Phil said:

>Although I have in the past contributed to the planetary Soc's SETI search
>(just in case there WAS some low hanging fruit to be found) I believe that
>it is clear that OSETI is the way. Forget the 60s paradigm of radio telescope
>wavelengths.

I suspect our star system has been visited by machine intelligence from outside the Solar System about once every 10 million years. There should be lots of ET's junk laying about if we only knew where to look and what to look for. I suspect some of those metal "asteroids" that are under 1 km. in diameter might not really be asteroids. Of course telling the difference between an asteroid and an old starship's decelleration stage could be nontrivial. The old hardware would have beat on and shreaded by micrometeors for the last 10 million years.

Another place to look for ETI is in our own DNA. Wouldn't it be cute if someone did a careful examination on our own genetic sequence and discovered a designer's logo and serial number. It wouldn't necessarily be with human beings that our world was seeded with by ET. One could speculate that a machine intelligence came by during the Cretaceous Period, concluded that our Earth was stuck in a biological dead end and deliberately perturbed an asteroid to wipe the slate clean. The same machine intelligence then picked up some of the more robust survivors and reprogrammed their DNA to fast track evolve into intelligent tool using apes.

Truth to tell, SETI is a bit of a bore. It's 99.99% pointless science fiction and 0.01% interesting science.

Gary