Digital Humanities 2002
I have been tasked with participating in a crowdsourced project on zooniverse and in that writing a reflection on what it was, what I learned and how can I use the skills I learned here in future projects.
Are we alone in this universe?
The search for life in this universe is one of humanity’s biggest questions. The discovery of life on different plants would be immense. With the help of zooniverse and UCLA SETI, I can participate and help. What was my project objective?
My part was to look at radio frequency signals in SETI data and examine those images to figure out if they are similar to commonly occurring (RFI) or not. – https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/ucla-seti-group/are-we-alone-in-the-universe/classify
It was quite simple and relaxing even though it sounded confusing.
In step one, you look at the image and see if there are any lines and see if they are horizontal, vertical, or neither. Then you see if the lines are spaced out or if are they equal, which will bring you to the final step of the project, deciding which class they belong to. After you do about 10 you understand that a few similar ones come up and seeing that makes you wonder if there is a code that needs to be decoded and see if there is more life out there and if so where. By helping organize these images one is helping the researchers and scientists figure out these questions.
Step one:
Step two:
Step three:
The goal for UCLA seti is to find evidence and signals of other civilizations and societies in our universe. With this extract the encoded information is. BY helping out just by the smallest bit you can organize images of signals which are tens of thousands of lightyears away. With this the possibilities are endless, of course, there are pros and cons but we can most definitely have huge advances in science, medicine, and all aspects of life. They have received donations from THe planet society and The NASA citizen science seed and funding program. In this project, they are searching for technosignatures, which is any measurable property or effect which can provide evidence in the past or present that the use of technology was or is there. Radio technosignatures can search the entire galaxy not just our solar system, and it is cheaper than biosignatures, which is any substance or phenomenon that provides scientific evidence of past or present life. The search volume is much much bigger as well in technosignatures than bio which for me is the deciding factor that it is a much better researching style. On the zooniverse website this is how they describe what you are doing in an in-depth way:
‘Our search for technosignatures uses the 100-meter Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in an observing mode that is sensitive to Arecibo-class transmitters located within 420 light-years of Earth and to transmitters that are 1000 times more effective located within 13,000 light-years of Earth (Margot et al., 2021). Our observations sample 800 MHz of bandwidth in the L band (1.1–1.9 GHz), a region of the radio spectrum that contains “a unique, objective standard of frequency, which must be known to every observer in the universe: the outstanding radio emission line at 1,420 Mc./s. (λ=21 cm) of neutral hydrogen” (Cocconi and Morrison, 1959). For each hour of telescope time, our search covers 8 directions in the sky that include thousands of stars, and it yields ~5 million narrowband signal detections, approximately 99.8% of which are automatically classified by our data processing pipeline as anthropogenic radio frequency interference (RFI). The remaining 10,000 detections per hour constitute promising candidate technosignatures. This citizen science platform is designed to identify the most promising signals among those.’ – https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/ucla-seti-group/are-we-alone-in-the-universe/about/research
It is clear to see that for the time being that this is the way forward on this type of research and that there are endless possibilities to what is out there waiting to be found. I think that if they split up the tasks required and made them much simpler like how they did it with the radio signals and images it is clear that they could spread the workload even more and possibly make more breakthroughs.
What did I learn?
I, first of all, learned about biosignatures and technosignatures. They are the two pieces of information that when reading intrigued me more and which I did more research on after finding out what they were. According to American astronomer Jill Tarter, one of the main methods used in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is technosignatures. While researching I also found out about the Kepler mission, which was a survey of the milky way to search for planets in the habitable zone. This uses again the search for radio technosignatures as the presence of life could be detected this way in this they found hundreds of earth-sized and smaller in or near the habitable zone. planets. Intrigued to know what biostructures are I went and did more research about these, and I was told that they are pieces of evidence that life was or is there in the past or present, they can also take more than one form, which physical, geological, and chemical. while doing this project I also the images above are called dynamic spectra, which are 2d images of lines shown at consecutive times which are representing frequencies and the pixels show the signal power. This would be the standard analysis procedure in radar astronomy. I also learned about what the zooniverse was. Before this module, I had never seen this and thought that this is a great concept. Being able to spread some workload helps and there are lots of projects there. Before this project, I did not realize that there was much study going into the study of the possibility of life in our universe. The idea that there are working societies excites me as a sociology student and the possibility of the information, ideas, and medicine we could learn is by far a mindblowing attribute.
As a student what did I learn that I could use in future projects?
I feel I have learned some invaluable information that could be used for ideas and developed some skills for my future projects, for example, the digital humanities group project, where I and a fellow student will be researching local GAA clubs and digitizing their GAA jerseys. Taking images(of jerseys) and figuring out where and how to align and organize them will be great skills to have and ones that I developed during this project. I also am excited to see what’s in the future of my sociology projects and if there was life to be found today or tomorrow. The chances of life and societies being out there are relatively high so maybe we just need to find them, this study would be fascinating to see and study. I hope any crowdsourced project that I study in sociology will be this interesting as I was intrigued by the radio technosignatures and the possibilities of finding life. I found it extremely enjoyable watching youtube videos and reading articles about this information