My "encounter of the 3rd kind"

[Stone1]

[HarryStottle]

[Stone1]

[Stone1]

Just to bring back some life into this forum:

If we educate some apes to type into a keyboard ad infinitum, we'd by far sooner get an entertaining novel than any Boltzmannbrain'd pop into existence. The proposed cosmological crisis was a journalistic exaggeration. I'm still reading bdw monthly, but if one really wants to go in-deep on science topics as a layman, Scienceblogs is very useful (and some of the comments over there are better than those of many TV-comedians).

There's still no hard evidence around 'bout ET-visitors, or is there? As far as I know, most reports have been debunked, although I didnt exactly follow the topic during the last few years. I just upgraded my rig to a quadcore with extra GPGPU-power and spend 50% of its calculating capabilities on SETI@home in order not to waste the resources.

[HarryStottle]

nope, there are no significant new developments in the field of alien visitors.

And I'm pretty sure you're wasting your gpu processing power on the SETI search. And indeed the entire SETI project is ill conceived. Looking for radio signals from aliens is about as naive as looking for evidence of steam power would have been a century ago.

How long have we had radio? just over a century. How long are we likely to continue broadcasting in that wasteful inefficient manner? Another century at most. By then we'll have moved from broadcasting to narrowcasting and although there will still be some wireless electromagnetic signalling, it is much more likely to be in the ghz or thz range than "medium wave" or "long wave"; the significance of which is that shorter waves have short range. The chances of a mobile phone signal being readable from more than a hundred thousand miles away are close to zero. Light years? Forget it!

So our entire broadcasting window will have lasted a couple of centuries in the lifetime of our planet. And we're expecting (in SETI) to be intercepting similar signals broadcast by other species during their brief window of broadcasting, (but which has probably since closed) in the vain hope that our receiving window and their broadcasting windows somehow coincide (allowing for the distance and time implied by interstellar distances).

As hinted in both "Talking to God" and "Resurrection", my own conjecture is that as we - and they - advance we all become much more efficient energy users and thus leave a decreasingly visible fingerprint for alien species to identify as indicators of intelligent life. Thus only if we - or they - WANT to be found, will we, or they. And if they want to be found, they're going to do something much more dramatic and clearly unmistakeable, like the projected beacons I sketch in Resurrection. Something clearly visible from a million plus light years away.

If I ever get around to publishing part 2 of that play, it will include an explanation of how "they" DO "broadcast" their entire history and scientific analysis of the universe, by superimposing a signal on the twin projections, where the "white noise" of the parent star is used as the "carrier wave". That, of course, is no more than wild speculation on my part, but I'm confident that it is closer to the probable truth than our discovery of messages hidden in radio waves "leaking" from their homeworlds.

I think your gpu power would be much better employed helping to solve the ...

[Stone1]

Hey cool, you answered already. This was just a post for warming up, and already I acquired some useful information from you. I must confess that I never informed myself appropriatly about the SETI@home project, I just assumed that their searching methods and patterns would be upgraded constantly. But that's really like searching for a sub-atomic needle in a googol of haystacks.
I know of the protein-folding project, consider it important as well and will rearrange my BOINC settings. It was just out of convenience that I continued with the old settings on my new system. Which is awesome now for a private Workstation (patting proudly on my new deep-black super silent, low temp, dust filtered casing - with cable management behind the mainboard tray)!
And the next upgrade is already in the process of planning.

I think I read about the white noise / carrier wave theory before, but I'm also sometimes reading (other) science fiction, sorry about that sentence now sounding like a joke on your cost. No offense meant, I take your non-fictional writings very seriously. But do remember Schopenhauer: Man can do what he wants, but he cannot always want what he wants. This preserves me from taking myself and other people all too seriously and helps my not to loose my good humour.