david@djwhome.demon.co.uk (David Woolley) wrote in message news:<T1058386681@djwhome.demon.co.uk>...

In article <1082a057.0307152128.70463feb@posting.google.com>,
exosearch@yahoo.com (Jason H.) wrote:

I've created the following table of Known Extra-Solar Planet RA/DEC's
to help me to cross-compare their positions to the SETI@home Stellar
Countdown WU RA/DEC's (very kindly sent to me.)

Why?  The detectability of extra-solar planets is normally considered
a contra-indication of intelligent life because the habitable zone is
compromised.

...snip...

Hello David,

You may want to read-
http://www.planetary.org/stellarcountdown/reobservations_5.html

...The observations began at midnight, Atlantic Standard Time (UTC - 4
hours) and lasted until 8am AST. During that time Werthimer, along
with colleagues Eric Korpela and Paul Demorest, directed the giant
telescope to the locations of 52 of SETI@home's most promising signal
candidates. In addition, they also observed 30 stars known to be home
to extrasolar planets from a list provided by famed planet hunter
Geoff Marcy. After all, based on the only known instance in the
universe, planets appear to be the most hospitable place for the
emergence of intelligent life."

This hopefully answers your question.

Also, detectable ones tend to have already been subjected
to targetted SETI and tend to be relatively close (S@H is really best
for targets that are too far to be considered for a targetted search).

Well, now that you know that S@h did do a mini-targeted search, this
is a moot point.  Also, why say this? Aren't you contradicting your
first statement?

I've heard that some extra-solar planets have been examined by
targeted searches, but I'm not aware of a published list of RA/DECS of
targeted SETI searches that have already examined extrasolar planets,
are you?  I'd love to read about it.  Also, I doubt that there is any
way for anyone to predict WHEN ET will transmit a signal, so I would
posit that even if there were such a list of already examined
candidates, no one could rule out a single extrasolar planet based on
such a list, so your statement that 'detectable ones tend to have
already been subjected to targetted SETI.' does not seem relevant.

The main value of extra-solar planets is that their detection increases
the estimated likelihood of planets in general, not in providing specific 
candidates.

(My impression is that one of the reasons for not publishing detailed
coordinates is to discourage this sort of speculation.)

I've never read or heard about their reason (if there is one) for not
publishing detailed coordinates, so I don't know how you formed your
impression.  To the contrary, every day S@h publishes the coordinates
of their WU's on hundreds of thousands of computers, any person could
look at their WU and let their imagination run away with them; I'm not
doing that (you should know me better than that after all these
years!)   The last time you falsely acused me of 'speculation', I was
right about the dates of SETI@home's follow-up visit to Arecibo known
as the Stellar Countdown, and it was NEVER an issue of speculation for
me, because, as I said before, I had a good source of information. 
Now you are again accusing me of speculation.  Speculation about what?
 They specifically said that they looked at known extra-solar planets.
 I'm not speculating about that.

Jason H.