Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, an organization that scans the sky for signs of non-human technology. Study has focused on analysis of the radio spectrum of other stars, but also involves other approaches.
Questions tagged [seti]
29 questions
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Why aren't we using neutrino emissions to detect alien civilizations?
Current SETI efforts seem to focus on the electromagnetic spectrum in the "water hole," or EM waves between 1420 MHz and 1720 MHz since that's the resonant frequency of hydrogen atoms up to water molecules. The rationale being if an alien…
Justin Braun
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How to construct a message to send to the stars?
There have been a few attempts to transmit messages to the stars with the assumption that there may be extraterrestrial civilizations somewhere out there to receive them. These messages (such as the infamous Arecibo message) were constructed based…
Anthony X
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Why are messages to space constructed as pictograms?
The Arecibo message and both forms of the Dumas-Dutil message are constructed exclusively as pictograms. They are sequences of bits, grouped into "pages" which when viewed as black or white pixels, form low resolution images. These images express…
Anthony X
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What is the protocol surrounding public disclosure of a message of extra-terrestrial origin?
SETI is listening for messages of extra-terrestrial origin. This article talks about a candidate signal Russian astronomers received over a year ago but that only recently came to light. There was no independent confirmation of the signal at the…
Anthony X
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Likelihood of Neighbor close enough to detect
Not sure if this is the correct site on Stack Exchange to ask this, please let me know if there is a better one.
If civilizations were distributed fairly evenly in the habitable region of the galaxy, how many civilizations would there have to be for…
Tibrogargan
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From how far away could our SETI searches detect and recognize our technological signals?
If we imagine an extra-terrestrial civilization which is on an exact technological par with Earth, and has been leaking radio signals into space exactly the way we have been doing, how far away can it be from Earth and still be detectable as a…
Anthony X
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Why is SETI searching for unusual signal patterns, and not higher levels of randomness than found in background radiation?
Maybe this is a (very) stupid question, but anyways, I was wondering about that lately just for fun.
So SETI is basically searching (among all the noise coming to use from space) unusual (repeatable) patterns among all the noise from outer-space we…
sabiland
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Do we know the Wow! signal was not a forgery?
The Wow! signal was a strong narrowband radio signal observed by the by the Big Ear radio telescope. According to wikipedia,
it remains the strongest candidate for an alien radio transmission ever detected
As far as I can tell, the signal was…
Wouter
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What would happen if less computing resource were volunteered for SETI @ home
I recently learned about SETI and SETI @ home home. It's basically allows volunteers donate spare computer time to analyze data from remote server.
What if the participants are less? Will it ignore considerable amount of data? To elaborate this…
Pasupathi Rajamanickam
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Is SETI a waste of time?
If the cosmic speed limit of electromagnetic waves is $c$ then is there any reason to use this to communicate as over long (interstellar) distances? Can this be an effective means of communication? Even between Earth and Mars the lag is problematic.
Gobabis
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