Re: intent of package seti@home

[Kevin Dalley <kevin@seti.org>]

ron@microtronics.com.au (Ron) writes:

> In the case of seti@home though, I can't see how the same applies..  It's
> not like the flat earth society is going to purchase a Cray to send
> billions of "nobody's home" messages back to them.. and it's not like it's
> going to be particularly hard for them to confirm that, while the message
> "Live long and prosper" may have originated from a greater intelligence,
> it certainly didn't come from thousands of light years away ;-)

The same does apply.  SETI@Home wants to know whether a given piece of
data has been analyzed.  You don't need a Cray to send billions of
"nobody's home message".  Remember, the data does not need to be
analyzed in order to send a "nobody's home" message.  My old 486 could
send back many possibly false negatives, downloading new data and
immediately turning it around with negative results.

This massive number of negatives would leave SETI@Home not knowing
whether data has been analyzed.  If the data really does not contain
an interesting signal, nothing is lost.  But if a signal does contain
data incorrectly marked as negative, then that data will be
incorrectly ignored and the ETI signal will not be discovered.  Also,
SETI@Home will not know how much data has been analyzed.  Barring the
discovery of an ETI signal, the amount of analyzed data will probably
appear in published papers.  That number should be correct.

Confirming false positives is easy, as you pointed out.  Confirming
false negatives requiring reanalyzing all of the data using known
software, rendering SETI@Home useless.

I am not directly associated with SETI@Home, though my company does
support Project Serendip, which provides the data for SETI@Home.