Thread: What is new with SETI?

What is new with SETI? The last I heard was that the SETI@Home project is now bundled with some other program to crunch numbers for a number of other endeavors. And The Planetary Society is taking over now (is that right) andthey is talk about looking for blazers instead of radio waves. So, what is going on and what have you heard?I know I must have come to one of the right places to ask these things.What to the people at The Planetary Society and other enthusiasts say? When do they predict we will get a message from ET.

Lasers have advantages over microwaves for very long distance communications, so I hope SETI is moving into this type of search, as very advanced ET may use lasers instead of microwaves. When we get a message from ET is any one's guess as it depends a lot on weather ET wants us to hear or prefers us not to get a message. We have similar doubts about ET discovering that sentient beings live on Earth, so perhaps we should take steps to reduce our emissions and disguise what we can't reduce as natural noise. Neil

However, lasers are much more directional, which means that it would be much more unlikely that we could detect a signal that was not beamed directly at us. The optimum would be a maser signal at some frequency that has less-than-average absorption in the galactic dust.

I can confirm that the Seti at Home software changed. We used to run Seti as our background window saver on two Macs. But several years ago we were told to upgrade to a different background cycle sharer which would run other things as well. I checked it, and it was more trouble than we were willing to go for them. The Seti web site still is on Google, SETI Institute, so I recommend you try that.