Quote Originally Posted by Deborski View Post
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?