SETI receives signal possibly from an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization

AN UNEXPLAINED radio signal is the best candidate yet for "first
contact" by an intelligent alien civilisation, scientists have
suggested.

The enigmatic signal has been picked up three times since last year by
the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, making it the most
exciting result of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence
programme (Seti).

It does not carry the signature of any known astronomical phenomenon,
and does not appear to be the result of natural interference or noise,
according to researchers who have studied its frequency pattern.

This means that it could have been transmitted deliberately by an
extra-terrestrial species on a distant planet, though experts
cautioned that this remains unlikely.

For the past six years, Seti has been hunting aliens using Seti@home,
a project that harnesses the power of millions of personal computers
around the world to sift through radio signals picked up by the
Arecibo telescope. Individual computers load a screensaver, which
allows Seti@home to use their processing power when they are idle.

The new signal, which originates from the region of space between the
constellations Pisces and Aries, is the most tantalising to be
analysed with this powerful new tool, researchers told New Scientist
magazine.

Please read the whole article:
[ http://www.theinsider.org/mailing/article.asp?id=568 ]

There is also this:

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/0...eut/index.html

(possibly the same article - the one on cnn certainly lacks any
details that would be intersting, anyone know any actual facts?)
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(Alert) wrote in message . com...
AN UNEXPLAINED radio signal is the best candidate yet for "first
contact" by an intelligent alien civilisation, scientists have
suggested.

Check the follow-up article in The Guardian with what Dan Werthimer really said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/news/...295799,00.html

(P. Backus) wrote in message . com...
(Alert) wrote in message . com...
AN UNEXPLAINED radio signal is the best candidate yet for "first
contact" by an intelligent alien civilisation, scientists have
suggested.

Check the follow-up article in The Guardian with what Dan Werthimer really said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/news/...295799,00.html

Of course the media hyped it, that's how they sell their product, but
the story is true.

http://www.theinsider.org

"Alert" wrote in message
om...
(P. Backus) wrote in message
. com...
(Alert) wrote in message
. com...
AN UNEXPLAINED radio signal is the best candidate yet for "first
contact" by an intelligent alien civilisation, scientists have
suggested.

Check the follow-up article in The Guardian with what Dan Werthimer
really said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/news/...295799,00.html

Of course the media hyped it, that's how they sell their product, but
the story is true.

http://www.theinsider.org

Of course the story is true. It's just that it doesn't seem to be a signal
from aliens. HTH

from Dan Werthimer in Arecibo to SETI League

Da: "Dr. H. Paul Shuch"
Inviato: Venerdì 03/09/2004 00:41:07 -0400
A: "Dr. H. Paul Shuch"
Cc:
Oggetto: SETI public: False SETI@home alarm, courtesy of the press


SETIzens,
Today, I've received nearly a hundred emails about a three-time
SETI@home hit, reported in today's New Scientist. Sorry to throw a wet
blanket on this otherwise exciting announcement, but I have to tell you
the press attaches more significance to this observation than do the
astronomers themselves.
Here is the text of an email received today
from SETI@home director Dan Werthimer of U.C. Berkeley
(and now in Arecibo):


it's a zero on the rio scale.

none of our candidates are very interesting - they are all
consisitent with noise. we will continue to observe many
of the candidates over the next few years, but there's
nothing on the candidate lists we are particularly excited about.

a reporter from new scientist read the seti@home web pages:
in particular there's a section on "candidate signals" where
we discuss how we score signals and we show the data from
the 220 candidates we re-observed at arecibo 1.5 years ago.
these web pages are old, but the reporter made an exciting
story about them, by exagerating their content and mis-quoting
us and quoting us out of context, and making a press release
about one of the candidates that has a bit higher score than
the others.

i talked to a couple of reporters today, explaining we've seen
stuff like this for the last 30 years, and it's always turned
out to be rfi or noise, and that there's nothing to get excited
about, and that when you look at 50 trillion bytes of data,
occasionally you'll find patterns that look unusual just from
noise...

i wish we had something in our data to get excited about.

tomorrow we'll start using the multibeam receiver you guys made
to map HI in the galaxy. the HI survey will take about five years.
we begin in 12 hours.

best wishes from arecibo,

dan



The Rio Scale to which Dan refers is a one-to-ten tool SETI scientists
use for quantifying the importance of a candidate detection. For
details, see
http://www.setileague.org/iaaseti/rioscale.htm

Sorry this one wasn't The Signal, but as you can see from Dan's last
comment, that won't stop us from continuing the search!

Yours for SETI success,
Paul

--
H. Paul Shuch, Ph.D. Executive Director, The SETI League, Inc.
433 Liberty Street, PO Box 555, Little Ferry NJ 07643 USA
voice (201) 641-1770; fax (201) 641-1771; URL http://www.setileague.org
email work: ; home:

"We Know We're Not Alone!"
=======================================

Bruno Moretti
member
TeamSETI of SETI Institute http://www.seti.org/
SETI ITALIA Team G. Cocconi
http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/team...p?teamid=30233
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/s...team_7422.html

Hi Bruno,

Thank you very much for posting this letter.
I appreciate that, since Werthimer himself apparently did not think that
the sci.astro.seti newsgroup was worth posting a message on about
this so far 'most promising' signal since the start of the project that
detected it.

Now, I trust that Dr. Werthimer is telling the truth that this 'signal' is
nothing
more than noise. But I feel that it is at least unthoughtful that he seems
to be the only one with enough information to draw that conclusion.

In a previous posting, I vented my frustration in 5 reasons, that besides
the news postings available to anyone, there is no technical
information available about this signal (and its repetitions).

No info on what it's start frequency is, its drift rate, its duration, its
bandwidth,
its strength, and how close its repetitions matched the original
pattern, how much time elapsed between the repetitions, how
strongly repetitions were correlated, how often we did not find
any signal in that part of the sky, and not even info on when
and where in the sky the signals were detected (a basic piece
of info displayed on every WU in seti@home).

At the very least, we, as active seti@home crunchers, as seti
enthousiasts, and also just as curious people, should at least
be allowed to form our own opinion about this signal and its
repetitions.

At the very least, we need the applicable work-units to become
available to the public. So we can listen to, or analyse ourselves,
the noise that Werthimer so profoundly believes is the only thing there.

You seem to be more directly involved in the close circles of the
seti community, so I call upon you to use your influence to open
up the work units and any other info which is/was available
(to Werthimer), and convince everybody in that way, that we still did not
detect "The Signal".

I think that everyone active on seti@home deserves at least
full openness after years and years of cranking work units.

Thanks

Rob


"SETI ITALIA Bruno IK2WQA" wrote in message
m...
from Dan Werthimer in Arecibo to SETI League

Da: "Dr. H. Paul Shuch"
Inviato: Venerdì 03/09/2004 00:41:07 -0400
A: "Dr. H. Paul Shuch"
Cc:
Oggetto: SETI public: False SETI@home alarm, courtesy of the press


SETIzens,
Today, I've received nearly a hundred emails about a three-time
SETI@home hit, reported in today's New Scientist. Sorry to throw a wet
blanket on this otherwise exciting announcement, but I have to tell you
the press attaches more significance to this observation than do the
astronomers themselves.
Here is the text of an email received today
from SETI@home director Dan Werthimer of U.C. Berkeley
(and now in Arecibo):


it's a zero on the rio scale.

none of our candidates are very interesting - they are all
consisitent with noise. we will continue to observe many
of the candidates over the next few years, but there's
nothing on the candidate lists we are particularly excited about.

a reporter from new scientist read the seti@home web pages:
in particular there's a section on "candidate signals" where
we discuss how we score signals and we show the data from
the 220 candidates we re-observed at arecibo 1.5 years ago.
these web pages are old, but the reporter made an exciting
story about them, by exagerating their content and mis-quoting
us and quoting us out of context, and making a press release
about one of the candidates that has a bit higher score than
the others.

i talked to a couple of reporters today, explaining we've seen
stuff like this for the last 30 years, and it's always turned
out to be rfi or noise, and that there's nothing to get excited
about, and that when you look at 50 trillion bytes of data,
occasionally you'll find patterns that look unusual just from
noise...

i wish we had something in our data to get excited about.

tomorrow we'll start using the multibeam receiver you guys made
to map HI in the galaxy. the HI survey will take about five years.
we begin in 12 hours.

best wishes from arecibo,

dan



The Rio Scale to which Dan refers is a one-to-ten tool SETI scientists
use for quantifying the importance of a candidate detection. For
details, see
http://www.setileague.org/iaaseti/rioscale.htm

Sorry this one wasn't The Signal, but as you can see from Dan's last
comment, that won't stop us from continuing the search!

Yours for SETI success,
Paul

--
H. Paul Shuch, Ph.D. Executive Director, The SETI League, Inc.
433 Liberty Street, PO Box 555, Little Ferry NJ 07643 USA
voice (201) 641-1770; fax (201) 641-1771; URL http://www.setileague.org
email work: ; home:

"We Know We're Not Alone!"
=======================================

Bruno Moretti
member
TeamSETI of SETI Institute http://www.seti.org/
SETI ITALIA Team G. Cocconi
http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/team...p?teamid=30233
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/s...team_7422.html

Rob Dekker wrote:
Hi Bruno,

Thank you very much for posting this letter.
I appreciate that, since Werthimer himself apparently did not think that
[...]

Rob,

Learn to cross-post or just don't cross-post.

Already answered in alt.sci.seti. Followups there please.

Regards,
Martin


--
---------- OS? What's that?!
- Martin - To most people, "Operating System" is unknown & strange.
- 53N 1W - Mandrake 10.0.1 GNU Linux
---------- http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en-gb/concept.php3

"Martin 53N 1W" wrote in message
...
Rob Dekker wrote:
Hi Bruno,

Thank you very much for posting this letter.
I appreciate that, since Werthimer himself apparently did not think that
[...]

Rob,

Learn to cross-post or just don't cross-post.

Already answered in alt.sci.seti. Followups there please.

My "news.la.sbcglobal.net" server doesn't seem to carry "alt.sci.seti" ...
(a gazillion other "alt." stuff but not "alt.sci.xxxxxx")
rats!


Regards,
Martin


--
---------- OS? What's that?!
- Martin - To most people, "Operating System" is unknown & strange.
- 53N 1W - Mandrake 10.0.1 GNU Linux
---------- http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en-gb/concept.php3

Alfred A. Aburto Jr. wrote:
[...]
Learn to cross-post or just don't cross-post.

Already answered in alt.sci.seti. Followups there please.


My "news.la.sbcglobal.net" server doesn't seem to carry "alt.sci.seti" ...
(a gazillion other "alt." stuff but not "alt.sci.xxxxxx")
rats!
[...]

What?! No alt.sci.seti???

Put in a request to your ISP. Or try out Google groups. There's also
various news servers open for access from the rest of the world.


Regards,
Martin

--
---------- OS? What's that?!
- Martin - To most people, "Operating System" is unknown & strange.
- 53N 1W - Mandrake 10.0.1 GNU Linux
---------- http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en-gb/concept.php3