|
|
Thread Tools | Display Modes |
#11
|
|||
|
|||
How smart are SETI@homers?
"Andrew Nowicki" wrote in message ... Please don't feed the troll... |
#12
|
|||
|
|||
How smart are SETI@homers?
Rich wrote in message ...
Some expect it to work, but many, myself included, think even negative evidence worth having. We'll know what ain't there at least. Ditto: I _expect_ seti@home to fail to find anything, but still think that not finding anything would be a useful enough result to justify the thousands of data blocks I've processed for them. At least we'll know that aliens with big non-directional radio transmitters are rare. Mark |
#13
|
|||
|
|||
How smart are SETI@homers?
Andrew clearly thinks that he was being clever with his comments. What he
was actually being, was a complete arse. If he has no interest then why is he in such newsgroups? "Andrew Nowicki" wrote in message ... When a reasonable person fails to attain his goal, he either abandons the goal or tries a different method of attaining the goal. An idiot is usually defined as someone who responds to failure by doubling his efforts. NASA is an ossified bureaucracy, but they are not idiots. When their big SETI program failed, they abandoned it. SETI@homers ignore their failures and have little if any interest in modifying their search method. Worse yet, they seem to believe that some extraterrestrial civilizations have been sending powerful microwave beams toward the Earth for millions of years. Why would the extraterrestrial tax payers support such an effort? If we ever receive their message it will say something like: "Life is absurd. Have a happy suicide." |
#14
|
|||
|
|||
How smart are SETI@homers?
Matt Giwer wrote in part:
Its what the voters back on Alpha Ceti V want to hear. We mean you no harm. By that we mean it is not our specific intention to cause you harm. We cannot be held responsible consequential damages which we know will happen but which we really and truly wish would not occur even though they are inevitable. AAAAIIIEEEEE! The Planet of the LAWYERS!!!! WE'RE DOOMED! Corry -- It Came From C. L. "I thought WE were the Planet of the Lawyers" Smith's Unclaimed Mysteries. http://www.unclaimedmysteries.net "Bill Funk" said in rec.photo.digital: "Is this actually part of your plan? To use tag lines to show your contempt, while showing that you really have so little understanding?" |
#15
|
|||
|
|||
How smart are SETI@homers?
In infinite wisdom Sander Vesik answered: In sci.space.policy Rich wrote: In semi-infinite wisdom Andrew Nowicki answered: When a reasonable person fails to attain his goal, he either abandons the goal or tries a different method of attaining the goal. An idiot is usually defined as someone who responds to failure by doubling his efforts. NASA is an ossified bureaucracy, but they are not idiots. When their big SETI program failed, they abandoned it. No, congress told them to stop spending money on SETI. NASA would spend trillions on SETI if they had the funds. NASA cannot even account for where their current funds go, after a GAO audit. Yes, but that was not the reason of that funding cut. The point is that NASA will spend as much money as it can get, regardless of outcome. Like all bureaucracies, status is determined by budget and headcount, not by science, results, or efficiency. SETI@homers ignore their failures and have little if any interest in modifying their search method. What failures? SETI@home is an open research project. Some expect it to work, but many, myself included, think even negative evidence worth having. We'll know what ain't there at least. More correctly, we know what wasn't where some time ago. Remember, radio signals move at a finite speed, so instead of "now" it is always looking at the past. I don't see it as a useful distinction, SETI has no hope (IMHO) of detecting anything not in the immediate stellar neighborhood. Any signal's source cannot be older than tens of years, maybe a hundred years at best. A positive result depends on there having been a civilisation that was a strong radio source emitter k years ago at the distance of k lightyears. This is where Drake equation comes into play and why you need not pay attention to whetever it then goes off to conquer the stars or not. What do you claim the Drake equation will tell you *if* an signal apparently from ET is received? It will tell us no more then than it does now, which is what our current baseless guess on the frequency of intelligent ET life is. The chance of detecting a signal from stars that are say 5000 - 10000 lightyears awy depends on the chance of there having been a civbilsation in the radio noise phase among that relatively largis amount of stars during teh past 5000-10000 years ago (though to be sure about outermost stars, we have to listen for 5000 more years). Its an odd kind of archeology ;-) Indeed, a civilization with non-directional transmitters stronger than stellar sources at waterhole frequencies. Are you working on a plot for Enterprise by any chance? Rich Rich |
#16
|
|||
|
|||
How smart are SETI@homers?
Unclaimed Mysteries wrote:
Matt Giwer wrote in part: Its what the voters back on Alpha Ceti V want to hear. We mean you no harm. By that we mean it is not our specific intention to cause you harm. We cannot be held responsible consequential damages which we know will happen but which we really and truly wish would not occur even though they are inevitable. AAAAIIIEEEEE! The Planet of the LAWYERS!!!! WE'RE DOOMED! I have seen plenty of movies where the earth survives an invasion of slime dripping maggots. Not once has even Hollywood produced a movie with the incredible ending that we could survive an invasion of lawyers. -- There were 2.4 million Jews in the part of Europe controlled by the Nazis. After the war 3.8 million of them applied for compensation from Germany. Unfortunately the other 6 million perished. -- The Iron Webmaster, 3148 |
#17
|
|||
|
|||
How smart are SETI@homers?
Harold Groot wrote:
HG So if I fail to chop down a tree with a single swing of an axe, by HG your definition I would be an idiot to continue chopping? Sure, you HG can argue that my 2nd and subsequent swings of the axe are not HG identical to the first.... If you are making a dent in the trunk, you can estimate how much time it will take finish the chopping. SETI researchers made absolutely no progress -- no dent on the tree trunk after several decades of chopping. HG but then again the searches now being conducted by SETI@HOME are HG not identical to earlier searches. Different numbers of frequencies, HG different algorithms to detect artifical signals among the noise HG and so on. The whole "shared computing power" concept, while not HG unique to SETI, nonetheless got a huge boost from the SETI@HOME HG project. Even if the SETI@HOME program never finds what it is hoping HG for, it has been very valuable in pioneering the way for other HG scientific projects that had been stalled for lack of adequate HG computer power... Joann Evans wrote: JE At what point do you decide one has 'failed' at this sort of effort? JE One doesn't cover the Universe in a few decades of modest searching. I would describe the universe as a big pile of dangerous trash. Most of our terrestrial species are parasites -- a sort of biological trash. Some of you wonder why the other civilizations have not transformed this trash into something of greater value, for example manufactured objects or living things. The answer is that all values are imaginary -- everything we care about does not have greater value than the trash. Biological species are driven by instincts rather than reason. Some of them colonize outer space with the help of electronics. Advanced electronics transforms their biological civilization into an artificial intelligence civilization. The AI civilization is ruled by a dictator which has a very big and very powerful brain. The AI dictator has no interest in colonizing the outer space because independent space colonists can challenge his authority. All the AI dictator needs is slaves that worship him like a god. He controls his slaves so thoroughly that his death, serious injury, or addiction to virtual narcotics dooms his civilization. Radio and optical search for the ET makes as much sense as the search for the perpetual motion machine. A reasonable person living in the 21st century does not spend his entire lifetime trying to invent the perpetual motion machine. It is high time the SETI people draw conclusions similar to the energy conservation laws. |
#18
|
|||
|
|||
How smart are SETI@homers?
"Andrew Nowicki" wrote ...
Harold Groot wrote: HG So if I fail to chop down a tree with a single swing of an axe, by HG your definition I would be an idiot to continue chopping? Sure, you HG can argue that my 2nd and subsequent swings of the axe are not HG identical to the first.... If you are making a dent in the trunk, you can estimate how much time it will take finish the chopping. I posit that there are people who are sometimes absent minded enough to put on only one sock in the morning. In order to test this I get permission to put a camera at ankle height in a ticket machine in an underground station that has a few thousand people pass through each day. After analysing one day's results I have found no one-sock wearing people. Based on these results what is the estimated time until I find a one-sock wearer? |
#19
|
|||
|
|||
How smart are SETI@homers?
In infinite wisdom Paul Blay answered: "Andrew Nowicki" wrote ... Harold Groot wrote: HG So if I fail to chop down a tree with a single swing of an axe, by HG your definition I would be an idiot to continue chopping? Sure, you HG can argue that my 2nd and subsequent swings of the axe are not HG identical to the first.... If you are making a dent in the trunk, you can estimate how much time it will take finish the chopping. I posit that there are people who are sometimes absent minded enough to put on only one sock in the morning. In order to test this I get permission to put a camera at ankle height in a ticket machine in an underground station that has a few thousand people pass through each day. After analysing one day's results I have found no one-sock wearing people. Based on these results what is the estimated time until I find a one-sock wearer? Unlike SETI, people wearing one sock have actually been observed. And there are no a priori reasons to question either their existence or their delectability should they exist. Where are you gonna put your camera to detect ET? To make your analogy more similar to the situation with SETI you'd have to use bigfoot or perhaps the Lock Ness Monster. Now, no matter how many nessie photos are shown to be fake, no matter how many sonar surveys come up empty, no matter how many fish surveys show too few fish to feed a breeding population of animals of Nessie's purported size, the searches continue, with better and better equipment, and they continue to come up empty. At what point would an intelligent observer call it quits? With SETI, we seem doomed to a similar situation. How much energy and resources are called for? Is there an upper limit? Or is this like Economics where you can get everything wrong for your entire professional career and still get paid. And if an economist does get something right one sunny day, it's Nobel prize work for sure. Rich |
#20
|
|||
|
|||
How smart are SETI@homers?
"Rich" wrote ...
In infinite wisdom Paul Blay answered: "Andrew Nowicki" wrote ... If you are making a dent in the trunk, you can estimate how much time it will take finish the chopping. I posit that there are people who are sometimes absent minded enough to put on only one sock in the morning. In order to test this I get permission to put a camera at ankle height in a ticket machine in an underground station that has a few thousand people pass through each day. After analysing one day's results I have found no one-sock wearing people. Based on these results what is the estimated time until I find a one-sock wearer? [massive snip] You've missed the point which is simply that there is no way to determine the time to observation of X based solely on having had no previous observations of X. Actually that's not quite right - but the statistics involved don't really prove anything. [e.g. You could say that, based solely on having looked for 60 years and not found anything, then the chance you'll find something in the next year is 1%] |
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Thread Starter | Forum | Replies | Last Post |
JimO does TV later today | JimO | Space Station | 28 | July 9th 04 04:16 PM |
NASA I know about your wired humans and how really smart they are | Raoul Ortega | Space Station | 0 | August 21st 03 02:21 AM |