I happen to be at the radio observatory right now. Hold on! Something's coming in! "What's the frequency, Kenneth?" What the hell does that mean?

Jack Welch was on my dissertation committee at Berkeley and is a great guy. His wife is the head of SETI. If you read between the lines, they've used SETI to raise money from Paul Allen, but the telescopes are really going to be used for research astronomy, and they'll just split off a few frequencies to send off to the SETI computers as they do research.

"We love Lucy too!"

PJ -

Sounds cynical of them, if effective. To the best of your knowledge, what do Welch & wife *actually* think of SETI and its chances for success?

You can see Jack's view in the linked article -- "SETI is a longshot". I think they both think it would be very exciting to detect space aliens. The real test is, will they point the telescopes away from the Orion Nebula so that SETI can cover some fresh ground?

Hat Creek would have been shut down if they hadn't found private money. They were able to find enough to upgrade it to a level where it can do worthwhile science. Good for them.

Like all of space exploration, it is much wiser to let the private sector do it.

I've always been skeptical about SETI. When it started 20+ years ago, they made similar promises about the detection of extraterrestrial intelligent life. On earth, the increased use of encryption for telephone and satellite communications makes these signals appear to be noise, and the switch to cable and fiber for increased bandwidth means most of our communication will be non-emitting. I also recall reading somewhere that the strongest radio signals from earth are the military radars, which, except for their periodicity, convey no information at all.

There was an interesting article making the same point linked to at the bottom of the cited article, Earthlings' Low Signal-To-Noise?:

"If ET ever phones home, chances are Earthlings wouldn't recognize the call as anything other than random noise or a star. New research shows that highly efficient electromagnetic transmissions from our neighbors in space would resemble the thermal radiation emitted by stars. ... Said Newman: "Our message is that, even for the people who do believe this, they're probably wasting their time. If they did pick up a signal from little green men, it would probably look like a star to them and they would just pass over it and move on to the next thing." "

Knock it off. Who do you think you are going to communiate with? L Ron Hubbard? Allah?

jd - It's true that SETI won't find anything unless (a) aliens exist, (b) the aliens are intentionally trying to contact us, and (c) in choosing a means to contact us, the aliens think like SETI people, and choose the particular frequencies SETI has chosen to listen to. I think (c) and (b) are both extremely unlikely.

Fascinating, but I can't shake the fear that if these two didn't draw attention to us, the aliens wouldn't come and squish us all.

Maybe that's why I'm conservative.

The SETI Institute predicts that we'll detect an extraterrestrial transmission within twenty years.

SETI is completely a-okay with me, but it would be nice if they could avoid pontificating on subjects that cannot possibly know.

The SETI Institute predicts that within twenty years, most everyone currently employed by the SETI Institute will be retired, and no longer quite so anxious about the SETI Institute's continued funding. Reminds me of that joke about the fortune-tellers convention: a reporter asked one of the fortune-tellers if there'd be another convention next year. She said she didn't know.

I am with Rico.

Welcome to the Federation, friend.