From: Dave Sill (dave@sill.org)
Date: Fri Jul 09 1999 - 21:59:30 MDT
"Robert J. Bradbury" <bradbury@aeiveos.com> wrote:
>
> Question: Does anyone know if there is an encryption
> methodology that will work if QC cracks the factoring problem?
Of course: private key encryption with or without quantum key exchange.
> So taking Ockham's Razor, which of the following would you choose:
Occam's Razor is great for playing the odds, but it doesn't prove anything.
> So, for the SETI@home project to work, as has been suggested, by
> "evesdropping" on similar level civilizations, they would have to
> be within ~100 light years of us.
Or, as has already been pointed out, they could have been farther away but
further advanced: e.g., 200 light years away, 200 years ahead of us.
> If they are beyond that their
> signals would have already passed us by. If you plug the number
> of Earth-like planet supporting stars in 100 cubic light years
> into the Drake equation
Er, shouldn't that be "the number of Earth-like planet supporting stars in a
sphere of 100 light years radius"? More like 31000 cubic light years. and
that's not even taking into account the previous point regarding the 100 ly
number.
> So, when I go through all this stuff carefully, I reach the
> conclusion that SETI@home will not work and people have just
> been hoodwinked.
Nobody here thinks that SETI will *probably* detect an ETI. It seems silly
not to try, though.
> The question is whether you have "thinking" time to spend
> on it or just "computer" time. If you have just computer
> time there isn't any game other than SETI@home.
Sure there is: RC5 and GIMPS are two, there are many others.
> But to
> my mind you should put the SETI@home computers in suspend mode
> and donate the value of the electricity saved to an organization
> that can pay someone to write a competing application to do
> an analysis of the 2MASS data.
Which organization is accepting donations for that? If there isn't one, why
don't you form one? Do something more constructive than telling people
running SETI@home that they're dupes.
> First you have to get the SETI people to see the possibility,
> and since they have been at this for nearly 35 years in
> the face of virtually no results, it is going to take some
> *strong* arguments to shake their "faith".
No you don't. You can ignore the SETI people completely.
> ... What I'm dissing on is the fact that the SETI people
> gloss over some of the details (like the transmitter power
> requirements) that make people think the probability for
> aliens that we can communicate with is >> 1 instead of << 1.
> You never hear about these things unless you delve into
> the literature in some detail.
Even Joe Sixpack knows that SETI isn't guaranteed to find anything. That's
why they call it a "search".
-Dave
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