SETI: Letter from Dr. David P. Anderson

[Smoke]

Just got this eMail. You may have received one too.

EDIT: Dr. Anderson will appear tonight on the Coast2CoastAM Radio show to discuss the upcoming reinvestigation of the most promising SETI signals.
______________________________________________

Dear [Team AnandTech] Smokeball:

This is an exciting time for SETI@home. On March 18-20 2003 we travel to the Arecibo radio telescope to re-observe the most promising "candidates" produced by our search so far. There is a chance that these new observations will yield the first real evidence of extraterrestrial life. Thanks for being part of this history-making effort! According to our records, you have processed 66,479 work units, the most recent on March 14, 2003. Your contribution of computer time to SETI@home is greatly appreciated. If you have taken a break from SETI@home, now is a great time to start up again; you can download the latest software at http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/download.html


Support SETI@home - Join The Planetary Society
----------------------------------------------
Without the unwavering support of The Planetary Society, we would not be embarking on this round of re-observations. We strongly urge all SETI@home users to join The Planetary Society and help keep our project alive. If you join now, you'll receive a free poster titled "Is Anybody Out There?" featuring an evocative image of the millions of stars near the center of our galaxy. Go to: http://planetary.org/html/member/SETIoffer.html

The Planetary Society supports several different searches for extraterrestrial intelligence, as well as extra-solar planet research and many other worthwhile projects. For a look at the full range of their activities, visit http://planetary.org

Thanks also to our other major sponsors: the University of California,
Sun Microsystems, Network Appliance, Fujifilm Computer Products, and Quantum; and to individuals around the world who have generously donated to SETI@home: see http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/donor.html


Scientific News
---------------
With the help of participants like you, SETI@home has analyzed about 10,000 hours of data from the Arecibo radio observatory, producing a database of several billion events (spikes, Gaussians, pulses, and triplets). From this database, we have extracted the "candidates" that,
in our judgement, have the greatest likelihood of coming from an extraterrestrial synthetic source. The factors in this evaluation include:
- Signal power
- Goodness of fit
- Detection several different times
- Proximity to a nearby star, especially one similar to our Sun.
Our next step is to re-observe the top candidates by pointing a radio telescope at that location in the sky and checking for a similar signal. We applied for telescope time at Arecibo and were granted 24 hours, in three 8-hour chunks on March 18-20, 2003. If everything goes well, this will be enough time to re-observe about 150 candidates.

The re-observations will be done using the main receiver at Arecibo,
which has a smaller beam and greater sensitivity than the antenna we normally use. We'll record the re-observations on magnetic tape, both in our usual format of 2 bits per sample, and in a higher-resolution format with 8 bits per sample. Then we'll analyze the recorded data in three ways:

- We'll do a fast analysis using computers at Arecibo; this will guide us in choosing candidates on which to spend more time.

- We'll analyze the 2-bit data using the current SETI@home client; this will take place during the week or two after the Arecibo visit.

- We'll analyze the 8-bit data using a new client program based on BOINC (see below), yielding better sensitivity. This will take place a month or two after the Arecibo visit.

More information on the re-observation project is here: http://planetary.org/stellarcountdown/


Project News
------------
The re-observation is just one of the things keeping us busy. We have built a new data recorder capable of handling the 13-channel multibeam receiver at Parkes in Australia. This will produce data for our new "Southern SETI@home" project, which we hope to start later this year if we can raise the necessary funds. In addition, we are preparing a new distributed computing project, Astropulse, that will analyze our current SETI@home data, looking for evidence of evaporating black holes, fast pulsars, and new types of ET signals.
See http://www.planetary.org/astropulses.html

Our upcoming distributed computing projects will use the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), which we are developing with support from the National Science Foundation.
See http://boinc.berkeley.edu.
BOINC will also be used by science research projects in other areas, such as molecular biology and climate prediction. BOINC lets you choose how much computer time to devote to each project. The transition from SETI@home to BOINC will be gradual. We'll continue to record new data at Arecibo even while BOINC ramps up; for now you can help us most by continuing to run SETI@home.

Whether or not the re-observations find an ET signal, SETI@home has been a tremendous success and a lot of fun. We are very grateful for the participation and enthusiasm of our users all over the world,
and we look forward to continuing working together to investigate the mysteries of the universe.


Dr. David P. Anderson
Project Director, SETI@home
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu

Edit

At popular request I have re-encoded the files of Dr. Anderson's interview on the Coast2CoastAM Radio program.

The new files are about 4 MBs each. This will cut the download time down substantially.

Enjoy

Coast2CoastAM Interview with Dr. Anderson Part 1

Coast2CoastAM Interview with Dr. Anderson Part 2

 

[SoulAssassin]

I wonder if they're going to reinvestigate potential signals from this point until the end of the project or if this is it and everything from now on is just filler until SETI2.

 

[Smoke]

SoulAssassin,

There may be a "hint" in Dr. Anderson's message. I've highlighted the pertinent sentences. hmmmm

 

[Assimilator1]

Lots of cool & interesting news ! thanks Smokeball

Btw I don't seem to get the S@H newsletters ,any idea why?

 

[Smoke]

Because of these requirements, Arecibo's 8 bit radar recorder is more sensitive than SETI@home's 2 bit recorder. This suits SETI@home Chief Scientist Dan Werthimer just fine: "During ordinary observations," he explained, "we have so much data to record with SETI@home that we record very few bits, but then we sacrifice some sensitivity." "With follow up observations," he added "we can afford to record a lot of data, because it's only for a short time."

Both recorders will operate simultaneously during the reobservations, preserving all the incoming data at their different degrees of sensitivity. Once the observations are completed and the data delivered back to Berkeley, however, the information captured by the two recorders will be treated very differently.

The 2 bit recorder's data will be processed like any other SETI@home data tape: it will be divided into normal work units and sent out for analysis by the project's 4 million users around the world. It is, after all, only appropriate for SETI@home that any potential alien signal will be detected on one of the personal computers that make up its vast distributed computing network.

The analysis of the radar recorder's data will take considerably longer. Since the format of the recordings is different from the usual SETI@home tapes, they cannot be analyzed by the existing SETI@home client program - the one installed on millions of personal computers worldwide. A different type of distributed computing system is needed, and fortunately one is at hand.

For some months now, SETI@home Project Director David Anderson and colleagues have been working on perfecting the "Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing," more commonly known as BOINC. Inspired by the phenomenal success of SETI@home, BOINC is a consortium of various scientific distributed computing projects, all of which share the basic infrastructure for sending out calculations and collecting processed data. Now Anderson and his team plan to modify the existing SETI@home program to make it compatible with BOINC standards, and to adapt it to the analysis requirements of the data collected by the radar recorder.

All this, however, is some months in the future. In the meantime SETI@home users can look forward to processing those special work units from the Arecibo reobservations on their personal computers, using the tried and true SETI@home client program. This time they will be analyzing not a random section of the sky, but only that select set of the best and most promising candidates signals.

See entire webpage here.

 

[Assimilator1]

 

[Smoke]

Dr. Anderson will appear tonight on the Coast2CoastAM Radio show to discuss the upcoming reinvestigation of the most promising SETI signals.

 

[Evadman]

whohoo! month or 2 to the new client!

 

[theNorse]

Thanks Smoke . . . more than appreciated Sir!!!












... --- ...
norse

 

[Assimilator1]

Cool! , can someone record it?
Will there be an online audio stream of it?

 

[SoulAssassin]

Originally posted by: Smokeball
SoulAssassin,

There may be a "hint" in Dr. Anderson's message. I've highlighted the pertinent sentences. hmmmm

Hmm, I would interpret that as them testing it with the latest version of BOINC, not that it would be GA.

 

[Smoke]

I recorded the interview with Dr. Anderson on the Coast2CoastAM show last night. You can listen by downloading the following files. When you unzip them you will have mp3 files. Each file is about 18 MBs so be prepared for lengthy downloads depending on your internet connection.


Coast2CoastAM Interview with Dr. Anderson Part 1

Coast2CoastAM Interview with Dr. Anderson Part 2

 

[Assimilator1]

Took me about 12mins to download both of them
I found there's a little bit of stuttering & crackling for the 1st 20secs or so of each recording & then its quite listenable ,as good as it gets for AM radio anyway

Quite an interesting showing ,you can tell that Dr Anderson isn't used to being interviewed ,but he did ok

Can't wait for us to crunch those 150 candidate signals ,I wonder how many WUs that would cover?
Will they tell us the exact day they are going to be released? ,maybe we could nab the lot of them into our own SETIQ's? hehehehe

Thanks Smokeball

 

[Spacehead]

How were the interviews? Was it worth listening to, anything new there?
18 megs each :Q, that would be about a 2 hour download each for me.

 

[Ken g6]

Hey, Smoke, your server won't let me continue a download with WGet (-c). So this could really take awhile!:Q

 

[Smoke]

At popular request I have re-encoded the files of Dr. Anderson's interview on the Coast2CoastAM Radio program.

The new files are about 4 MBs each. This will cut the download time down substantially.

Enjoy

Coast2CoastAM Interview with Dr. Anderson Part 1

Coast2CoastAM Interview with Dr. Anderson Part 2

 

[Spacehead]

Originally posted by: Smokeball
At popular request I have re-encoded the files of Dr. Anderson's interview on the Coast2CoastAM Radio program.

The new files are about 4 MBs each. This will cut the download time down substantially.

Enjoy

 

[theNorse]

Smoke - you Sir, deserve an awful lot of credit 4 ALL that you do . . .

" A Hand for Smoke . . . " really

[keep up the great work Sir!!!]

Sincerely.







norse