From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Wed Jul 07 1999 - 13:38:00 MDT
> "Michael S. Lorrey" <mike@lorrey.com> wrote:
>
> Just got started with seti@home (here at work),
> How do I join the exi seti team?
> Jonathan Reeves <JonathanR@mail.iclshelpdesks.com> wrote:
> Go here
>
> http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cgi?cmd=team_show&id=393
I can't believe this. I looked and there are 35 people that
have been hoodwinked into this effort (not that RC5 seems
that much more justifiable), but at least RC5 is guaranteed
to produce a result (if it gets enough computers/time), while
SETI@HOME never will.
Perhaps these people were not at the Extro3 conference or
perhaps they never read the J-brain discussions of many
years ago, or perhaps they simply want to believe that those
benevolent little green men want to talk to us. Or perhaps they
are simply nano-alien clones spreading confusion on the issue
to keep us from looking in the right places or perhaps they
simply can't follow a logical argument when presented with one.
At any rate...
A 10^40th to 10^50th Instructions Per Second SuperIntelligence
(compared with a 10^12 to 10^14 IPS human { leaving out those
on the SETI@home lists where I believe there may be a "-" sign
in front of the "10" :-)} ) that has the capacity of building
100 billion telescopes (or radio transmitter/receiver dishes)
the diameter of the moon and has an internal communication bandwidth
so large I can't even begin to compare it to a human brain
*ISN'T GOING TO COMMUNICATE WITH US*! Paraphrasing what I said
at the Extro3 conference -- "We don't talk to nematodes and SIs
don't talk to us" (we are closer to a nematode than we are to
a SI!).
We don't begin to become interesting until the post-singularity
era arrives. Until that time, perhaps the best they could do
is guide us towards that point (as lightly as possible), making
sure that we don't get too depressed beforehand by discovering
them and plunge like lemmings into the sea when we realize
how very far down on the evolutionary tree we actually are.
That brings us to what happened to the WIRE mission, launched
in March, which was supposed to conduct a really good
infrared survey of the entire sky. NASA has attributed the
mission failure to a design "flaw":
http://origins.jpl.nasa.gov/library/pressreleases/99-74.html
It could be sloppy engineering or it could be alien SIs being
really clever at hiding themselves... You be the judge.
In the mean time, since there aren't any good space based
IR telescopes going up in the near future, the best use of your
computer time would be in processing the 2MASS survey data
[http://pegasus.phast.umass.edu:80/2mass/pub/overview.html]
trying to identify very cold objects that could be further
examined for a lack of a stellar spectral fingerprint.
The 2MASS survey has about 10 terabytes of data at this point,
so there is plenty of work to be done. Even if you didn't
come up with SIs, you would come up with brown dwarfs,
proto-planetary dust clouds, asteroids or comets that might
be on Earth-impact trajectories, etc. (in contrast to
SETI@home which does nothing but pollute the planet).
Unfortunately, they haven't written any software to let you
work on the data yet and if they did have it would have to
overcome the used-car sales job the SETI@home people have done.
I'm going to take the SETI@home people to task (and make
sure they understand how silly the project is). I may
get to do it at the Bioastronomy conference at the end
of this month, but failing that I will definitely be doing
it early this fall. If I'm lucky, I might convince them
to adopt the SETI@home distribution mechanism with some
software to process the 2MASS data and then we would
have a crack at finding those darn SuperIntelligences.
If you want to use your excess computer time for something
else, push on the people at the Foresight Institute or the
Institute for Molecular Manufacturing to come up with
a software package that would produce "random" collections
of atoms that are assigned merit values as "building block"s
or "functional unit"s (pumps, gears, etc.). Then we could
use all the processing power to "evolve" the designs and
have some interesting things to build when the nanoassemblers
arrive. Where would we be tomorrow if Zyvex announced a
working nanoassembler? We all act as if its going to arrive
someday in the far far future.
As an Extropian, probably the best thing you could do is hack
the SETI results and send them back something that decoded as
"You are not alone, you are not alone, you are not alone..."
repeating endlessly. [According to the news at slashdot.org,
someone did hack the SETI@home site the other day and replaced
it with a picture of Alf.] It had me ROTFL because thats the
only way the project will ever have anything to show.
Robert Bradbury
---------------
6th cousin, twice removed from the
S.F. Author "Raymond Douglas Bradbury"
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