Here is the problem I see with SETI

I can't pick up the signal of a radio station 5 miles from my house. Empty, blank air space....notta.
If i get into my car and get about a block away. I pick it up loud and clear.

As it is on Earth so shall it be in Heaven

Originally posted by ronnieray123
I can't pick up the signal of a radio station 5 miles from my house. Empty, blank air space....notta.
If i get into my car and get about a block away. I pick it up loud and clear.

As it is on Earth so shall it be in Heaven

I don't think that should be the only problem you see with SETI...

Regardless, I believe the expected signal sources in space are significantly more powerful than the transmitter towers here on earth. Perhaps you can clarify in case I'm misunderstanding your point?

Dude. Look at the antenna on your car. look at a seti antenna. See the difference? The antenna on my car is a conductive paint on a window! I used to have a sattelite transmitter on my roof for the internet. It beamed up a signal to a sattelite in geostationary orbit. how many miles is that?

The parabolic dishes amplify the signal. Take an old sattelite dish and put a dipole antenna made of speaker wire and solder a coaxial to it and hook it up to a stereo, aim it at a radio station. I bet you can pick one up 100 miles away.

Duh!

Get a radio receiver as powerful as seti then you might be able to pick up something. Because your radio is third class trash compared to seti.

I think we may be listening on the wrong freq. We have yet to crack the quantum envelope. I believe once we do we'll find that there are other more efficient ways to communicate and to move through the vastness of space.

In the quantum state we know that a particle can exist in more than one place at a time. Is that not the holy grail of physics we are searching for?

Originally posted by aaaiii
I think we may be listening on the wrong freq. We have yet to crack the quantum envelope. I believe once we do we'll find that there are other more efficient ways to communicate and to move through the vastness of space.

In the quantum state we know that a particle can exist in more than one place at a time. Is that not the holy grail of physics we are searching for?

Wut?

Seriously.. Frequence has nothing to do with some "quantum envelope" - I don't even have more than a vague idea what you meant by that. Something like "lets get smaller and when we reach quantum size (or dissassemble ourselves into a heap of quants) we can be everywhere we like at no-time.".
And furthermore critic, the same particle can't exist in more than one place at a time. You are talking about quantum entanglement - but that just means that two different particles can be undestinguishable from each other, so you could say you have doubled that particle.

What I am saying is this,
There are so many variables involved with me picking up a radio signal. Some of you have already jumped on the "Ron is wrong" bandwagon it is almost funny.
The most humorous response is that for some reason because of the size of the SETI array it is immune from the laws of physics.
There as so many factors that determine if a person receives a signal that he can listen to that I almost to wonder about the people responding to me here.

The most obvious ones that come to mind are buildings, atmosphere and location.
Any signal that is headed our way is going to be effected by the atmosphere of every planetary body it passes. It is going to be effected by every planet that gets in the way of that signal and I suspect that radiation coming from the many stars had the potential to interfere as well.
Your seeming belief that SETI is operating under the most ideal conditions is almost like telling a man with cataracts that he can see just fine

reply to post by ronnieray123

The size of the SETI antenna does not make it immune to the laws of physics as you said.
But it allows weaker signals to be picked up.

What makes the difference is how you analyze the signal.
Your radio picks it up, amplifies it then sends it trough your speakers and you're done.

SETI signal go trough what we call a Fast Fourier Transform (with the help of users running their screen saver)
To put it simply, its an analysis method that allows you to isolate a particular frequency in a stream of what appears to be white noise (an over-simplified analogy : like you picking up a particular conversation in a noisy crowd).

Comparing SETI signal issues with your normal radio transmission issues is a bit like comparing apples to oranges, even tough they are both fruits.

reply to post by ManFromEurope

To quote a previous poster, what I'm saying is this ~

.....Once we understand the quantum world we will understand how to properly communicate with other civilizations and how to traverse the vast distances of what we perceive as space.

Call it a feeling. Call it intuition. Scoff at it as you do.

We are listening and transmitting on the wrong frequency.

reply to post by SolidGoal


So you are saying in no uncertain terms

Earth based radio telescopes suffer no ill effects by being inside our atmosphere. That they are in ideal operating conditions

Yes or No

Try to answer without self indulgent displays of some greater knowledge. It is a binary question 0 or 1.
Either the Earth is the most ideal place to put a telescope or it is not

reply to post by ronnieray123

Earth based radio telescopes suffer no ill effects by being inside our atmosphere. That they are in ideal operating conditions

Read my friend : (from my first post)

The size of the SETI antenna does not make it immune to the laws of physics as you said.

Emphasis mine.
I never said that SETI is operating under ideal conditions.

I was merely trying to show you that there is more to SETI signal processing than other type of radio transmissions. A normal discussion, you know...

As for your direct question, yes, earth is the ideal place for a radio-telescope, for now.
A better place IMO would be the moon, but we are not there yet.

Originally posted by aaaiii
reply to post by ManFromEurope

 

To quote a previous poster, what I'm saying is this ~

.....Once we understand the quantum world we will understand how to properly communicate with other civilizations and how to traverse the vast distances of what we perceive as space.

Call it a feeling. Call it intuition. Scoff at it as you do.

We are listening and transmitting on the wrong frequency.

Ah yes, feeling. Something our technology works best with. Just a moment, there is another call on my feelo-phone..

Yes, I am scoffing. Because that is New-Age. Don't mix tech and feelings. It does not work. This is SETI, not "News from Antares, I am your spiritual guide". Wrong topic, wrong forum, I think.

Everything about SETI

www.seti.org...

en.wikipedia.org...

science.howstuffworks.com...




They usually just Listen

There are certain parts of radio spectrum where doing SETI would be like trying to listen to a single cricket half a mile away while your nextdoor neighbor is testing his car stereo at full volume. Man made radio emissions bounce around in the ionosphere and come from satellites, such that if anything happened on those bands - good luck in ever finding out.

That's the biggest problem I see with SETI. At least it may be one we can fix, provided we can establish radio astronomy sites on off-Earth locations. The moon is probably the best one currently.

The next biggest problem is one of our technological timeframe compatably meshing up with the technology of any other technological civilization that may exist. Of the four or so billion years Earth has existed, modern man has been around for about 50,000 years of the millions where vertebrate life has existed, and yet we've only had the tech for radio for about 100 years and modern computers and signal processing for less than half of that. Unless we're really lucky, for SETI to be fruitful the project may need to be sustained for multiple generations lasting thousands of years. It is a long-term project. And the moment you stop looking is definitely opportunity lost, even if the odds are comparable to playing the lotto.

Originally posted by aaaiii
I think we may be listening on the wrong freq. We have yet to crack the quantum envelope. I believe once we do we'll find that there are other more efficient ways to communicate and to move through the vastness of space.

In the quantum state we know that a particle can exist in more than one place at a time. Is that not the holy grail of physics we are searching for?

MOD NOTE - The following material is my personal copyrighted content so there is no copyright issue in posting it in full.

You come close to something I speculated on about a year ago. I wrote an article on quantum entanglement and this short piece is a spin off from it.

Link to article

And if you would like to read the original article that this one was spun off from Follow This link

E T Call Home

Let me start by saying that the SETI program (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) is a total waste of valuable time and resources. It doesn’t matter whether you believe that aliens (if they do exist) come from deep space or another plane of existence. Either way they are going to need a means of communication that works better than radio waves. For communication between the stars ordinary radio waves, which are subject to the same speed limit as light, simply will not do. The nearest star is several light years away. That means that radio or laser based communications would take several years to send a message just one way and double that for an answer. If you believe that the little green men live in an alternate dimension or universe then even if they do use radio waves for communication in their own domain they cannot communicate between dimensions or parallel universes by that method or we would be swamped with their transmissions.

So how do they communicate you ask? And I do have an answer. It might not be the right one but it is one possibility. I propose that they use entangled photons.

Follow this reasoning…

We can send both amplitude (AM) and frequency (FM) modulated signals by radio waves so why can’t we at least send FM signals by entangled photons. I am not sure we could modulate the amplitude of photon entanglement but FM should work just fine once we fully develop the technology. After all we didn’t have the ability to send even simple AM signals when we first invented the telegraph now we have cheap wireless home telephone handsets that operate in the gigahertz frequency range. All we need to do is develop a way to gather a large number of entangled photons and modulate the state change fast enough to simulate a carrier wave like we use in radio. Then we would need a way to detect that modulation and convert it to information. It is probably a daunting task to say the least but that is what was thought of radio before we perfected it.

What are some of the advantages, besides eavesdropping on ET, of such a communication system?

Because it would be instantaneous it would allow real time control of lunar and mars probes. Instead of them being autonomous and on their own for decision making they could be controlled in real time with just a keyboard and a joystick. No more letting them just wander around and get into trouble before an operator could intervene.

But an even more important application would be to place satellites as close to the sun as possible and let them monitor flares and coronal mass ejections. The instantaneous nature of the data received would give us a longer lead time to protect our communications satellites and any astronauts in space.

I doubt that we have the technology right now to accomplish this but the benefits of instant communications from any distance should make it a priority area of study. So what if we have to start off sending Morse code again. We have some brilliant physicists who should be able to find a way to make advances in the new technology just like they did with the old technology we use right now.

© 2011 DBIC-Inc and Dennis M. Burnett
[email protected]
All Rights reserved This article may be freely reproduced in any media as long as it is reproduced in its entirety including the copyright notice and contact link.

I believe that for 50yrs, Seti has been searching for our own type of waves that we are so used to sending, I discovered a different type of wave form located on the Moon.
Its a Triangle Tone Wave centered at the frequency of 2003.50 hertz. I posted my results along with supporting photos on legendarytimes.com.... I also notified Seti on their team member forum. Maybe I have helped speed the research, if I'm correct.
When you go the website for the Legendary Times look at the forum in the bottom left, click and the topics are displayed. You will find it under New Research, desertrat is my handle.

There are a lot of problems with SETI. There are a million reasons why it might not work. But it's really all a matter of getting lucky, anyway, and it's like that old joke about the guy who complains to God about not winning the lottery. "You gotta buy a ticket!"

If SETI were to pick up a signal it would be a miracle. They are looking for radio signals and I believe radio has a fairly small window.

The planet Earth is going radio quiet as we speak. With cable and satellite TV our radio signature is diminishing.

Any advanced, space fairing, civiliazation would need to be faster than light. That means either FTL communication or using vessels to convey messages. So to detect such a civilization we would need to be listening during the period they were using radio.

An FTL civilization would not bother transmitting to us. They would be too busy investigating systems in range.