[X] My Assistant

[deglr6328]

What is going on with SETI@home? I have in the past, (like many of the other users of this board I suspect!) run the SETI@home screensaver on my computer. I ran it for about 4 years and then uninstalled it. Not because I was fed up with not having an ET directly send to me personally a big "HELLO THERE" message, but rather because I saw little in the way of actual science being done with the SETI results we volunteers were all producing and because there seemed to be no plan for any kind of endpoint of the project in the future.

I recall seeing in a 2000 edition of Scientific American a plot of the already searched parameter space by SETI@home and it looked like most of our galaxy was searched and found empty obviously, of "type I civilizations" and higher. (ah. found it) Now, its been 6 years since then and we've since viewed ~97% of the observable sky from Arecibo at least once since the start of the project (~86% at least twice). Why are there no papers published on this result? It IS a significant result even if its negative one. Were there SETI papers published that I've just not seen? The SETI and SETI@home web sites are of very little help when looking for actual peer reviewed published papers that the projects have produced.

[deglr6328]

We probably should not be so quick to dismiss the possibility of photosynthesis on planets orbiting stars which dominantly radiate in the IR.....


article and the PNAS paper.

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

We probably should not be so quick to dismiss the possibility of photosynthesis on planets orbiting stars which dominantly radiate in the IR.....
article and the PNAS paper.

Wow! this is incredible.


Photosynthesis working with the radiation of nearby red-hot hydrothermal water... No sci-fi writer imagined such a thing!


That makes photosynthesis something much likely to appear. And in a statistic view of the Drake equation*, it increases the odds for civilizations. Not so fast, photosynthesis is just one of the numerous mandatory steps toward the appearance of a civilization. It is not enough for this, especially if it is available only around some very located hydrothermal vents, like in Earth deep oceans, or like in Europa moon. To evolve fast, life requires a lot of opportunities to mutate, and lot of different ecological niches to be able to select these mutations. So a complex environment, that a place like Europa is not likely to provide. On the other hand, Europa provides a stable environment since 4.5 billion years, and the bottom of its ocean may offer varied temperatures, shapes and chemical composition, if it has hydrothermal vents (very likely) or volcanoes (likely). So, if a microbial life appeared on Europa, it had enough time to evolve into complex multicellular beings. But no more brains than with worms or bugs, for the lack of a powerful source of oxygen.

* the Drake equation tries to calculate the number of civilizations in a galaxy, by multiplying various numbers such as the probablility for a star to have planets, the probability for this planet to have water, etc. Most of these numbers are still widely uncertain today.

[ljk4-1]

Paper: astro-ph/0511583

Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 21:35:43 GMT (30kb)

Title: Hot Jupiters: Lands of Plenty

Authors: David Charbonneau

Comments: 8 pages, 2 figures, summary of conference "The Tenth Anniversary of
51 Peg b: Status and Prospects for Hot Jupiter Studies", held August 22 - 25,
2005
\\
In late August 2005, 80 researchers from more than 15 countries convened for
a 4-day conference entitled ``The Tenth Anniversary of 51 Peg b: Status and
Prospects for Hot Jupiter Studies''. The meeting was held at l'Observatoire de
Haute-Provence, the location of the 1.93-m telescope and ELODIE spectrograph
used to discover the planetary companion to 51 Peg roughly 10 years ago. I
summarize several dominant themes that emerged from the meeting, including (i)
recent improvements in the precision of radial velocity measurements of nearby,
Sun-like stars, (ii) the continued value of individual, newly-discovered
planets of novel character to expand the parameter space with which the theory
must contend, and (iii) the crucial role of space-based observatories in
efforts to characterize hot Jupiter planets. I also present the returns of an
informal poll of the conference attendees conducted on the last day of the
meeting, which may be amusing to revisit a decade hence.

\\ ( http://arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0511583 , 30kb)

[ljk4-1]

I have been wondering whatever became of The Planetary Society's Project BETA Radio SETI program, begun ten years ago, ever since the 84-foot Harvard radio dish broke and fell during a windstorm in March of 1999.

The TPS Web site has an article from 2000 describing and showing a repair job undeway:

http://seti.planetary.org/BETA/default.html

But when I went to Harvard University's Oak Ridge Observatory site, I found out that the BETA dish has since been "retired":

http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/oir/OakRidge/oak.ridge.html

I also learned from there, to my surprise, that the 61-inch telescope that had conducted their Optical SETI program since 1998 has also been retired - retired in this case meaning dismantled!

Why didn't the TPS or Harvard or someone inform us about this?

A few years back, TPS began a new Optical SETI project with much fanfare. I looked on their Web site but could find no new updates on it since 2002 (with lots of broken links here), when it was supposed to have its "first light":

http://seti.planetary.org/OsetiConstruction2.htm

The latest version of their Optical SETI page also reveals no recent news on this project:

http://planetary.org/programs/projects/set...tical_searches/

So what is happening with what is supposed to be the "largest Optical SETI project east of the Mississippi"? Is it still being built? Is it up and running? Has it too been abandonded? Has the TPS been slipping away from SETI ever since Carl Sagan's passing, as I suspect?

I and many other have supported this project financially as well as verbally, so I would hope to at least know what progress is being made - and why BETA was abandonded. Why didn't TPS at least transfer it to another radio telescope?