Experts say that for a signal to be considered interesting, the same signal must be picked up at least 2 times. There is only a 1% chance of this happening, but if an advanced plant sent a signal only 1 time, it would not be considered important. Maybe some of the Spikes on the science status page are from advanced planets that sent only 1 signal. A spike is a strong signal that is picked up.

Maybe, but about 99.9999% of the time, it's going to be something else, ie terrestrial radio or interstellar noise, or even a hoax.

Only way to eliminate those is through reobservation, preferably from multiple receivers spaced widely enough to show parallax if the source is close.

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If the strong signal came from an intelligent ET society, it would contain some sign of intelligence. Either counting out the first 100 primes or the first 50 digits of pi.

It would seem to me that all signals strong or weak should be scanned for this type of content. Anything non Gaussian, with repeating "Beeps" etc should be looked at and compared with a "Clutter Map" of known terrestrial sources , pulsars etc.

I trust that the signal processing is much more sophisticated than what we surmize is actually happening.

Very much doubt that it would be an "interpretable" signal, more likely to be a very consistent noise type signal such as earth has been emitting for about 100 years - ever since Marconi first pounded the key...

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

The Science status page demonstrates why every signal isn't checked. Currently:

Table	#	Last 24 hours
Spikes	3,604,522,513	1,855,793
Gaussians	590,955,345	206,870
Pulses	1,700,282,859	1,139,935
Triplets	1,547,444,710	790,328
Workunits	1,302,786,897	621,056
Results	1,291,971,534	506,762

There are about two million spikes received daily. Today there are almost four per work unit. Gaussians are a better probability, but almost half of all work units have one. There's just too much to look at. It's computationally infeasible.

The only way to pare them down is to find correlating observations of the same place showing the same result. This is exactly what NTPCKR is supposed to do. And, it was finding them when it was first being implemented, but it doesn't seem to be run nearly as much as it should be. Again, it all comes down to a lack of funding.

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Do you think that some of the Spikes on the science status page are signals from Aliens?

Do you think that some of the Spikes on the science status page are signals from Aliens?

probability > 0 !!!

If I may - one of my tasks who is carrying out the gaussian search is showing a gaussian score where the background running score apparently is -13.000 all the time.

Best gaussian score now stands at 0.269, at 76.9% completed.

A score of 0.5 or better is needed to get this task to the Master Database and perhaps a score of some 6.0 or better may also bring it to the Scientific Database as well. Right now I am having one task which is having a score of 2.76.

You know, the lower graphics is still the analog raw data as they are being processed. The end result is the well known spikes, gaussians, pulses and triplets. Perhaps the signal we are wishing for is hiding in this mess (or jungle).

For the gaussian search the numbers are up and down all the time. The best score is being recorded for each and every such task.

What you should ask is what type of processing should be done to first eliminate earth origin signals (perhaps a clutter map) and then what type of processing should be done to detect a sign of intelligence or a signal. Then ask why isn't this being done (maybe it is). Also, why this couldn't be done before the work unit is archived or discarded and why a computer farm couldn't handle all of this without asking for more money.

Are we just processing out the noise and creating an un-manageable data base that is never re-examined?

Any intentional message received is likely to be a one-time experience in my opinion. They (if "they" exist) would not know if and where we are. Thus they would have to focus a powerful beacon and slew it around the Galaxy or beyond.

The only way to pare them down is to find correlating observations of the same place showing the same result. This is exactly what NTPCKR is supposed to do. And, it was finding them when it was first being implemented, but it doesn't seem to be run nearly as much as it should be. Again, it all comes down to a lack of funding.

Did they move NTPCKR to V7 MB? ie What does autocorrelation do?

Thanks

edit - autocorollary - Is autocorrelation a hidden frontend for the Hidden NTPCKR I just read about in the forum entry "Near Time Persistency Checker"

Did anyone read the announcement that a signal has been detected and has been followed for 2 years ? The announcement was made in the April 2013 issue of CQ Magazine from an observatory in Austria.
Scott KE5TO

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Interesting, I hadn't even heard of it until I saw your post. I'm puzzled why more hasn't been heard about it in general, if only to bash the results. I was able to see the article you mentioned in the table of contents of the CQ April 2013 issue. Alas I cannot access the article. Have you read the article?

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Hi
I read the "Announcement" in the April edition of CQ Magazine, a very serious scientific monthly journal for Amateur Radio operators. I am surprised that the news has not been picked up since the first publication of the announcement, which was the CQ Magazine article ?
I will dig out my copy and quote the essential details in the morning. I am very interested in getting this community's take on what I take as an important contribution to SETI.
Scott KE5TO ( AMATEUR RADIO LICENSE SINCE 1967 )

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A signal from a distant star would likely be just a carrier wave that maybe passed this way. Everything is moving mostly away from us. For tranbsmission to be understood it would have to be a focused beam of tremendous strenght to be heard over a tremendous distance. Short wave radio is reaching stars 70 lightyears out. Maybe they will tune in to years of I love Lucy.I would think a civilzation that could go to the stars would flood space with their signals that flow over like us. TV , radio shortwave all floos into space. If they have radio telescopes it might be that they will study a warring planet with no real peace and mostly hostile to other beings, some things are better left alone.

Firstly, the problem with CQ Magazine is that they are not a peer-reviewed scientific journal; they simply report on nearly anything they think will sell issues.

According to the CQ Magazine highlights for their April 2013 issue:

Since this is April, we have our annual visit from Professor Emil Hiesseluft, who reports on signs of intelligent life detected by the Lauton Institute's Center for Research on Alien Populations. In the same spirit, "Math's Notes" editor Irwin Math, WA2NDM, looks into Ultra-Low-Frequency communications, and "Magic in the Sky" editor Jeff Reinhardt, AA6JR, writes about Color Radio and Smellovision.

I attempted to look up Professor Emil Hiesseluft and found this PDF document where he claims he is the person responsible for inventing the Pringles packaging (canister), yet according to this Wikipedia page, Fred Baur is the one that invented the Pringles canister packing and received the patent for it.

Further reading of the aforementioned PDF document shows Prof. Emil claiming that the designs for the Pringles canister also allowed him to provide a solution to the "intelligence community" to "sniff out holes in wireless network security", of which I've never seen even a close resemblance of a device like that used by a single professional a day in their lives, ever.

In the closing paragraph of the same PDF document, Prof. Emil says:

The claims of former U.S. Vice President Gore notwithstanding, it is Dr. Ostermond-Tor who is recognized universally as the Father of the Internet.

The issue with this is that no one believes former U.S. Vice President Gore is the "Father of the Internet". In fact, misstatements aside, Al Gore himself doesn't believe he's the Father of the Internet, only that he was the primary lobbyist of the U.S. Government to setup the infrastructure. The Architect, excuse me Vint Cerf, who is widely considered to be one of the Founding Fathers of the Internet, said this of Al Gore:

as far back as the 1970s, Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship [...] the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication.

It would seem that this Dr. Ostermond-Tor is not universally recognized as the Father of the Internet, as he seems to be virtually unknown to the Internet as a whole, and certainly isn't mentioned anywhere in the History of the Internet. For such a distinguished title, you'd think he'd be mentioned somewhere, if even in the footnotes.

All of this makes "Professor" Emil Hiesseluft's claims dubious, which makes me skeptical of whatever article was printed in CQ Magazine.

Moving on to the Lauton Institute's Center for Research on Alien Populations, not even a Google search seems to show up for this Center for Research, let alone even much information about the Lauton Institute itself.

The supporting articles for the main alien article all seem to center around fringe science that seems to have no real backing from peers.

Based upon this research, I would have to say that whatever claims are made in the article, they are likely incorrect, incomplete, and contain inaccurate data, which is why the article remains in a publication like CQ Magazine instead of the front cover of Time.

Thanks, I too found it hard to find other information about the Professor or the institute. Some pages were in German and my high school German was decades ago. (;-) I completely understand the peer review requirement but I guess my fantasy of somebody qualified following up and striking pay dirt will have to wait for another day.

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Why is anyone posting about an April issue of CQ?

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Very much doubt that it would be an "interpretable" signal, more likely to be a very consistent noise type signal such as earth has been emitting for about 100 years - ever since Marconi first pounded the key...

Wasn't Marconi's first "key pounding" sending the same characters over and over again so the listeners on the other side of the Atlantic could pick the pattern through the noise ?

In the old TV show "A for Andromeda", wasn't it the fact that the same signal kept repeating over and over again that made the astronomers realise that it came from an intelligent source ?

T.A.

Some years ago (1974) a message was sent from the Arecibo Radio Telescope that lasted less than 3 minutes. I assume everyone knows about this. I have a couple of questions:

If ET broadcast a similar message in this general direction I assume we would pick it up. Would we necessarily pick up the entire message or perhaps, say, only a part of it as our radio telescopes swept through that portion of the sky?

Would we be able to repeat an observation of that signal, since as with us it was sent once only.

There was the WOW signal that was never repeated. Is it possible that signal would have been similar to our Arecibo message?

OTOH, relooking at that part of the sky as has been done what, a few million times?, if ET's tech were similar to ours, we should be able to pick up something although not necessrily a deliberate signal. Or would we if that one message deliberately exceeded the power of their routine transmissions significantly, their routine signals being degraded through time and distance? And this assumes the WOW signal was more than a glitch.