Re:With Help From Jodie Foster, SETI Resumes Search for Alie...
by shin_lao on Wednesday August 17, 2011 @04:07AM
(#2894530)
I have a question: is SETI actually useful?
There's a couple of agencies on Earth that spend their time capturing human communications. It's a very difficult task and they need more than $ 200,000 to operate.
Now I understand we just want to detect with a good degree of certitude that a transmission is intelligent but not human. We don't care about descrambling it.
Yet, I think it's an almost impossible task because those communications will most likely be compressed and ciphered and therefore look like noise.
There's a couple of agencies on Earth that spend their time capturing human communications. It's a very difficult task and they need more than $ 200,000 to operate.
Now I understand we just want to detect with a good degree of certitude that a transmission is intelligent but not human. We don't care about descrambling it.
Yet, I think it's an almost impossible task because those communications will most likely be compressed and ciphered and therefore look like noise.