h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have a question for my follow researchers. I came into work one day and saw my SETI at home screen saver and I was thinking, what would it chance if we did find a signal? If we found a signal and decoded it so we could listen to their music and watch their version of I love Lucy, MASH, and Bay Watch , how would it change the world? Would we see the human race come together because we would see that we are not so different or would we see the world define life as less precious?

Your thoughts please and what ET TV shows would you like see.

Mostly Harmless

Well, the movie "Contact" addressed that very issue. (I suppose the book does, as well, but I haven't read the book.) The scientific community rejoiced at finding proof of extraterrestrials, whereas religious groups denounced the discovery on the grounds that it showed that humans are not the one chosen species of God.

I thought that was pretty silly, but then a few years ago they found that Mars rock that could have had bacterial fossils on it. When that was announced, religious groups did indeed protest the fact that science was proving them wrong.

I'd like to watch the ET versions of 1960's sci fi just to see what their alnt on ET lifeforms was

I suspect that the impact would be slightly lessened by the way SETI messages are treated. Reportedly, they recieve several signals of a possible extra-terrestrial nature every year, on which they are currently working to see if they are simply random or genuine conscious transmissions by intelligent life. If the results seemed positive, it would only come out gradually and people would get used to the idea as it develops. I daresay they would even be bored of it by the time it came to conclusive pictures and translations.

" If we found a signal and decoded it so we could listen to their music and watch their version of I love Lucy, MASH, and Bay Watch , how would it change the world?"

or their version of their first tv broadcast, which in our case was a Hitler rally. (was that in Contact?)

That's not entirely true, Kea. The first TV broadcasts came from the BBC in Alexandra Palace, and were a general mix of short "light entertainment" shows. They weren't produced by the BBC themselves, who were resistant to the idea of television, but privately by John Logie Baird's "Televisor" company, who paid the BBC for the privelege. When the BBC increased the charges for the use of their transmitters, Baird's company formed a consortium with three German companies to develop a national television system in Germany, run by their post office. It too carried a mix of music, dance, cookery etc., but when the Nazi party came to power a year or two after it launched (can't remember the exact date; sorry.) they removed all non-German influences from the board and started interspersing propoganda broadcasts into the light entertainment schedules. The transmission you mention was one of those, making it far from our first "broadcast". Oh, and as it was an early cable system, with the receivers wired in to every major public post office, the odds are against them ever seeing it anyway.

Oh, and as for what alien TV to watch, their version of "The Sky at Night" might help us get a fix on their exact location...

I wonder if SETI really are on to something big. A few years ago they were a small organisation, laughed at and frowned upon by science administrators. Now they are building the worlds largest radiotelescope array. Have they found something the governement wants investigated more fully?

I think that if SETI did not exist, someone would and should invent it.

Much like http://www.phobe.com/yeti/

There was an article in yesterday's paper saying thanks to all the home PCs utilised they have narrowed down the search to 150 signals that are unexplainable as natural phenomona and that with 100 years they should have tracked the sources.

We have an old PC or two knocking around and are now planning to add one to the LAN just for SETI's use

It'll take them 100 years to track the source?! Why so long? Surwely it's simply aatter of looking back along the trajectory from which the signal came and seeing whats there.

But establising the trajectory isnt all that easy...

I suppose it would be much harder if the signal were of a short duration and had stopped by the time the analysis showed it to be worth following up on.

If you're interested on how SETI does things, have a look at some of the recent posts on 'The Fermi Paradox'.

Also, most radio telescopes pick stuff up in a cone, and signals paths get bent for all sorts of reasons. And the Earth moves about lots. All of this makes it diificult.

Good points all. I stand corrected.

I haven't heard that they should be getting to build their own antenna. I just heard they got 24 hours of observation time at Arecibo, to investigate a few select signals better.

I wish I had instead of going to Malaysia headed off to Puerto Rico and stayed at Arecibo like I was planning.

I think the first time we discover alien life it will be followed by an outcry from humanity. An outcry along the lines of "THAT'S IT?!?" Because I think it will be algae or fungus. While what people want is animals and intelligent creatures. So it will be a big letdown and a lot of funding will probably disappear.

They're not building their own antenna; they're ganging together a lot of existing antennae at the same time to produce a larger effective area.

Well, that is what the idea of the whole seti@home program was surely.