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jlf1961 -> RE: Okay, stupid questions (8/3/2016 8:54:22 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Greta75
I see the point of interacting Aliens to learn about their culture, their technology, to see if they have anything more advance than us that we couldn't figure out that they could!
I mean, you never know! Aliens could have figure out the cure for cancer!
Greta, considering some of your statements on other threads, allow me to point out a few things you seem to have neglected.
1) Radio and television signals travel at 186,000 miles per second, so for a signal to reach the NEAREST planet that might be able to support life would take 50 years. So, a 100 year round trip for radio/television.
2) Considering that the ONLY signal that was ever received that might have POSSIBLY been and indication of intelligent life was the famous "WOW" signal which happened once, only once, and has never happened again, the odds are that if there were intelligent life out there, it is a hell of a lot further away than 50 light years.
The obvious proof of this is the fact that, since radio/television signals are not directional, and go out into space whether we want them to or not, if a species using this technology was any closer than 100 lightyears, we would have been picking up their signals already.
3) All the radio telescopes on the planet use a broad band signal processor, which means if there is life out there using electromagnetic communications, you dont need a brand new 100 million dollar radio telescope to look for it, we are gonna pick it up whether we want to or not.
4) Finally, the most logical location for a radio telescope to do this type of research is NOT on the surface of the planet, but actually in orbit, a few specialized satellites with dish style radio antennas pointing into space would be more practical and a hell of a lot cheaper, at about a half million a pop.
5) This planet has problems that would make better use of the billions spent yearly on the Seti projects around the world.
Hell, even without private gun ownership, people on this planet are killing each other with anything they can get their hands on. Those billions wasted on SETI projects would be just as good if spent to throw a world class 'let's get shit faced and sing Karaoke' party for every one on the planet.
Or maybe feed the millions of people starving to death on a daily basis.....
6) While the American based Seti project has spent millions on a new phased array radio telescope, they are privately funded, AND, instead of dropping hundreds of millions on a super computer to go through all that data, have taken a lesson from the US Air Force and set up a world wide network of privately owned home computers to process the signals.
The trick is to use a very simple software system that does not use a lot of resources in the back ground, runs like a screen saver, and when you look at the current number of 12 million home computers running it, actually has more computing power than all the super computers on the planet combined.
The airforce super computer that I am referring to is the one that built out of 1760 ps3's which actually out performs the much vaunted IBM big blue, at 1/3 the cost.
Hell, I am a ham radio operator, I built a radio telescope out of an old C channel satellite dish and a 40 dollar shortwave radio kit. Total cost $123.98, and most of that was coax.
In other words, even IF another race had the cure for cancer, by the time they realized we need it, transmitted it to us (of course, we would have to hope the biology is remotely similar) the odds are that we would have done something totally stupid, nuked the freaking planet and what few survivors left would be to worried about surviving one day to the next to monitor radio telescopes.
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