Thread: Pale Blue Dot - бледная, синяя точка - по-русски перевод.

Originally Posted by Deborski

I like SETI at home. I have many friends who use it.

I used to run it, but now I intentionally do not. For what it's worth, I think it's a neat way to catch an extraterrestrial computer virus. Even if aliens know nothing about our computers, they can make some assumptions and given the timeframe and the sheer processing power that the distributed computing provides, they can make it work. It least, it's easier to make some assumptions about an unknown computer than some assumptions about an unknown form of life. What do you think of that?

Crocodile - heheh! I think, given quantum theory, that about anything is possible

Originally Posted by Deborski

Crocodile - heheh! I think, given quantum theory, that about anything is possible

Aha, translating into an everyday language - you don't believe that's possible, do you?

Let me explain my thought, and I would really appreciate the criticism. What is SETI? The guys from the 60-s believed an extraterrestrial civilization would send out an electromagnetic signal of its existence hoping another civilization would catch it, distinguish it from the noise, and send a similar signal back notifying the other civilization they are not alone. The 'distinguishing from noise' algorithms should analyze the entropy of the signal this way or the other. That means, from the outside, the whole SETI system looks like one giant computer which at the very low level has the same logical operation. For example, an entire computer of any complexity can be built by the logical units which only implement the primitive NAND operation. Once we know that the computer is NAND based, we can make further inquiries and find out more about its structure and gradually build a high-level application which does something useful to us. Of course, the NAND units would not know anything about it, they would continue analyzing their low-level input and produce the low-level output. I think, it is theoretically possible to do the same for the SETI@HOME. The system would not know it is actually processing the high-level program.

Let me explain the need for that as well. It's true we want to know we're not alone, but that is not everything we want to know. Let's say you sit in a cave with some other humans and you want to let the humans from some other cave (which existence and location is unknown) that you're here hopeful they are friendly and your cooperation would be appreciated. However, is the best way for that would be get out of the cave and shout out loud: "Heeey! Is anybody heeere?" Because, a hungry saber-toothed tiger would most likely visit you first. Therefore, you should avoid the not-so-smart shouting, but think of some civilized way to get some information first.

I think the SETI and METI are the legacy of the analog communication of the 60-s and 70-s and are not relevant today. I think, if we want to look for the other civilizations, we should get some info from them first, and only then make a decision of whether to reveal ourselves or to stay in the shade. So, if we'd had a computer program which could penetrate another civilization's computers by masking itself as the noise, detect what kind of elementary programming operations the computers use, gather information and send it back, that would be much more useful and safe.

And if we think it's useful, why the other part will not find it useful too?

I think the SETI and METI are the legacy of the analog communication of the 60-s and 70-s and are not relevant today. I think, if we want to look for the other civilizations, we should get some info from them first, and only then make a decision of whether to reveal ourselves or to stay in the shade. So, if we'd had a computer program which could penetrate another civilization's computers by masking itself as the noise, detect what kind of elementary programming operations the computers use, gather information and send it back, that would be much more useful and safe.

That makes a lot of sense, Crocodile. I would tend to agree with you. I think, however, that we have already shouted enough times to alert any saber-toothed aliens in the universe to our presence. All of those messages we sent are out there already. We cannot retract them.

Do you think maybe we have already doomed ourselves?

Originally Posted by Deborski

That makes a lot of sense, Crocodile. I would tend to agree with you. I think, however, that we have already shouted enough times to alert any saber-toothed aliens in the universe to our presence. All of those messages we sent are out there already. We cannot retract them.

Do you think maybe we have already doomed ourselves?

I think we've done a lot of not-so-smart stuff. I think we should at least start moving into the right direction, stop shouting and stop letting 'the noise' from the outer space enter freely into our computers, stop intensively process it the same way each year, putting more processing power into it every day (and being proud of it).

According to BOINC (Boinc all Project Stats) the SETI@HOME is processing 1,683.399 TeraFLOPS taking up more than 40% of all hosts. That is terrible. It is either useless (if there are no aliens) or very dangerous (if there are). BOINC has much more useful projects to participate in.