Breakthrough Listen at UC Berkeley
seti.berkeley.edu
seti.berkeley.edu
This is an announcement for a new partnership with an organization called "Breakthrough Listen". There have been no new discoveries. There is no breakthrough. There is nothing new to see or hear here.
Title seems deliberately deceptive to make people think SETI has had a breakthrough listening event. Fuck whoever made this title with a bent, rusty fork.
There are so many technical challenges to face with this and one of the major ones is with the software that scans the absolutely huge amounts of data. The data is available publicly so with a bit of study, the average engineer with understanding of radio waves and what not could get up to speed enough to potentially do some good.
Whether or not radio waves are even the best route to go is up for debate. There's a lot of interference and the longer they travel the weaker they are...There's some interesting techniques being used but like I said, the more I learn about how we're approaching this, the less faith I have in the project, which actually is a good thing. It means we're not doing "all that we can do" and when their 10 years is up and they haven't discovered anything, we don't have to lose hope that we aren't alone.