On 08/20/2017 09:46 AM, Cursitor Doom wrote:
On Sun, 20 Aug 2017 08:01:18 -0400, bitrex wrote:

I think it's possible to do much better than 1.5 light years, if you can
make some assumptions about what area of the spectrum you're looking in,
and what kind of patterns you're looking for. It's not like there aren't
ways to recover periodic signals/signals with structure that have been
corrupted by noise.

So even if we could do 3 light years, there's still nothing much within
that radius that we could expect to communicate with. Why did all that
effort go into SETI, then? Surely all the nerds that ventured into that,
or granted the SETI nerds spare time on their idling computers to analyse
the data obtained from the world's radio telescopes must have known they
were wasting their time!

I think the idea wasn't to scan for ET's version of "I Love Lucy", it
is/was to look for much higher power signals, from more advanced
civilizations, broadcast with the express intent of alerting systems
like SETI.

i.e. not trying to overhear ET's conversations, but listening for
trumpet blasts.