[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.

[ElkGroveDan]

It's an interesting topic, but it doesn't belong here.

[ElkGroveDan]

Do you guys realize the search terms that have been added in just the first 8 posts here?

little green men
UFO's
aliens
galactic civilizations
star wars
Vulcans
missing planets
attack with spacefaring technology
Independence Day
unsuspecting worlds
colonize the whole galaxy
Cosmic Zoos
Galactic Wildlife Parks
galactic scale civilisations
Earth-like civilizations

[ljk4-1]

Do you guys realize the search terms that have been added in just the first 8 posts here?

little green men
UFO's
aliens
galactic civilizations
star wars
Vulcans
missing planets
attack with spacefaring technology
Independence Day
unsuspecting worlds
colonize the whole galaxy
Cosmic Zoos
Galactic Wildlife Parks
galactic scale civilisations
Earth-like civilizations

With that thinking, we better remove the word Mars from this forum, because we all know that will lead to the Mars Face!

On another SETI issue, are elements of art as universal as math?

http://www.jonlomberg.com/articles-Capri_paper.html

[ElkGroveDan]

With that thinking, we better remove the word Mars from this forum, because we all know that will lead to the Mars Face! 
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The way google and other search engines work when you enter multiple search terms is that they look for frequency of terms on a page, as well as proximity of the terms to each other.

So a search for "Mars Pathfinder" or "Mars Opportunity" will likely turn up this site.

Prior to this thread, a search on "Mars alien civilization attacks by UFO's" would not have resulted in a hit here, it would have taken the kook to OTHER places.

[David]

The way google and other search engines work when you enter multiple search terms is that they look for frequency of terms on a page, as well as proximity of the terms to each other.

If you wished to avoid this, grouping all the suspect phrases together in a single post, as you did, was certainly not the best way to do so.

However, I tried searching for your questionable long phrase on Google, just to see whether unmannedspaceflight would turn up; if it does, it is buried very deeply. I tried using several terms from your list in combination, to narrow the list, and turned up nothing. So at the moment, there is nothing immediate to fear.

And on reconsidering your list, you seem to want to ban any word with a "science fiction" connotation. However, I have noticed that on this forum, simply due to the subject matter and the personalities involved, every tenth or twentieth message has some sort of science fiction allusion; I've seen discussions of science fiction novels, and of course repeated jokes about "Marvin the Martian", possible fossils and so on. I don't think you can practically hope to wipe those sorts of allusions out.

Moreover, banning such phrases as "unsuspecting worlds" or "missing planets" seems like overkill, as there are legitimate uses for such phrases even quite outside any discussion of ETIs, and they are hardly likely to be high upon any anomalist's list of search terms. Perhaps what bothers you is not so much the phrases, or the possibility of them being detected by a web-searching anomalist, as their context? --that is, the sense that a scientific forum such as this is degraded by the discussion of anything so "science fictional" as SETI?