Cool stuff.

This is now the lead story on reddit. They (SETI and whatever other organizations are involved in this sort of thing) are apparently taking it seriously enough to devote resources to it, like turning other radio telescopes to point at that star.

I'm curious whether or not the signal can be decoded. When they detect these things, is it just like a loud "Beep!" they receive or is it data they can attempt to decipher? does that even make sense?

I haven't been able to find a description of the actual signal content.

reddit points to media making more of this than the scientists involved. If the signal were directional, specifically targeting where we live, broadcast from something as big as our biggest receivers, it would need to be over a trillion watt signal (more power than what everyone on Earth uses.)

from Seti:

The chance that this is truly a signal from extraterrestrials is not terribly promising, and the discoverers themselves apparently doubt that they’ve found ET. Nonetheless, one should check out all reasonable possibilities, given the importance of the subject.
Consequently, the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) was swung in the direction of HD 164595 beginning on the evening of August 28. According to our scientists Jon Richards and Gerry Harp, it has so far not found any signal anywhere in the very large patch of sky covered by the ATA.

Click to expand...

It also says they've looked looked 39 times and found the signal only once.

http://www.seti.org/seti-institute/a-seti-signal

It might not have been detected with the right equipment to really analyze content. It sounds like they're not exactly sure what the frequency even was.

A good way to think of it would be to envision yelling into a piano. If you yell really loudly into an upright piano, you can hear it after you stop. But it doesn't echo what you say, it sounds like someone mashed a group of keys together...but faintly. A microphone diaphragm picks up sound waves and turns it into an electric signal that can be reconstructed into the original signal really well, but the piano signal is blurred by the nature of it's mechanics. Peter Frampton's talking guitar trick would probably be an intermediate case. Different structures pick up different things with different sensitivities. If you played a single note into a piano, you should just excite the corresponding piano wire (and its harmonics), but if you play a sound in between two notes, you might excite multiple strings. If you can't hear the original note and you only see the piano's reaction, you can't exactly tell what the original note was or how loud it was. A piano makes a crappy microphone.

The Russian setup that detected this is a huge ring, not a dish, and it doesn't capture a narrow band frequency. So we're not sure what the signal looked like and we aren't seeing it again when we go back to that spot. But it's something so we're going to point better equipment at it.

"yelling into a piano" kinda sounds like a good metaphor for comments from a typical Trump supporter.

E.g: "I tried to talk to those Trump supporters, but all I got back were some piano yells."

so it turns out the signal was nothing but a reflected radio signal from Earth. probably something stupid, like a Justin Bieber song, or tweet from Donald Trump.

oh well. the search continues.

False alarm

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/article/mysterious-signal-revealed-to-be-from-earth/

This seti project hasn't been fruitful :-(

Shoot !!!*