| Subject: Re: Dr. Werthimer's explanation of the mysterious signal |
| From: "Rob Dekker" <rob@verific.com> |
| Date: 07/09/2004, 10:02 |
Hi Joe,
Werthimer seems to want see a signal which contains a "message
from an advanced civilization" deliberately aimed at us and intended for
us.
I totally agree with you that it is much more likely that we
would receive signals from an ET source which are not a message, but merely an
unintended by-product of any other application. Radar, probes, long distance com
signals or anything that we cannot even think of.
I also think that Werthimer is a very experiences scientist,
and has analyzed countless signals during his career, so if he says that this
signal is nothing out of the ordinary, I believe it.
Problem is that the sky is full of little sqweeks and rattles
and noises and not all of these have an immediate explanation for their origin.
Ham radio operators can contest to this. In fact, I have a lot of respect for
the seti@home guys and how they filter out
all this RFI and spurious signals to get to the really interesting ones. It's
like having 100billion UFO reports on you desk, and then you tell
me which ones are from ET origin...
But seti@home has now run for 5 years, with
millions of users, and in May did a survey of the most interesting 200 signals
or so, and this signal SHGb02+14a came out to be the most interesting one of
all. So now that Werthimer bluntly states that this best candidate is a 0 on the
Rio scale, not different from any of the other signals he has analyzed in the
past, I am disappointed. Is this the best we could come up with ? Or did
Werthimer have a different vision of how a ET signal is supposed to look like ?
Maybe there are many, many ETI signals in the massive seti@home database, but we did not detect them
because the objective was apparently to find a signal which is stable in
frequency, continuous in time, somewhat strong, with some modulation with a
message, and in the water-hole band around 1420Mhz.
But even so, let us at least listen to such a signal which is
0 on the Rio scale. Let us at least analyze the best result after so many years
of computation. Let us see what such a trivial signal (to Werthimer)
actually means.
We need to get these work-units, and the full analysis of
them. Original signals and repetitions.
Apart from the two discoverers, none of the seti@home users have actually had this signal on
their computer.
After we analyzed our
failure, then maybe we can set some different criteria for finding other types
of signals in the already analyzed database. I'm sure if we tweek the parameters
a bit, many other signals will pop out as being promising. Set the parameters to
what you would expect a space-probe signal to sound like, and who knows what
comes out....
Rob
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Because of the drift, explained Werthimer, “if we
had looked at the sky even a few seconds later we wouldn’t have found a match”
for this candidate. A signal that drifts so quickly that it can only be heard
for seconds at a time at a given frequency can only be detected by blind luck.
Needless to say, such a transmission is an unlikely vehicle for message from
an advanced civilization
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Now it seems to me that he is making an unfound
assumption. Namely of all signals likely to be received from ET are
INTENTIONAL signals. I think that is It is far more likely to receive
unintentional signals. Let me explain. In the small amount of time that
we had a marginal capacity of space travel. We sent out dozens of probes. It
is not hard to imagine an advanced civilization in the course of its existince
from a few hundred years to a few thousand years for it to send out thousands
of probes(varying in size and sophistication), not to mention "space junk".
The actual number of probes has to be in a ratio of 1000 to 1 when comparing
to the existence of planets that CURRENTLY have advanced civilizations that
are transmitting in our direction. Probes and space junk can conceivably
outlive their respective civilizations by thousands of
years.
What would it take to concentrate to detect
errant signals from probes? They would have be narrowly focused. and they may
rotate as consequence of their travels when they initially did not
rotate. And in that case their signal would not be corrected.
contradicting Dr. Werthimer. If they are intended to be truly long distant and
therefore would transmit at that favored frequency? Wouldnt that make
sense?
perhaps we should change the definition of
advanced civilization to one that can send probes?
joe
.--