any sort of pattern
> emanating from deep space, indicative of intelligence (or signs of
> intelligence from Earth itself :-), but I feel quite confident in saying
> that the odds are 100% in favor of us never finding any such signs before
> Sol blinks out for good.
Again, there is no scientific basis for this statement. The only thing we
know is that we don't know. And my opinion is: therefore we still have to
try.
On the other hand I have to say that the practical implementation of GIMPS
is far better than the one of SETI. Apparently they chose the route of
creating something for John Doe average Win95 user, so they're catering to a
different populace than GIMPS for example. I don't think that's wise,
because your average home user will probably grow tired of leaving his
machine on 24/7 pretty fast, no matter how fancy the displayed graphics,
which truly idealistic don't care about anyway (see GIMPS). You cannot run
SETI as a service under WinNT, for example, which is a bummer, because the
majority of the time NT boxes are idle is when nobody is logged on, and SETI
does not work as the logong screen saver.
[I managed to get it running as a service using SRVANY from the WinNT
Resource Kit, but the stupid thing has standard priority, so in order to
keep my dual machine responsive, I will use one SETI and one GIMPS client
each...and I would feel a little bad abandoning GIMPS totally after all that
time ;-)]
Furthermore, they don't have anything like our "DaysOfWork" setting, i. e.
when their server goes down, so go the clients, and that effect is even
worse than it would be for GIMPS since your average work unit apparently
does not take longer than 40hours (400MHz) and also requires a download of
300+kB. I don't understand their thinking.....they also lack a descent
mailing list like this one.
Oooops, I think I should stop here, because this *is* the GIMPS list, after
all....
Martin
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