This is how you get Trisolarians knocking on your door!
This is what I thought also.
Maybe they didn’t find any signals, but just said, “To heck with it. We’ll just say we found 100 signals, and let them come to us!”
At the same time, no advanced civilizations will be using coherent RF communications that stand out from the noise floor, because it makes little sense to keep doing that once your civilization understands information theory.
Still, SETI was an undeniably cool thing to try, and I'm glad they did. Lots of other cooperative-computing tasks grew out of the same idea as the article mentions.
Is this not the perfect job for AI today? Just sit there and digest signals for 30 years and report back the top 1000? I'm quite sure it could even work on the algorithms as a side-quest.
This sort of effort really ought to be conducted with antennas on the far side of the Moon, IMO. But good luck finding the budget for that these days.
seti@home was definetly a cool screensaver, though.[0]
[0]: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eric-Korpela/publicatio...
According to chatgpt, our current earth-based radio telescopes would only be able to detect signals equivalent to radio leakage from earth at a distance of 1 light year.
