The frontiers of research have to do with understanding how the universe works. The MRI that detected your medical problem came from a machine built to tell what atoms are in interstellar space. That is a practical application. Not discovery and exploration.

To maintain that we shouldn't be doing ANYTHING (such as SETI) because in someone's FAR less than humble opinion is not productive... well, it is among the classic examples of sheer intellectual dullness which I can conceive of.

Anything which adds to human knowledge is worthy (and this includes the null experiments) and it is sheer arrogance to presume to judge what is and is not "worthy".

One of the great geniuses humanity has produced said about himself and his discoveries that he was "like a small child playing and discovering a pretty pebble or shell while the vast ocean of undiscovered truth lay in front of him". That was Sir Isaac Newton.

If you can't duplicate or exceed his genius, at least aspire to his humility. Please.

And don't criticize those who at least try. No one has that 'right'.

Very well said, Doc, you hit the nail square on the head, there. Many of the products we use today are a direct result of 'so-called' waste of time and money research/exploration into space.

I just hope that the end of the Shuttle Program doesn't herald the end of space exploration because the benefits are too great to lose.  The same goes for SETI, we need to keep monitoring space for other intelligent life... who knows, it may turn out to be our saviour at the end of the day.

Show me were I said that.

If you read my posts, I didn't say radio will go away. I said detectibility goes away.

I explained a variety of technical reasons why, such as carrier waves, the analog vs digital tv, directional vs omnidirectional transmission, modern compression algorithms, etc.

Humanity's transmissions into deep space has declined and what is going out is far less discernible as being artificial. Use went up, but technology improved.

Being against SETI is not the same as being against galactic exploration. There are projects that try to map the galaxy and beyond... those are admirable.

Which is why you should steal someone elses money and give it to SETI via taxation to not be a blithering dullard... yes?

What did SETI add to human knowledge? All your claims are from space exploration which is admirable... not from scanning the sky for analog TV signals.

Also there is a HUGE fucking difference between "you should not be allowed to do this" and "this should not be funded by taxpayer, and as for donations, I wouldn't donate to it myself when there are better uses for the money"

What a steaming load.

1. He doesn't know as much about genetics as he thinks he does.

2. I would stop and talk to a worm if I observed it behaving like a sentient being.

Humans did not arbitrarily define themselves as smarter then other animals on this planet. We are desperately searching for the tiniest glimmer of intellect, we have tried decoding their "languages" to see if perhaps their minds are merely alien and they communicate with each other, we are looking and so far we are not find any that are quite there. Although some come very close.

PS. Sorry for double post but forum quote function exploded on me again (it's very buggy) and I had to split the post in half to fix it.

Since space is all about the TARDIS ..... declining radio emissions is meaningless as whatever level they WERE at is still dispersing.

...AM Radio stations can be on the decline [here] but radio 'noise' is still emitted [here].

And SETI is NOT about 'here' ....it is about THERE.

Yes, it could be argued it's almost as valid to just stick your nose into the air and 'hope' to SMELL alien life .... but in reality the MOST FAR-REACHING 'sense' we have yet developed is the RADIO 'telescope' ...so it makes more SENSE [no pun] to 'listen'.

Meanwhile, intelligent life HERE is debatable..... as emotions unravel and spelling goes tits-up.....;p

I believe there are other intelligences out there. Considering how big our galaxy is and the number of exo-planets already found. Incidentally...if the number of 'possibles' are all confirmed that number goes well past the two thousand mark. SETI could find a new home were it tied to what's already ongoing. It could aid the Keppler telescope as it searches for other earths. It could also be of use when the James Webb Telescope is launched in 2018. Doing it that way allows SETI to stick around a bit longer. Who knows....

Crap!

I forgot the Tardis! 

Beer and pizza to whoever noticed that.

Paaaaaaaaaaarty!!

Actually, it matters because SETI is looking for stars that are emitting a total amount of radio waves that is statistically significantly higher then they should. If you find one you either discovered an alien civilization or a previously unknown astrophysics phenomenon.

Noise is undetectable. Its coherent repeating signals which are obviously artificial in nature which we are looking for.
The problem is that highly compressed signals lose their "obviously artificial" status and instead become indistinguishable from white noise. 

Irrelevant. Yes, SETI is looking for extra terrestrial signals not signals made by humans... but what they are looking FOR is based on the signals humanity produced for a period that lasted under 100 years.

Smell alien lifes? Is this your idea of a joke?

No....it's my idea of demonstrating just how fatuous the argument is that Radio transmission/emission detection is a waste of time.

Remember....the first to lose composure loses totally.

Ridiculous.

Noise is the very real bane of radio communication.  It is the reason communications have sought to move beyond 'AM' frequencies.  It's TOO EASILY 'detected'.

I still maintain SETI is NOT looking for an alien's equivalent of the BBC .... they are looking for detectable radio EMISSIONS which CANNOT be explained as 'natural' phenomenon.....in other words - artifice.  

THAT 'may' include Yoda calling Luke in his fighter.....or it may not.....;p

Or ET phoning home.

These two statements are contradictory because they reference two different techniques.

Noise is completely detectable.  It just isn't DECIPHERABLE, which is not the same as being undetectable.  A technique that simply looked for an excess of radio emission (for example, by comparing the amount of radio emission to what would be expected from a Planck distribution) wouldn't care if they are looking at a highly compressed signal that "looks" like white noise or if that signal was obviously artificial.  It's still going to pick it up.

Now if you are looking for obviously artificial signals, then the ability to tell the difference between signal and noise is important.  But if you want to argue that alien radio emission will gradually become less decipherable, you are basically assuming that alien technology will follow the same trends as human technology.  Which is quite an assumption.  You are also assuming that aliens won't be trying to communicate with us, like when we sent out signals to various stars with the Aricebo telescope back in the day.

I don't think that its unreasonable to spend what amounts to a very small amount of money on the chance that one of your assumptions is wrong.

SETI employs multiple techniques. More then just these two.

If they invented radio, they will invent file compression and directed transmissions as means to increase the efficiency of communication and make better use of a limited resource (frequency)

Nope, I never said it will be less decipherable (it will be, but as long as we know its really a signal we could apple all the worlds computers to it and crack it). The first part is what I am saying. SETI is looking for obviously artificial signals and once signals get sufficiently efficient then it is no longer obviously artificial. Due to a variety of technical reasons.

And I am not so much "arguing" it as quoting experts.

Yes, which was my point.

You discount the ability to detect radio emission because certain types of communication are difficult to differentiate from noise.  But that argument isn't compelling if SETI is also using techniques which are relatively agnostic when it comes to differentiating between signal and noise.

Now, I'm not saying that the points that you bring up are irrelevant.  But you can't completely discount the ability to detect aliens based on those arguments.  You can simply point out that specific SETI techniques have strengths and weaknesses.

There are some contradictions here.

SETI uses a variety of techniques (as you say).  Some of those techniques look for obviously artificial signals.  Some of them don't care whether the signal looks artificial.  The methods have different strengths and weaknesses, so you can't completely dismiss them all like you do.  For example, the argument that its a waste of money because its difficult to tell signal from noise doesn't completely work because SETI uses other techniques which don't care about that (as you yourself point out when arguing another point).

I agree that they will almost certainly invent compression.  But will they use it?  By stating with certainty that they will assumes a huge number of things.  It's not hard to come up with a number of scenarios in which such technology wouldn't be heavily used - just because humans use that technology doesn't mean that aliens would.

No, because BOTH become ineffective. SETI uses multiple algorithms and each one of them is ineffective in detecting modern human emissions

The algorithm looking for obviously artificial signals is ineffective because improvements in efficiency based on elimination of carrier waves and higher compression, making the data indistinguishable from white noise.

The algorithm looking at quantity of noise is ineffective because quantity of noise decreases as efficiency of directed communication increases.

There is no contradiction here.

That specific technique (look for unnaturally high quantity of white noise) is ineffective because white-noise quantity decreases as efficiency of communication improves.

I am not dismissing them, I am explaining exactly why they are flawed. You need to actually poke a hole in my argument.

Not all aliens are the same... You could have in an infinite universe a tiny percentage of civilizations will never make use of such techniques. (although you would need some extraordinary measures and situations to enforce such)

But I would say that its highly implausible and as such the vast majority of sentient life out there will make use of such technologies.

So, so many assumptions about almost everything.

So far the "assumptions" you keep on claiming I made have all been cases where you assumed I made assumptions based on which facts I chose to present.

And one by one (when you named them) I have refuted that. Why don't you point out some of my "assumptions" and why they are wrong? Because you can't thats why.

Assuming that alien technology itself, as well as the use of that technology, follows the same trend that human technology and usage did.

Assuming that alien technology itself, as well as the use of that technology, follows the same trend that human technology and usage did.

Also, so?  The amount of signal will likely increase even as the amount of noise decreases.  What really matters in this case is signal+noise.

I've shown that you are completely reliant on the assumption that what is obvious to humans is also obvious to aliens.

This is clearly not the case.  Just because such and such a technique is an obvious thing for humans to do to make use of limited resources does not imply that the same thing is obvious for completely alien intelligence.  There are any number of reasons why the natural progression of technology would be different between humans and some kind of aliens.

You are also completely discounting the possibility that a single alien civilization would try and contact us.  Like we tried to send signals to aliens in the past.

Ultimately, all I'm arguing is that there is a reasonable probability that SETI could detect aliens.  I don't think it's likely that they will to be honest.  But even if there is a 1% chance of detection in the next 50 years, I still think its a good use of money given the price tag.  It's basically a risk/reward analysis, where the reward is very high.

Oh, cool.....you've met some then?

Makes the whole 'need' for SETI utterly redundant....;p

You seem to be misunderstanding somethings.

Directional transmission (and other advances in radio transmission) does not convert signal to noise of vice versa. It decreases the amount of radio waves going into deep space; period.

Furthermore, there is no noise generated by man made radio waves. There is obviously artificial signal (analog TV) and "indistinguishable from noise" signal (current tech). While it is indistinguishable from noise, it is not actually noise, it is a compressed datastream.

Noise comes exclusively from solar bodies. Like the sun, black holes, pulsars, etc.

I was referring to compressed signal that was difficult to distinguish from white noise that you were talking about earlier.

If you want to bring up directional vs. isotropic, you still don't have an out.  While directional emission is certainly less likely to be pointed at Earth, it also doesn't drop off as an inverse square.  Basically, there is less signal initially, but its easier to detect.  I think that SETI is actually kind of counting on directional stuff since the aliens would have to have a massive radio luminosity to be detectable if that radiation was isotropic.

Uh, what?

Of course there is noise associated with man made radio sources.  Anything man made with a temperature above absolute zero emits radio via blackbody radiation.  Any magnetic field with charged particles will emit via synchrotron/cyclotron emission.  Hell, a spark plug going off in a car fires off enough noise to be detectable by radio telescopes.  And they definitely cool parts of radio telescopes to reduce thermal noise from the instrument itself in many cases.

And even if you wanted to call astronomical sources noise (which isn't necessarily usual, but whatever), it's certainly not all caused by solar bodies like you say.  Sure the Sun and pulsars produce plenty of radio emission (black holes are pretty negligible nowadays), but so do non solar sources.  For example, the CMB is a pretty big source of background radiation (you can pick it up with a TV antenna, although most of the static comes from other processes), and it was produced well before any solar bodies existed anywhere in the universe.

In fact, if anything, I'd say that most noise throughout the universe comes from non solar sources.  The CMB accounts for something like 99% of all radiation ever emitted, and its definitely not solar.  Here on Earth its probably a bit different since the Sun dominates everything.

Finally, you don't even have to go astronomical to find other sources of noise.  For example, lighting produces some nice noise in the radio.

In the flesh an F1 is a little noisy....where I stand it's around 120db .... enough to make a 3 ton block of concrete vibrate from sound pressure . [note the headphones on my avatar].  Emission-wise they currently are limited to 18,000 rpm - 4 stroke - 8 cylinder.

That means a plug fires 18000 / 4 x 8 = 36000 times per minute = 36000 / 60 = 600 hz.

Interestingly a simple Google search of the frequency popped up WWV ....the US's oldest continuously transmitting Radio Station....emitting a time code pulse.....been transmitting since 1920.

There's one incontrovertible truth.....Man is more likely to find 'something' out there WITH Seti than without.   Losing it is simply a LOSS to all.

Correct. 

Except that:

1. It is searching wrong so it will not find anything.

2. Opportunity cost, directing those resources elsewhere, such as for space colonization and exploration, would increase our chances of finding alien life moreso then running SETI.

If a radio telescope on another solar system is pointed at our sun, it will not detect a single spark plug being turned on or remaining off over the background radiation.

Also you were explicitly calling radio transmissions noise not referring to noise emitted by technology that is not intentionally transmitting radio signals.

Which is wrong and I already explained why.

1. I brought it up in my first post.

2. I don't need an "out"... I am trying to teach and learn not to "win".

Directed transmissions aren't going into deep space. They are aimed at their target. Also there isn't more of it since it allows for a reduction in initial signal power (power efficiency, limit interference with other signals)

Ok, we are grinding water here and repeating arguments. This is going nowhere, you have your belief and its strong. Moving along, good bye, have a good day and a good life.