Oumuamua and Tabby' Star.

It is part of the human experience to slowly realize we are each an isolated mind in a sea of other isolated minds, and then to spend our lives trying to cross the mighty gulfs between ourselves and others, striving to make a connection. Everybody wants to be found. So it’s natural, as our science has progressed, that the human race should project its collective hopes onto the cosmos and see if anyone else is reaching out to us. The last century is permeated with science fiction of alien visitors, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (or SETI) is the manifestation of our hopes that someone out there is trying to find us. So great is our desire for contact, we instinctually see aliens in emissions of radiation, in planetary landscapes, and in comets on hyperbolic trajectories. In a sense, we anthropomorphize the universe.


The Anthropomorphization of the Universe

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And some people here are out and out pessimists, quite frankly I wonder why such people get involved with a project such as this in the first place with such negative attitudes. :-(

Cheers.

Chris, not every article is from a tabloid. Slate used to be ok. You should be happy for SETI., and all the attention it's getting.

Loeb, was on you tube last night. Yes, talked about Oumuamua. Loeb, said he added the light sail comment.

Just the rate at which Oumuamua came into our solar system, let alone the rate at which it exited is remarkable.

Hoping it will come back. :)

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If charlatans and hypocrites like Loeb can make a living spouting their drivel, then more fool us for listening to them. Some say it's a shame that ducking stools went out of fashion.

For the extremely sad state of science education world wide.

I saw a report on the science channel last week hinting at the possibility that there is a lot more ordinary matter in the space between the galaxies than had been previous;y estimated. It makes me wonder if and when all the "DARK" matter will be accounted for without making up any new previously unknown particles.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

The Ars Technica community was celebrating (as we will soon) their 20th anniversary a few days ago, mentioning S@h (page 1's last par.)

Ars Technica turns 20 years old, and we couldn’t have done it without the community - Jan 14, 2019
https://arstechnica.com/staff/2019/01/ars-technica-turns-20-years-old-and-we-couldnt-have-done-it-without-the-community/
https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/team_display.php?teamid=30188

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Apr 3, 1999 - May 3, 2020

Il y a 20 ans : un million d’internautes se lancent aux trousses d'E.T. - ZDNet 
https://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/il-y-a-20-ans-un-million-d-internautes-se-lancent-aux-trousses-d-et-39884751.htm

Google Translation (the translation from French to English isn't perfect, far from it, but is good enough to give an idea of the article's content) :

Twenty years ago: One Million Internet Users Go After ET
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=fr&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zdnet.fr%2Factualites%2Fil-y-a-20-ans-un-million-d-internautes-se-lancent-aux-trousses-d-et-39884751.htm

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Apr 3, 1999 - May 3, 2020

SETI@home gets a mention in this well rounded, humorous and recently updated article.

"The WIRED Guide to Aliens" https://www.wired.com/story/wired-guide-aliens/

What to Do When ET Phones: There’s a protocol—from the International
Academy of Astronautics (lightly edited).
1. Scream.
2. Try to make sure, using your own equipment, that “message from an alien” is the most
likely explanation, way ahead of “secret spy satellite” or “hoax courtesy of nearby laser lab.”
3. Alert your alien-questing colleagues that you may have beaten them to the biggest
discovery in (non)human history, and kindly ask them to use their own equipment to confirm
it. Request that they redirect their resources to continuing observation.
4. If your colleagues agree you won, send a message out to all the other earthling astronomers
via the International Astronomical Union. Also, please phone the secretary general of the
United Nations (but gloat less).
5. Send WIRED an encrypted tip of your discovery via Signal.
6. Make the data public so scientists can check your work.
7. Work to protect the frequency at which you received the most important message ever,
so that the signal from a new internet of things toothbrush doesn’t interfere with page 17 of
the faster-than-light ship schematic.
8. Don’t respond to your new ET BFFs until “appropriate international consultations have
taken place.”
9. Pop the champagne!

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Apr 3, 1999 - May 3, 2020

À la recherche d'ET, les ordinateurs domestiques traitent des données de 200 To | India news, 2019/08/26
https://teles-relay.com/2019/08/26/inde-a-la-recherche-det-les-ordinateurs-domestiques-traitent-des-donnees-de-200-to-inde-nouvelles/

Translation in English :
In Search of ET, Home Computers Handle 200TB Data | India News
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=fr&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fteles-relay.com%2F2019%2F08%2F26%2Finde-a-la-recherche-det-les-ordinateurs-domestiques-traitent-des-donnees-de-200-to-inde-nouvelles%2F&sandbox=1

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Apr 3, 1999 - May 3, 2020

NASA's Planet-Hunting Probe Joins the Search for Intelligent Aliens
https://www.space.com/breakthrough-listen-nasa-tess-seti-search.html
NASA's newest planet hunter is joining the hunt for intelligent aliens.

Scientists working on the space agency's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission will collaborate with the $100 million Breakthrough Listen project in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI, members of both teams announced today (Oct. 23).

"It's exciting that the world's most powerful SETI search, with our partner facilities across the globe, will be collaborating with the TESS team and our most capable planet-hunting machine," Pete Worden, executive director of Breakthrough Initiatives, a program that includes the Breakthrough Listen project, said in a statement.

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The SETI@home Uses Citizen Scientists to Search for Aliens | By Jenny McGrath, February 1, 2020
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/setihome-citizen-scientists-extraterrestrial-intelligence/

“Over the last 20 years, we’ve gotten billions and billions of potential signals,” said Korpela. “I think at last count, it was close to 20 billion potential signals in our database.” He and the team are working on software to analyze all that information. In some upcoming papers, the team will list the most promising areas of the sky. The software injects signals that the SETI@home team believes mimics what an E.T. would send. Thus far, it hasn’t found anything that resembles this artificial extraterrestrial intelligence. If anything looks interesting, Korpela hopes others might take a look. China’s new FAST Radio Telescope is one of the world’s most powerful. “Maybe if you point a bigger telescope at it, maybe it is interesting,” Korpela said of some of the potential spots. “So that sort of thing might raise the interest of more people, I think.”

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Apr 3, 1999 - May 3, 2020

Astronomers want public funds for intelligent life search

The head of one of the US's national observatories says the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe needs to be taken more seriously.

Dr Anthony Beasley told the BBC that there should be greater government support for a field that has been shunned by government research funders for decades.

His backing for the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (Seti) marks a sea change in attitudes to a field regarded until recently as fringe science.

Dr Beasley made his comments at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Seattle.

No direct mention of SETI@Home, but it does make interesting listening:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000ffzg

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

Another British take on the story:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/feb/15/astronomers-to-sweep-entire-sky-for-signs-of-extraterrestrial-life

Andrew Siemion has also just given a live interview to BBC News. Both the Guardian and the BBC introduced the story by naming the SETI Institute, although Andrew himself was correctly identified with the Berkeley SETI Centre.

https://www.foxnews.com/science/search-for-aliens-new-techniques-announced-determine-whether-alone-universe
Search for aliens intensifies, new techniques announced to determine 'whether we are alone in the universe'

Following the news that scientists discovered a fast radio burst from deep space that is "repeating" every 16 days, experts are increasing their efforts to look for alien life.

Scientists at the SETI Institute announced they are working on new techniques to spot "technosignatures" that could potentially indicate the presence of an advanced civilization. SETI will use the Very Large Array (VLA) telescope in New Mexico for their work and provide data to the search system.

"The SETI Institute will develop and install an interface on the VLA, permitting unprecedented access to the rich data stream continuously produced by the telescope as it scans the sky," said Andrew Siemion, Breakthrough Listen principal investigator and Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI, in a statement. "This interface will allow us to conduct a powerful, wide-area SETI survey that will be vastly more complete than any previous such search."

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Ya Know what fellows and girls ?----Why aren't the following questions being asked and answered ?
Maybe they are; but the reporting is extremely poor.

Were the bursts recorded ?
Were subsequent bursts identical to each other.
Were the periods exactly the same
Was there any modulation within the bursts.
What do statistical techniques show about the randomness of the emissions' content.
Why then do we even remotely think that the burst s were created by other than natural causes.

Claude Shannon must be revolving in his grave !

Until these questions are intelligently answered the project doesn't deserve any further headlines or funding for that matter.

Source paper is here https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.10275.pdf

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Thank you a heap Jon.

This answers a good many of my questions--I have printed it out and will study it at length.

I will add my ignorance into the question to try to imagine what the source might be . I am fairly well convinced that it must be a periodic event --perhaps one that doesn't emit each rotation.

I do expect better reporting and discussion in the lay press and less sensationalism among the poseurs.

Dan Werthimer (SETI@home) and Seth Shostak (SETI Institute) feature in the "SoundWorks Collection: Space is a Sound'' documentary https://vimeo.com/390859057 details https://soundworkscollection.com/post/space-is-a-sound

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Apr 3, 1999 - May 3, 2020

In the news not in the way we wanted, but:

SETI@Home Is Over. But the Search for Alien Life Continues (from Wired)

In 1995, the computer scientist David Gedye had an idea that could only originate at a cocktail party. What if the world’s personal computers were linked together on the internet to create a virtual supercomputer that could help with SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence? The network would be able to sort through the massive amounts of data being collected by radio telescopes, seeking signals that might point to an alien civilization around another star. A distributed supercomputer sounded outlandish at the time, but within four years, Gedye and his collaborators had built the software to make it a reality. They called it SETI@home.

On Tuesday, researchers at the Berkeley SETI Research Center announced they would stop distributing new data to SETI@home users at the end of March. It marks the culmination of an unprecedented 20-year experiment that engaged millions of people from almost every country on earth. But all experiments must come to an end, and SETI@home is no exception. So far, the researchers at Berkeley have only been able to analyze small portions of the SETI@home data. They had to hit pause on the public-facing part of the experiment to analyze the full two decades of radio astronomy data they’ve collected to see what they might find.

“For 20 years, there’s been this fight between keeping the project running and getting the results out to the scientific community,” says Eric Korpela, the director of SETI@home. “At this point, we can’t even be sure that we haven’t found anything because we’ve been doing most of our data analysis on small test databases rather than the whole sky.”

SETI@home Going into Hibernation (from the SETI Institute)

UC Berkeley has announced that the volunteer computing part of SETI @ home will stop distributing work and go into hibernation on March 31. Two reasons were cited for this action:

[The remainder is basically a verbatim of the announcement.]

SETI@home to shut down after two decades of crowdsourced alien hunting (from CNet)

After March 31, a bunch of amateur alien hunters will regain some personal computing power. The Berkeley SETI Research Center announced Monday that SETI@home, the two-decades-old crowdsourcing effort to hunt for signs of E.T. in radio telescope data using internet-connected computers, is shutting down at the end of the month.

The home-based search for extraterrestrial intelligence project was launched from University of California, Berkeley, back in 1999 -- when the internet was still a relatively new thing to many people and the term crowdsourcing had not yet been coined.

Prior to SETI@home, radio telescopes would collect massive amounts of noisy data that would then need to be analyzed using supercomputers to see if there might be a signal from distant civilizations amid all the noise.

SETI@home works a little bit like bitcoin mining: Volunteers install a free computer program that downloads and crunches data in the background around the clock. The difference being that there is no currency produced as a reward, except for the satisfaction of helping your fellow humans navigate the vast cosmos, in a way.

Now the SETI@home team says it's time to shut the whole thing down and focus on compiling the results from the project.

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