S. Hawking said to listen for ET, but make no attempt to let him know we're here. Look what happened to our cousins -- Neanderthals, CroMagnon , et.al

Yes, Hawking did say that. But Carl Sagan already made it clear many years before that if they are out there, they will already know we are here. We can't hide what we have been broadcasting.
Might as well try to level the playing field by finding out if they are there and get ourselves ready.
Hopefully we will not be foolishly aggressive in the future as we have been in the past. Same will apply to them also I think.
The odds seem to be stacked against cooler heads, but still it is better to know and prepare.

S. Hawking said to listen for ET, but make no attempt to let him know we're here. Look what happened to our cousins -- Neanderthals, CroMagnon , et.al

Yes, Hawking did say that. But Carl Sagan already made it clear many years before that if they are out there, they will already know we are here. We can't hide what we have been broadcasting.
Might as well try to level the playing field by finding out if they are there and get ourselves ready.
Hopefully we will not be foolishly aggressive in the future as we have been in the past. Same will apply to them also I think.
The odds seem to be stacked against cooler heads, but still it is better to know and prepare.

They certainly know we are here, no (unrefutable) doubt about that. They are very selective into letting us know. They know about the imperfection of the human mind and to which consequences this may lead... In my lettre to Dr. Hawking I literally wrote ETI thinks we're too 'dumb' to reveal themselves to us. A bit of a blunt choice of words but that is actually what we are to them. We still have so much to learn and when we are ready and don't form any danger anymore to ourselves or our cosmic neighbours, that is when they will reveal themselves fully. Might still take a while but as we all know, patience is a virtue.

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"Worldwide, the total number of people doing this for a job, if you will, is maybe a dozen, maybe fifteen," he says. "Something like that. It's very small, terribly small."

As Seth Shostak knows full well there is of the order of 100 or more people working at his SETI Institute alone. Perhaps he was misquoted or the context of the question was misinterpreted. Admittedly the number is modest unless you count all of the crunchers here at SETIi@home who don't do it as a paid job; but the number that do it as a livelihood is a good bit more than a dozen or so.

Seti@home gets a brief mention at the tail end of this Huffington Post article:

What The Heck Is This Thing On Mars?

Dan Werthimer is being interviewed for CBC radio right now.

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Reality Internet Personality

UK team plans 'unsent letter' to aliens

A network of UK researchers has decided to compose a message to aliens - but they are divided over whether such a message should be sent into space.

The group will enter the Breakthrough Message contest, which offers a $1m prize for creating a digital missive that represents human civilisation.

That prize accompanies a new effort to accelerate the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (Seti).

Experts have argued for decades about the wisdom of broadcasting into space.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34211549

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UK team plans 'unsent letter' to aliens

A network of UK researchers has decided to compose a message to aliens - but they are divided over whether such a message should be sent into space.

The group will enter the Breakthrough Message contest, which offers a $1m prize for creating a digital missive that represents human civilisation.

That prize accompanies a new effort to accelerate the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (Seti).

Experts have argued for decades about the wisdom of broadcasting into space.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34211549

This is dumb. With absolutely nothing to support it but speculation, otherwise rational scientists are willing to cultivate a fear of the unknown and doubts about the scientific method among a public who would have to deal with an announcement of alien life being discovered. If and when that day comes, a lot of the world is going to believe they are now in some kind of danger because of science and it's going to be too late to explain the realities of traveling at sub-light speed between the stars.

Status of the Arecibo Observatory Receivers

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I've written a comment to the November 17 issue of "Nature Physics" explaining the importance of Arecibo for SETI@home and mentioning that the whole BOINC environmet has reached a processing power of 10.324 petaflops, that is that of a supercomputer.
Tullio

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Billionaire puts money behind tiny spacecraft in search of ET

Yuri Milner, the Silicon Valley billionaire who has already committed $100 million to SETI, the search for alien life in the universe, announced Tuesday he is adding a second $100 million to expand the quest by sending fleets of tiny robot spacecraft into interstellar space.

The one-time Moscow physicist envisions thousands of ships he calls “nanocrafts,” someday speeding at 100 million miles an hour to star systems light-years away, powered only by the pressure of light beams from arrays of space-borne lasers.

Milner’s money will finance research and engineering programs designed to prove that concepts for the project he calls “Breakthrough Starshot” could become possible within a generation, he said.

His first $100 million grant targeted expansion of the UC Berkeley-based “SETI listen” program whose astronomers at observatories around the world are listening and looking for radio signals and bursts of laser light that might be carrying messages from intelligent civilizations across the universe.

http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Silicon-Valley-billionaire-to-give-another-100-7242109.php

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http://news.discovery.com/space/the-universe-likely-has-many-extinct-civilizations-study-160429.htm

Our civilization is 10,000 years old; unless a typical civilization lasts much longer, over the 13-billion-year lifespan of the universe it’s likely the others have gone extinct, the researchers added. But there is a practical application to keep us around longer, the researchers said.

“Our results imply that our evolution has not been unique and has probably happened many times before,” Frank said. “The other cases are likely to include many energy-intensive civilizations dealing with their feedback onto their planets as their civilizations grow. That means we can begin exploring the problem using simulations to get a sense of what leads to long lived civilizations and what doesn’t.”

Full paper http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1089/ast.2015.1418

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http://news.discovery.com/space/the-universe-likely-has-many-extinct-civilizations-study-160429.htm

Our civilization is 10,000 years old; unless a typical civilization lasts much longer, over the 13-billion-year lifespan of the universe it’s likely the others have gone extinct, the researchers added. But there is a practical application to keep us around longer, the researchers said.

“Our results imply that our evolution has not been unique and has probably happened many times before,” Frank said. “The other cases are likely to include many energy-intensive civilizations dealing with their feedback onto their planets as their civilizations grow. That means we can begin exploring the problem using simulations to get a sense of what leads to long lived civilizations and what doesn’t.”

Full paper http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1089/ast.2015.1418

From the paper:

Is to create a sustainable, energy-intensive, high technology
civilization here on Earth

All my hopes are on nuclear fusion if we were once to meet our galactic neighbours.

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Drivel and Pap for the masses.

We have plenty of sentient species here on Earth and have communicated with them very sparsely and in a
somewhat primitive way.

Hello all.

Maybe it's not the best place to post this message. Sorry...

I read the article explaining the need to get Arecibo still working and I fully agree.
But, as we all know, the probability to make us sure that extraterrestrial intelligence exits (and to prove it to others) is quite poor and we all know the reasons.

If I joined SETI decades ago it is because I am personnally convinced that intelligence is not "the" specifity of our Earth.
But now, I think that SETI should slightly change his message towards the politicians and funders : why not to insist much more on the usefulness of searching for extraterrestrial LIFE, even not intelligent ?
I suppose this could add more weight in the negociations for at least one reason : many of the scientists (all fields gathered) are not enough convinced that intelligence exists out of Earth. Then, they do not push the project as its image is today (maybe sometimes afraid that the money put in SETI could affect their own field of research ?). But I guess that most of them agree that life must exist somewhere for statistical reasons (enhanced by the number of exoplanets that are being discovered almost monthly now, and considering that life could exist in other places than Earth-like planets).

I discussed recently whith some of my colleagues and I realized that globally they consider SETI as a very nice (worse : a bit funny) group of Science-Fiction dreamers.
In those times where Science budgets are drastically reduced in most of the countries, it becomes harder and harder to get founds.

Changing our image by changing slightly our message would not necessarily save Arecibo, but at least, it could help saving SETI... (a kind of SETIL ???)

Waiting for your opinions and sorry if I hurted some : it was absolutely not my goal (just sharing a concern that spins in my mind).

JF

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Life is a sexually transmitted fatal disease(E.Bellamy)

On the register.co.uk site there is an article that points to an article by Nathalie Cabrol of the SETI Institute in "Astrobiology" that pleads for a new way to approach SETI not limiting it to search in the radio and optical bands. The article is long and scholarly. I tried to read it but I am not in the mood, for personal health reasons. However, I could not find any practical solution proposed. No mention is made of SETI@home, as usual.
Tullio

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SETI's Search For Aliens In The Universe Boosted By Donations

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- An array of 42 radio telescopes seeking signs of intelligent life in the universe will continue that work after private donors raised enough money to keep them going.

Here's the link for the rest of the article...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/13/setis-search-aliens-seti_n_926121.html[/b]

Very good news!!

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In the news.


Breakthrough Listen Project will follow up on possible Alien laser beacon detections but think it is most likely instrument or analysis error

It is too early to unequivocally attribute these purported signals to the activities of extraterrestrial civilizations. Internationally agreed-upon protocols for searches for evidence of advanced life beyond Earth (SETI) require candidates to be confirmed by independent groups using their own telescopes, and for all natural explanations to be exhausted before invoking extraterrestrial agents as an explanation. Careful work must be undertaken to determine false positive rates, to rule out natural and instrumental explanations, and most importantly, to confirm detections using two or more independent telescopes.

Peaks in Fourier analysis of stellar spectra, such as those discussed by Borra and Trottier, can be caused by instrumental optics or introduced during data reduction. Data artifacts, fringing, and inconsistencies in the manufacture of detectors are known to users of high resolution spectrographs to cause minute patterns to appear in the resulting spectra. The movement of the telescope, variations in observing conditions, and the process of wavelength calibration can easily introduce undesired signals at levels that are only barely detectable. It is therefore important to check the claimed signal using a different telescope and instrument.

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Berkeley SETI turns Australian telescope on nearest exoplanet to Earth

Breakthrough Listen, the UC Berkeley-led 10-year, $100 million search for intelligent life beyond Earth, inaugurated its observations with the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia by homing in on our nearest extrasolar planet, Proxima b, the main destination for a sister project called Breakthrough Starshot.

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After 14 days of commissioning and test observations, first light for Breakthrough Listen at Parkes was achieved on Nov. 7 with an observation of a newly discovered Earth-size planet orbiting the star nearest to Earth, Proxima Centauri. A red dwarf star 4.3 light-years from Earth, Proxima Centauri is now known to have a planet, designated Proxima b, within its habitable zone, the region where water could exist in liquid form on the planet’s surface.

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http://www.universetoday.com/132102/what-if-we-do-find-aliens/

Video with link.

What If We Do Find Aliens?


We’ve covered the Fermi Paradox many times over several articles on Universe Today. This is the idea that the Universe is huge, and old, and the ingredients of life are everywhere. Life could and should have have appeared many times across the galaxy, but it’s really strange that we haven’t found any evidence for them yet.

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http://www.universetoday.com/132102/what-if-we-do-find-aliens/

From the article:

the next generation of space and ground-based telescopes will let us directly image the atmospheres of extrasolar planets.

I find that in itself mind-boggling.

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The mind is a weird and mysterious place