Slashdot Mirror
SETI Results By Scientific American
Paul Cobbaut writes "This http://www.sciam.com/2000/070 0issue/0700crawford.html is a link to an article on SA about Seti results so far. It discusses about why we found no ET yet, and provides more links." Very lucid and informative. Compare and contrast with a previous story.
Interesting, but flawed in a major way.... the premise that 'if person XXX didn't invent/discover it no-one else would have'.
Perhaps you didn't know it, but Newton had competitors in most of his major endeavors. Liebniz is credited with having invented the calculus if not BEFORE Newton, then at the same time. It has been discovered that the Royal Society's verdict on the discovery of the calculus (which stated Newton had invented it) was actually written by Newton himself!
As John Maynard Keynes said "Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the Magicians...". Did you know he spent the last few decades of his life immersed in the occult and in the futile attempt to transmutate lead into gold? That he believed the gravitational pull among the planets would cause the solar system to break up?
He was an intelligent man, yes. But to elevate him to the status of 'one of the great men of history' is flawed, in my opinion.
The same holds true for every other person you named. They were HUMAN, not gods. They had flaws and foibles, made errors, and in MOST cases had competitors who were neck and neck with them in their discoveries.
Try not to be blinded to reality by your zealous pursuit of your belief system, ok?
Because we know they are exploding stars. We know that as a fact because we can see several hundred supernovas a year using optical astronomy and infrared spectroscopy. The Supernova Cosomology Project at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory finds and tracks Type I supernovas (these are a specific type of supernova that occur when a certain type of star explodes and releases a known amount of energy). When you see a star in a specific position on one pass and then you see an emerging supernova in your next past and then a full-blown supernova in the third pass that is pretty good evidence that a supernova is a star, isn't it.
The scientific community is so confident that supernovas are in fact exploding stars (and completely natural) that the red shift exhibited by them can be used to measure the expansion of the universe. In fact, by measuring these supernovas, the Supernova Cosmology Project has provided strong evidence that the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing.
While it is certainly true that there is a lot we don't understand about physics and the universe, we actually do understand at a fairly deep level more than most people realize. For example, how could we have modern computers if we didn't understand solids at a truly profound level (Quantum theory of solids, the basis of solid-state physics)?
From the article:
That there might be something wrong with this argument was famously articulated by nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950. If extraterrestrials are commonplace, he asked, where are they? Should their presence not be obvious? This question has become known as the Fermi Paradox.
This type of reasoning could be used to justify anything. Pre-breaking the sound barrier: "If man can break the sound barrier, why hasn't he yet?"
Just because something hasn't been detected yet or done yet isn't proof that it isn't there (or can't be done).
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Carl Sagan and a bunch of others had the idea before you and it's been done: Pioneer 10
Where can we get some?
Speaking for the Weak Assocation for Astronomical Phenomenas' Rights to Stomp Over Tiny Life Forms, I feel the need to clarify:
Would a sea of brain matter, filling a whole planet, count as "life", even if it were totally introverted, never communicating its thoughts to us in any way?
Would an astronomical phenomena, like chain reactions of exploding stars and matter condensing into new star systems, count as life, if it were self-sustaining, self-replicating and adjusting to its surroundings?
What scale, what view of life, and what structure must a thing be to be considered "life" or "intelligent"? Could we please accept some of our neighbors in this ecosphere as such?
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
Actually, it's even worse than that. The aliens in Star Trek play directly upon cultural stereotypes or archtypes.
Vulcans = the scientific rationalist, taken to an absurd extreme. They're what a 19th century Romantic might think of the scientist.
Klingons = the warrior ethic, with elements borrowed from primitive cultures all over earth, (though I see a lot feudal Japan and "Hollywood" Apache in them. And don't forget the Cold War projection of the Russians on the old show.)
Ferangi = the greedy merchant, and it seems to derive from a negative Jewish stereotype (I swear every Ferangi reminds me of the character from _The Merchant of Venice_)
Borg = the collective mentality in general taken to an absurd extreme (which I bet causes a lot cognative dissonance in some people, because Star Trek is so very liberal. Its not unlike Bradbury with _Farheneight 451_ or Vonnegut with "Harrison Bergman", or Orwell with _1984_).
Romulans/Cardassians = the machievalian schemer. The Romulans seemed to represent the Chinese to Russian Klingons on the old show, playing both enemies against each other. The new stuff expands this, with both Romulans and Cardassians engaed in plots, assassinations, factionalisation, infighting, etc. It borrows a lot from European history.
Bayjorans (sp?) = Religious fanaticism under an oppressive regieme. Take your pick.
Or perhaps, there a civilizations all around us still communicating with actual smoke signals.
If he put life on half the planets out there it would be a whole lot easier for evolutionists to say, "There is life all over. All these other races evolved just as we did."
Since speciation is nothing more than a cool science fiction theory we will never find life off of earth.
Unless of course, they planted seeds on mars(or moon) as part of the conspiracy to convince us that life exists outside of our planet.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
It is now well accepted that our particular encoding of base pairs in the nucleic acid chains is arbitrary. Whether the use of nucleic acids is necessary at all for reproductive organisms isn't known. Certainly some non-NA based molecules have been constructed which could be said to reproduce.
So don't be too DNA-centric.
FatPhil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
"Imagine for a second that the creature that sprouted first intelligence was a dolphin like creature or a cape buffalo type animal. In that case the course of intelligent life on this planet might have been very different."
First intelligence means naught. Whales beat us to the soup on that one. They are intelligent beasts, but unlike us, they can't make tools to help change their environment.
We have the capability for thought, and tool making. It's not just the ability to fomulate ideas, but also to fabricate those ideas.
Also, who's to say that another species may spring forth which makes us look like primatives compared to them...
Let's not be so blind as to think we know what the universe is like out there, or what the future here on earth holds for us in the next few 200 million years.
The author of this article (or is it an editorial?) trivializes the challenge of colonizing other planets. He makes the assumption that a transplanted civilization would be able begin its own extraplanetary explorations after only 400 years on its new new host planet.
To me this is naive. The earth is hospitable to human life only because it has harbored other types of life for billions of years. These primitive life forms oxygenated the atmosphere (it was originally carbon dioxide) and created the biomass necessary for agriculture. It took a long time for these processes to occur.
This biomass and oxygen can be thought of as a natural infrastructure that allowed humans to colonize the planet. This colonization allowed humans to gather and exploit mineral resources, and build a technical infrastructure. Competition for these resources caused the development of a political infrastructure to manage this competition. And finally the exploitation of these resources caused the development of an economic infrastructure.
For a civilization to begin space exploration, all these infrastructures would have to be in place. But the limiting path would appear to be the development of the natural infrastructure (biomass and oxygen). It does not seem reasonable to suggest that this could happen in 400 years.
Colonizing a new continent on earth only required a man, a woman, a boat, a vision, and some luck. Colonizing a new planet is significantly more difficult. The author seems to miss that point.
"SETI program is indicative of the fact that we really are alone in the cosmos"
We have only been broadcasting radio signals for about 100 years. There are not that many stars in a radius of 100 light years, so even if there is life somewhere in this universe, it is unlikely it sits in that 100 lightyear radius. That means, alien life can't have noticed us yet. Which means that they probably did not sent a signal back either.
Not that I don't think SETI is a waste of research money. Only a decadent civilization like America can afford to pump so much money into listening to background noise.
Oh, and about 'god', I think the mere fact that we figured out that life rose on earth so quickly after its formation proves that we can do without a god like creature pretty well. After all, there's nothing mysterious about how we figured that out, definitaly no lord's hand at work here. And suppose I'm wrong than it at least proves that the 'god' is not even close to the romantic character in the bible and comparable literature.
"... of the Bible are true in asserting that God made us in his image."
If he looks like me, he must be an ugly bastard.
Jilles
Did you have a look at the actual article? There is a nice diagram... More details in the article.
Looked at it, but I had to change the settings on my display to see the numbers on the left side of the graph, so I missed that graph on my first reading. It just starts at 10^10 Watts. That's 10 billion watts, effective radiated power. I can't see that any civilization short of the level of building Dyson Spheres would have that much energy to just throw around.
I disagree with the implication that a higher level civilization would be transmitting that much power. We've gotten much more efficient with our bandwidth and power utilization, I have no doubt that a more advanced civilization would too. They probably have to deal with finite resources, just as we do.
But I think that this establishes that whoever is out there, they have to be trying to talk to us. We won't hear their analogue to TV or radio.
Adaptation is the key. Dinosaurs had their chance, 140 million years and the first major disaster comes along and wipes them out. It doesn't matter if it was an asteroid or time traveling big game hunters. Unless you develop intelligence, your ability to adapt is limited to your genes. Something WILL happen, it's just a matter of time.
Rare event three: birth and procreation of mutated ape of sufficient intelligence to create civilization. This ape was an omnivore: hunter killer explorer and able to exist on plants as well - a land animal; a social animal but not a herd dweller.
It's possible that being an omnivore is required to develop intelligence. We really don't know. It's also possible that we had cousins who developed intelligence along the same lines as we did. Simply because they're gone now doesn't mean we're the only ones EVER to develop intelligence.
The existence of a very few brilliant individuals; remove 20 or so people from history and we never develop technology. Remove the printing press and everything changes, remove Isaac Newton and everything changes dramatically. Who knows what things we have failed to learn for want of a person to show us the way?
Yeah, remove the radio, who would of invented it? Well, I guess Tesla would of. Ok, how about the automobile? Oh, yeah, at the time there was several people working on it? I don't believe that 99.9% of the human population wanders around without a thought in their head, and that single geniuses come along and bless us with their ideas. Ever notice when something new comes out of the labs, two other labs are also working on the same thing, and many many people have thought about that product? OCCASIONALLY someone jumps ahead and comes up with something good, but given time the 'average' thinker would have come up with it.
One of the aspects of intelligence is coming up with the correct answer more quickly. The inventions and scientific achievements you mention are created by geniuses simply because they were able to think of, and develop the idea first.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
My question is what do eternal souls do? Eternity is really quite a long time. For entities that aren't really permitted to do anything, that could get a tad boring.
Maybe most civilizations don't last long after discovering radio communication. It seems like our candle has almost been snuffed several times in the last century.
Re: Imagine for a second that the creature that sprouted first intelligence was a dolphin like creature or a cape buffalo type animal. In that case the course of intelligent life on this planet might have been very different. How do we know that it wasn't? Maybe we were second (or third if you count mice... ). So long & thanks for all the fish!
First of all, life does not require 2 "matching pieces of genetic material". Clearly, RNA/DNA are highly evolved. The origin of life requires auto-catalytic systems (a chemical reaction whose products catalyze the reaction). These reactions then "evolve" so that they become more efficient and accurate, and ultimately become as complicated as a cell. Secondly, it is not likely that the arrangement of amino acids into a chain ("polymerization") just happened in primordial soup. People have specualted that water droplets in clouds, surfaces of charged minerals (iron pyrites or fools gold is currently favored) form areas more conducive to polymerization. Also, lipids (fatty acids which are the constituents of cell walls) spontaneouly for membranes in water, thus producing concentrated areas where certain chemical reactions could be more likely. The origin of life is a highly complicated topic, but biochemists have learned a surprising amount. For a good intro, see "The major transitions in evolution" by Maynard-Smith and Szathmary. As the Sci Am article pointed out, it seems that the origin of cellular life may actually be very easy, based on the fact that it seems to have happenened so quickly on earth. However, for 3.5 of the estimated 4 billion years that life has been present on earth, life was unicellular. The difficulty is the origin of multicellular and intelligent life. ' Vish
The sciam article leaves out a fifth possibility as to why no extraterrestrial civiliations seems to be broadcasting strong radio signals: There is something nasty is out there that hunts and destroys emerging civilizations.
Consider the possibility that one rather paranoid civilization wants to make the galaxy "safe" for later colonization. So they release a bunch of self-replicating planet killer probes. The probes hunt for radio signals from potentially competing civilizations. When they find one, they kill it before it has a chance to develop interstellar spaceflight.
This is basically the plot of Greg Bear's novels The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars. We could be like a babe mewling in the forest, calling down the wolves upon us.
I believe we can all agree that the first step of space travel is 'hard'. Getting off of your home planet and into orbit, much less escape velocity is difficult. It involves the control of *large* amounts of energy. In order to be truly spacefaring, you need to do this not a few times, but regularly. One can infer from this that very-high-energy technology is widely available in a spacefaring civilization.
Here on Earth, we don't really qualify as a spacefaring civilization, yet. We're close, but not *quite* there. At the same time, we're awfully lucky that we survived the Cuban Missle Crisis, and we just about punched out with WWIII when KAL-007 was shot down. (There was a lot of behind-the-scenes happening, then.)
I assert that a species that doesn't have a pretty good lid on its impulses, and that includes the human race, at the moment, will likely destroy itself once the wide deployment of the very-high-energy technology need to be spacefaring happens. We've survived nuclear power thus far by luck and by restricting deployment.
Most of our species is not fit to live in a nuclear era. We don't yet have the energy technology to be truly spacefaring, so this situation may well get worse before it gets better.
We need to grow up, more than a little.
Isn't this part of what the Star Trek civilization is about? So many people complain about ST-TNG talking the enemy to death, but if the first impulse was to always come out with blazing guns, how long would the Federation really last. I would instead argue that the Klingons never would have become truly spacefaring.
This presupposes human psychology. But I'd argue that the same is true of any life that arose in the Darwinian model.
By this reasoning, any species that has become truly spacefaring understands the problems of becoming a 'mature species', and is almost by definition non-intervening.
By the same token, we're having population problems even now. I'd also assert that we're going to have to have solved our uncontrolled breeding urges before space travel is truly viable. That further stacks the deck in the 'non-interventionist' camp. The "colonize the galaxy" model assumes expansion and population increase are limited only by transit time, and not by intelligence.
I don't know what the breeding and colonization speed of a mature spacefaring culture would be. It may also be that we have unknown links to Earth. There may be trace element atmospheric combinations that are unique to Earth that we depend on. Maybe as a species, we're infertile without that great big Moon in the sky. Maybe in order to colonize, we've got to learn to terraform, too. Sounds like a good reason to get to Mars with a permanent presence, to me. Explore our own biological limits.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
What did I do to annoy you then? If you don't like what I have to say, quit replying to each and every post I make. You'll give yourself an ulcer you know.
>Does the Bible state that God created life 'only'
>on the planet earth
Since the people who wrote the bible weren't aware that there were other planets, they most likely didn't feel it necessary to specify one way or another.
I believe this story is included in the collection "Bears Discover Fire" by Terry Bisson.
-----
Imagine if you will... the leader of the fifth invader force speaking to
the commander in chief...
"They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of
the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way
through. They're completely meat."
"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the
stars."
"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them.
The signals come from machines."
"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made
the machines."
"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to
believe in sentient meat."
"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only
sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat."
"Maybe they're like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence
that goes through a meat stage."
"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several
of their life spans, which didn't take too long. Do you have any idea
the life span of meat?"
"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the
Weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."
"Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads like the
Weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way
through."
"No brain?"
"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of
meat!"
"So... what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The
meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The
meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"
"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."
"Finally, Yes. They are indeed made out meat. And they've been trying to
get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."
"So what does the meat have in mind?"
"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the
universe, contact other sentients, swap ideas and information. The
usual."
"We're supposed to talk to meat?"
"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio.
'Hello. Anyone out there? Anyone home?' That sort of thing."
"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"
"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."
"I thought you just told me they used radio."
"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know
how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping
their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through
their meat."
"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you
advise?"
"Officially or unofficially?"
"Both."
"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all
sentient races or multibeings in the quadrant, without prejudice, fear,
or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget
the whole thing."
"I was hoping you would say that."
"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact
with meat?"
"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say?" `Hello, meat. How's
it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with
here?"
"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers,
but they can't live on them. And being meat, they only travel through C
space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility
of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."
"So we just pretend there's no one home in the universe."
"That's it."
"Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones
who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you have probed? You're sure
they won't remember?"
"They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads
and smoothed out their meat so that we're just a dream to them."
"A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat's
dream."
"And we can mark this sector unoccupied."
"Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others?
Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?"
"Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a
class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotations ago,
wants to be friendly again."
"They always come around."
"And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the universe
would be if one were all alone."
Your incorrect when you use the concept of entropy for the improbablity of life forming. Entropy only applies when there is a closed system. The primordial soup that life formed in is not a closed system. It is constantly recieving energy from the sun.
I think setis been looking too hard I thinks it needs a break and should retool itself
If we refuse to be flexible, we are in effect opting out of the game of life. The world moves on without us.
Humans are arrogant creatures! Each generation wrongly assumes superiority over previous generations, and small innovations delude us into believing that we are extremely advanced.
When humans learned to talk, they took to the mountaintops and cried out to the heavens. If heavenly beings exist, then surely they must hear. Just yesterday, we learned to communicate via electromagnetic waves, and now we assume these waves are fundamental and advanced. If other civilizations exist, then surely they must hear and have the ability to respond. Heh.
Before electromagnetic waves, we had knowledge of light. Little did we know it was just an artifact of electromagnetic waves. Electromagnetic waves could very well be an artifact of another more fundamental medium in space-time. We understand so little about the quantum world, space-time, and the nature of the universe. Just as it's ignorant to assume that all alien creatures will have eyes, and the ability to see with light, we also can't assume that all creatures will be able to observe and manipulate electromagnetic waves. It is possible that electromagnetic waves are meaningless to other forms of life, even those far more advanced than ours.
We have such myopia. We believed the earth was flat, that it was the center of the universe, and we still believe that our physical experience, based on light, sound, electromagnetism, etc. is central to the existence of all creatures. Wake up humans and smell the coffee! We've got a long way to go before we can truly consider ourselves advanced. Thousands of years from now, humans will without a doubt look back and see us as cavemen. Most likely, we would not understand truly intelligent beings from another world, even if they tried to communicate. I imagine it might be like us humans trying to communicate to the insect world.
There are actually multiple flaws in this part of the argument.
As you pointed out, there's the problem with the time period required for galactic colonization. Specifically, the statement "The greatest uncertainty is the time required for a colony to establish itself and spawn new settlements. A reasonable upper limit might be 5,000 years, the time it has taken human civilization to develop from the earliest cities to spaceflight. In that case, full galactic colonization would take about 50 million years".
However, previously in the article, it's stated "If civilizations form at a constant rate and live an average of 1,000 years each". Based on this, the civilization would likely collapse prior to the 5,000 years assumed as needed for the colony to establish itself. Either a colony can establish itself much quicker than assumed; or the average life of each civilization is much longer than assumed. In which case, the total number of civilizations in the history of the galaxy would drop.
Even if the 5,000 year colony establishment issue can be resolved; there's still the 50 million year civilization life problem. How do you maintain a civilization spread over 100,000 light-years (the distance from one end of our galaxy to the other) when your only means of communication are either radio waves or ships that travel up to 20% the speed of life? By the time a message is received at a colony; the sender's great-great grandchildren would have been dead for thousands of years (assuming life spans even ten times our own).
The logistics of maintaining a single civilization over such vast distances makes the likelihood of total galactic colonization extremely unlikely, if not impossible. It becomes much more likely that a colony would become entirely independant of the parent civilization. This would almost be a necesity as it would have its own priorities and requirements to survive in an alien environment while having little to no contact with the home world.
As a result; if life does exist on other worlds, it does not surprise me at all that they have not made physical contact with the Earth. On a side note: I tend to agree technological life does exist elsewhere, although for reasons I won't go into here I would expect the number to be significantly lower than the 1,000 technological civilizations assumed by Paul Horowitz of Harvard University (as stated in the article).
See: Misconceptions Regarding SETI, Dyson Spheres and the Fermi Paradox
The bottom line is this -- nanotechnology enables the transition from pre-Kardashev-Type-I civilizations (us) to post-KT-II civilizations in decades. Such civilizations are resistant to almost all hazards on galactic scales and will thus be the dominant form of life in galaxies. If we are typical, it only takes a few hundred years to evolve from the discovery of the laws of physics to reach KT-II levels. KT-II civilizations survive for trillions of years. Unless the evolution of intelligent life is very, very difficult our galaxy should be dominiated by KT-II civilizations (Dyson shell supercomputers, a.k.a. Matrioshka Brains) with thought capacities in excess of a trillion trillion times the human mind.
Intentional communications generally occurs between entitites of approximately the same capacity. As we are at the sub-worm level in comparison to KT-II civilizations, they will not be directing communications at us. Non-intended leakage communications could be detected by SETI out to a few dozen light years, but we should be looking in the MHz frequences, not in the GHz frequencies. Therefore SETI@home is a waste of CPU cycles.
Interstellar travel is possible (the British Interplanetary Society Project Daedalus Study showed that). It is however pointless. The speed-of-light delays and communications costs for large volumes of data, mean you get little benefit from colonization. You do not want to become larger, you want to become smaller (or at least work very hard to minimize propagation delays)! The fact that KT-II civilizations can each build billions of lunar diameter telescopes makes rationalizations for interstellar travel difficult (why go "there" when you can "watch" there?). You also don't go very far, because "there", by the time you arrive, may not be there anymore (a closer civilization may have occupied the location). Arguments that we should colonize the galaxy in a few million years fail to understand that the rate of expansion is not limited by the speed-of-light but by the time it takes to dismantle planets, gas giants, brown dwarfs, etc. and turn them into something useful. It isn't the stars that are desirable to KT-II civilizations, it is planets with heavy metal abundances that "happen" to be on courses around the galaxy that these civilizations find attractive.
It is worth noting that the gravitational microlensing results, suggest that our galaxy is surrounded by ~200 billion "objects" of masses around 0.3-0.5 Msun. Astronomers are currently unable to provide an good explanation for what these might be. The best current guess is primordial black holes. (Of course most of the astronomers involved assume the universe is "dead".)
Comments by Verteiron, regarding the use of radio are absolutely correct. Given the capacities of KT-II civilizations, they are going to be able to build very large telescopes that can detect any other KT-II civilizations. If they want to communicate, they will do it using tightly focused lasers, probably in the blue or UV regions. This minimizes photon (energy) loss due to beam spreading and allows the highest data rates.
What if we re-think what "colonization" means.
What if a civilization decides to colonize the galaxy. What assumptions can they make? Not a whole frigging lot. So they build a Von Neuman probe, but instead of instructions to build copies of the creators at the target star, it has orders to fabricate anything and everything that might stay alive in whatever kind of soup it finds.
Can we say "Cambrian Explosion?"
So (to paraphrase the SA article) the colonization wave front lag is not 5000 years, but 700 million years (give or take. time for intelligent life to develop, if it develops at all).
So. The proof of extraterrestrial visitation is in our own fossil records. Maybe :)
Of course, this doesn't answer the question of where the frigging signals are. Maybe the ET's just build a bigass farday cage around us (Oort cloud?) that filters out the frequencies they use. After all, their VN probe is still here, put it to work.
Why would ET's do *that*? Ask a cop what use a one way mirror is. My brain hurts, you guys pick it up from here...
Just my 2 cents
"If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" --Voltaire
Seti is Crucial but maybe they have taken to broad of a search. Maybe there should be a bunch of different seti's looking a diffrent ranges, of light, radio waves, etc
If we refuse to be flexible, we are in effect opting out of the game of life. The world moves on without us.
Your facts are correct, but I don't necessarily agree that SETI is crap. As you point out, we are unable to detect stray emissions from anything further away than 10 l-y. But we can detect focused emissions from much farther away - perhaps 1000 l-y or so (disclaimer: this is a wild-ass guess). So if a civilization is trying to be found and they are reasonably close we could potentially detect them. *If* we happened to be listening at the right time, *if* we happened to be tuned to the right frequency, and a lot of other ifs. The odds are low. Does this mean that we don't listen? Some would say "yes", but I think that means that we just have to listen that much more closely to improve the odds. Even if we never detect a signal, it's still useful scientific information - a negative result is still a result. Also, it costs us very little to try so there's not much to lose.
The key, though, is that for us to find a civilization they have to be trying to be found by broadcasting a message (or at least a carrier) more or less continuously. We aren't. Aside from a signal we sent to M13 (like we're going to find anything there!) many years ago, we aren't advertising that we're here. Maybe there's lots of other folks out there like us who just can't be bothered to dedicate an expensive radio telescope to sending signals that likely no one will ever hear.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
They could've been like Larry Niven's Kzin... An intellingent race lands on the Kzin homeworld. The Kzin promptly steal the ship enslave the crew, and start a glorious campaign of galactic conquest until stopped by a group of bloodthirsty but brainwashed monkeys. Hey, the universe is big like that. --Fesh
--Fesh
"Citizens have rights. Consumers only have wallets." - gilroy
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
Would DMCA and / or UCITA apply to them? (supposing they haven't been overturned by the time aliens from planet X receive the DVD, decode it, and word gets back here. Although, considering that bad news travels faster than anything else known to man (including light?), I'm sure the lawsuits would stack up quickly.)
Act now to free-release our DVD's in space!
I am dyslexia of borg - your ass will be laminated.
a little like being a piece of sand on a beach in Africa, and playing marco polo with a piece of sand in say Hawaii? Don't get me wrong, I think its worth the shot to find our other Universe buddies (there just has to be..) but I wonder statistically how apt this project is just listening. Maybe start shooting more CD's into space???
A Beer is a terrible thing to waste.
Sig it.
Of course, that should read "up to 20% the speed of light", not "up to 20% the speed of life". The other typos are too minor to correct here ...
I didn't read "Solaris" (shame on me!) but even on Terra there are vast differences between different lifeforms, that would make communication difficult. Image the ETs have a livespan of only one day..or they live for 1000 years: they might be simply too fast for us or annoyingly slow. Then they might be as tiny as ants or bigger as dinosaurs ("oops, sorry, just stepped on another human, sorry, won't happen again"). Then they probably don't like our athmosphere or temperature range.
The Scientific American article (which, by the way, was from a previous issue. If you are not subscribed, you are really missing out) mentions a rough classification of alien civilizations (see sidebar to the main article). Type I civiliations (like ours) have the resources of their home planet to use in sending out EM signals. Type II civs have the resources of the entire system (the solar system, in our case) for signals, and Type III have the entire galaxy to use to send out EM signals. If Type III civs were out there and sending our radio beams, we would know by now. Nearly the same for Type II, so now we are looking for Type I's, who are doing pretty much the same thing we are - sending out narrowly focused beams, sweeping the sky, or just leaking out signal (radio, TV, whatever).
The assumption that some of the signal would leak out or be intentionally aimed at us has guided most SETI projects. However, is this really the case? In the last century, we may have had unfocused EM signals spraying all over the place, but for how long? It appears that our communication channels are starting to become more focused and efficent through the use of cables and focused, line-of-site EM. Even cellular phones, which still use EM propagation in the air, are short-range devices. How many of the products sold today would, in normal operation, produce signals detectable from Pluto, much less from light-years away? With commuinication devices heading for higher-bandwidth applications, I don't see this trend abating. I can imagine, by this time next century, the whole planet is using cabled or focused communication, so that the aliens would have to wander between the Moon and Earth to discover a narrowly focused communication channel. They may notice runway lights first.
This reasoning may eliminate any hope of discovering everyday communication signals from alien civilizations. But we should still search, in the hope that other civilizations are as interested in making contact as us. We have to assume that their scientists are thinking the same way we are, and are searching in "logical" bandwidths for good carrier signals, as well as transmitting powerful signals on these channels. Although we may be looking in the wrong place now, eventually we will have the funding and technology for powerful, broadband searches across the spectrum. At the same time, we may just be lucky and find ET tommorrow.
> The greatest uncertainty is the time required for a colony to establish itself and spawn new settlements. A reasonable upper limit might be 5,000 years, the time it has taken human civilization to develop from the earliest cities to spaceflight. In that case, full galactic colonization would take about 50 million years.
Well. They can only colonize other stars after they have technology to travel at 10% of lightspeed, and before a moron have been granted the patent on spacetravel.
Cheers,
--fred
Btw, the reasonning also suppose a civilisation that can last 50 Millions years. A funny idea. This guy probably work in a University, and have not met the real world recently...
Agnokapathetic
It's a combination of agnostic and apathetic, as in "I don't know and I don't care."
And what is it about so many (not all) Christians, that they can't understand that you don't need a vengeful bogeyman looking over your shoulder to act decently and respect other people?
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
It seems to me that the current lack of success in the SETI program is indicative of the fact that we really are alone in the cosmos. If there were other races out there we would see evidence for them - after all, they would likely have been around for millions of years already, and in that time their engineering projects could easily have reached a scale where we could see them from Earth. But we only see natural pheomena. It would be far too much of a coincidence for other forms of life to be at the same technological stage of development as we are.
The face that life on Earth arose so quickly after it's formation - about 500 million years later - is a sure sign of the Lord's hand at work. The real question we need to know is whether His work was unique to this planet or spread across the cosmos. SETI's lack of results would tend to favour the argument that the Earth is unique, and that the words of the Bible are true in asserting that God made us in his image.
These points have been refuted by earlier replies, so I won't reiterate. I'd only point out that your fourth point (that the black death in Europe led to advanced technology) is a ridiculously Euro-centric position.
Us white boys tend to idolize our white forefathers, but tech evolved simultaneously all over the world. Chinese, Arabian and Indian civilizations made the same leaps independently. Your claim that we would have never achieved technology without decimating Europe is an extension of your claim that 20 individuals did all the work. You neglect all the smart people who've been ignored by history.
As soon as we develop interstellar travel, you KNOW someone is going to head to the center of the galaxy and leave the solitary message, "FIRST POST!".
I just want to take over the world...Why does that automatically make me EVIL?
Imagine earth a few hundred years in the past. A tribe of the Native Americans tries to seek other people on Mother Earth. As they didn't have the capabilities to ship over the oceans, they were sending scouts to the beaches of the Land of the Turtle to hear for descent drums or watch out for smoke characters. Unfortunately they were not sucessfull, they couldn't find a sign of other species over the vast distant of the Oceans so they gave up and declared they were the only citizens of Mother Earth. I believe that we are trying the same like the people in this story. I guess that the probability of finding a aliens who are as advanced as we are is like /dev/null .) . They will be far less or far more advanced. 80 years ago we wouldn't have been able to understand signals from Cell Phones after Matrix many people are using them. So how can we believe that we could receive signals from other civilizations ? Perhaps their way of communication is not even based on EM waves or they are using techniques we wouldn't understand to be a message at all ? I believe that if Seti remains not successfull this will not be proof of anything at all.
Change is the only constant in life.
Many people believe that there could be either good or evil aliens. For the sake of this article, let's call anyone who will talk about alien phenomena "Alien Watchers", or AW - everyone else is a skeptic (even neutral parties).
A slim minority of AW fear aliens. Most AW think that aliens are cool, even if they are evil.
Skeptics are really poor examples of the opposition in the debate because most skeptics won't think out their ideas to the bitter end, while many AW will work out the problems fully, regardless of bias.
The cream of the crop AW will tend to suspend judgment when hearing any idea, and wait to form an opinion based on multiple fact structures, using complex methods to obtain test results. This being the case, aliens must exist solely because the people who spend the most time working out how or why aliens exist, all believe in aliens. Or is it chicken & egg? Maybe the more a human concentrates on something, the more they tend to believe it.
I don't know about you, but the harder I think about something on a test in school, the better results I tend to get. Perhaps the same is true with 1% of the AW?
Some skeptics will sit in a room with AW and talk about the possibilities of ET, yet very few will hold fast to the belief that ET does not exist, without closing off their mind to the possibility.
The easiest way to swing a skeptic, is to simply say... "We humans exist. Reasonable doubt would lean to believe that something like us must exist as well, somewhere, at some time." Uh... maybe this planet is the only place in the universe where life as we know it will exist! Dinosaurs existed here... then we replaced them. What if this world is a vantage point for biology? Maybe it's the only place biology can work in the fashion it does. Then what kind of alien would we be looking for off this Earth, then?
The various human belief structures regarding ET all seem to conflict. You have to be able to play chess against yourself to even think about the unknown (alien) phenomena. What I'm saying here is not necessarily all true, or even partially true... it's a set of conflicting ideas that represent what the majority of alien watcher believe - in part or in whole.
One basic human belief is that aliens had a hand in creating humanity, and all other life on Earth. Evil aliens created humanity as slaves for some substance, or knowledge, or to serve, or to fight for them. Good aliens created humanity out of the goodness in their hearts, or as an experiment, or as a gift.
Some believe that aliens are harvesting something from us. Evil aliens would be taking some important thing, like our souls, awareness, or life energy, or perhaps knowledge. Good aliens might be growing extra energy, solving social ailments or perhaps just guiding us to a higher level, perhaps by giving us help.
Aliens could be similar to us, in every way. Evil aliens might want to destroy us, out of fear, or perhaps just to prove their worth to the cosmic order. Good aliens may want to steer clear of us. Good aliens might also want to form treaties, or nudge our history in the right direction anonymously, by hanging around schools or hospitals. Perhaps good aliens would want to nudge our DNA by emitting fields near our water supply, or in reverse, evil aliens might want to emit poisons near water supplies as well.
Duh... tobacco.
Aliens could own companies in our society could help certain types of humans. One such group might be Clear Green (www.cleargreen.com). Good aliens may focus energies in aiding people, while bad aliens might use such organizations to set humanity back. I guess this give good cause for human intuition.
Clear Green's methodology is based on Carlos Castaneda's writings of his time spent with Sorcerer Don Juan Matus. CC's books are filled with alien encounters and other science fiction trips, which all seem real when you read them. CC's books also tend to transcend the God complex and fire up new suspicions of alien interaction with humanity, all leaning toward inter-dimensional travel for humans and aliens, thus putting ideas like SETI in a different light. Carlos Castaneda is worth reading, if you are an AW or a skeptic, but you have to read between the lines.
Perhaps aliens have no idea what or who we are. What if they never become adults, or never die? We take much for granted, especially our own biological paths. We tend to believe that another race could behave as we do.
Humanity is horrible! We kill our own kind, do all kinds of nasty stuff to things unrelated to us, and we have a terrible case of morbidity, as a whole population. We are interested in police, and crime. We like violence. We don't think before we act.
If aliens never mature, if they stay in their perfect infant stage, perhaps they are closer to trees or other peaceful creatures. How would you find an alien tree on a spec of dust far, far away?
Have you ever shown up to an exam unprepared? Perhaps SETI is doing just that! I mean... what if these aliens don't even exist in a quadrant of space. Plausibly, ET could exist in a different space/time continuum. ET might live in a different universe and have the technology to show up here in an instant and annihilate us.
What is probably the truth is that ET has the means to get here, and they want nothing to do with us, or we are a kind of science project for them and they have been keeping tabs all along. Either case scores few points for alien search parties. :P
Okay maybe the little green men had nothing to do with manufacturing our ancestors. Maybe they were manufactured like us and want to kick our ass.
Can you imagine if we find ET and we are not prepared? The result could be cataclysmic! We could be signing our own death warrants! If ET were at all moral, they would want to exterminate us.
Our planet is on a destructive path. We have social ailments that are less important than weaponry budgets! Corporate agenda is more important than education and nutrition! Government has become a travesty. Justice has a price.
ET would probably destroy us with a simple flick of its antennae. It would certainly look at us in puzzlement. We are the epitome of imperfection, the height of human self-interest.
We need to start looking at who we are and how we can improve the lives of all living things around us.
Yet somehow, we appear to be of a design. I think, therefore, I am - it's a simple way to believe in yourself, yet what about other human traits?
They never said, "I move, therefore, I am." And they never said, "I feel, therefore, I am."
I think...
I believe that if there is an ET, that somehow one species of ET was responsible for creating humanity, and all life on Earth. However easy to believe, faith could not possibly generate truth. Truth is only found from observation and contemplation.
The evidence appears to lean toward deity intervention as the cause of our genesis. Advanced technology can blur the lines between religion and science. Deity intervention could be easily confused with hyper advanced tech.
ET is probably very distant from our physiology. It probably does not live as we do, on the surface of a rock (earth). Quite possibly, the ET responsible for our genesis exists in another dimension. Perhaps we were a kind of stepping stone for the archaic beings. They created us to be a monument for any other races that might exist.
Think of it this way... Did you ever get to have a cushy job? You know... plush leather interior office... the works. Did you ever notice how unhealthy behavior seems to coincide with luxury? ET might have had to find that out the hard way... and now ET is either dead or hiding.
Human DNA is a coded sequence. This leads me to believe that ET coded us, and left us here. What possible reason could they have for creating human beings?
Let's say you want to harvest a kind of element from a neighboring plane of existence, and you don't have the ability to do it yourself, or you don't want to get dirty.
Humans might be a cool vehicle to getting what you want, Mr. Alien. In fact, humans seem to be designed to produce energy, planetary change and excrement.
Any three byproducts could be of use to aliens.
youre forgetting timescale and quantity. your basketball example doesnt work for technology and evolution because even if there will never in history be someone who makes as many baskets as jordan, two average nba players together could make as many. basketball doesnt let you keep adding people to the game but evolution does. in the worst case it might just take a little longer
but this assumes that people like einstien and newton were abberations and it is extremely unlikely alien civilizations get people like them. why? imagine a bell curve of intelligence. sure there are fewer geniuses, but there are always _some_ geniuses! just as there are always a large number of averages. who knows aliens even have bell curves skewed towards geniuses naturally or through genetic engineering
the point is if it wasnt einstien there would have been another genius. or some combination of subgeniuses working concurrently or sequentially. our technology is advanced both by einstiens and by averages like me. and in the next thousand years there will still be a number of geniuses and a boatload of averages to come
the animal doesnt even have opposable thumbs, focker!
Will an intelligent species inevitably develop technology? Was it inevitable even for us? A look at our own history tends to throw some doubt on the assumption.
Why did human technology develop when it did? Greek philosophers had measured the circumference of a round earth, deduced the existence of atoms, and figured out that it was us who circled the sun. In many ways, they were more scientifically advanced than the European culture which finally birthed modern science. Two thousand years before Columbus and Galileo, Greece had all the pieces. Why didn't it put them together?
Chinese culture also birthed many "modern" technological advances -- from gunpowder to paper and the printing press -- and spawned several "proto-scientific" revolutions, yet they also never quite put the pieces together.
For nearly a thousand years, while Europe wallowed in the Dark Ages, Arab philosopher/scientists were the sole guardians of Greek philosophy. They had all the pieces Europe had lost, yet they, too, failed to birth a scientific revolution.
How and why did Europe finally pull itself out of its malaise? And what was the key which allowed it to do what other cultures with similar or greater potential had failed to do? It certainly had little to do with the 16th century's scientific knowledge -- which lagged behind both Arab and ancient Greek philosophers'.
It has been argued that the key which finally unlocked modern science was not a scientific discovery, but a religious belief. What early modern European culture possessed that others had lacked was a belief that the universe was fundamentally a place of order. After all, a search for the laws of order presupposes a belief that order exists. And it was Christianity which provided this missing link. The God of the Bible was a God of order who would necessarily create a universe in His own ordered image. It but remained for humans to deduce what that order was. It was this notion of the universe as a fundamentally and necessarily ordered place which had escaped both Greek and Arab philosophers, and which finally provided the spark which ignited the smouldering tinder.
I mention this not because I find the argument compelling, but simply because it illustrates my point: that science and technology are far from being inevitable offsprings of intelligence. Sixteenth century European philosopher/scientists were neither more intelligent nor more scientifically advanced than their ancient Greek forebears; in some ways they had in fact taken several steps backward. Science might easily have sprung from a 5th century BC Athenian womb, but it didn't. In fact, it might easily never have have sprung forth at all.
We may indeed be only one amongst hundreds or thousands of intelligent species inhabiting the cosmos. It may only be our technology which is unique.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
You bring up a good point, and I would like to it. Religion and science are not opposite things. Religion is a system of beliefs, science is a tool. The religion of the scientist determines how he translates the data.
The links are password protected due to the problem that many of them are under copyright protection. If people contact me personally on a case by case I can either forward articles to them or provide them with passwords.
The problem is this skates along the knife edge of "fair use" and copyright law. I'm working on alternate solutions but would like to keep myself on the good side of publishers in the hope that eventually permission may be obtained for granting full access.
In other words, there could be something nasty out there that hunts and destroys emerging civilizations.
Perhaps the reason there are no radio signals is that a paranoid civilization decided to launch a bunch of self-replicating planet killer probes. The civ may be long dead by now, but the probes continue to hunt for radio signals from potentially competing civilizations. When they find one, they kill it (with meteors or whatever) before it has a chance to develop interstellar spaceflight.
This is essentially the plot of Greg Bear's novels The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars. In the latter novel the surviving remnant of humanity takes revenge on the bastards' evolutionary descendants (with interesting ethical questions about justice and punishment for acts done billions of years earlier.)
There is a BIG problem with the current SETI projects. The main one right now, the setiathome project (in which I am participating) is that it uses the arecebo telescope which can ONLY detect STRONG signals beamed AT US (so to speak, at least in our direction AND for a prolonged period of time).
If any project is going to find ET, it will need to be VERY sensitive and capable of detecting incidental emissions of radio/radar. In other words, it would have to be capable of detecting us from a sizable distance...as we do NOT broadcast in such a way to say "Here we are! Here we are!. As a matter of fact, as we get more technologically advanced, our emissions go down. We acquire narrow band, tight beam, laser transmission, low power-high efficiency transmission systems. None of these are conducive to detection from interstellar distances.
Setiathome REQUIRES (from an ET) a large, high-power, dedicated transmitter that happens to be pointing our direction at the right time in history. Hell, some culture, which must be rare in itself, could have been broadcasting in our direction throughout the dinosaur era, then after a few thousand, or even millions of years, given up and turned their transmitter in another direction or turned it off.
It seems odd to assume that ETs would be inclined to build such large dedicated transmitters merely as a beacon of their existence, and maintain them for hundreds of thousands of years or longer. This isn't what WE'RE doing. We are not even embarked on the eventual program of doing this. It seems odd that given our non-propensity to SPECIFICALLY broadcast our existence, that we should assume that others would. Speculation beyond our own species is PURELY speculation with no grounding in fact.
That all said, I would say that life is abundant, but that technologically advanced civilizations are extremely rare. If it weren't for a certain chance meteorite encounter some 65 mya, the dinosaurs would STILL be the likely dominant life form on earth. Even given the meteorite, if it were to be repeated, it is unlikely that humans would arise again. There is no evolutionary drive toward technological civilizations. If it weren't for a few chance events in the Far East, Middle East, and West in prehistory/early history, WE wouldn't be a technologically advanced civilization today. The native Americans, Aborigine Australians, the Celtic (and other) tribes of Europe, etc, would not have changed much from their past lifestyles and technology.
Chance events, unrepeatable on Earth, led to what we are today. I would doubt that such chance events happen all the time, certainly not to the point of leading to technological societies all over the galaxy. It is certainly possible that there are other advanced civs in our galaxy, but it could be only one or two other than our own. ...Or what if there is ONE technologically advanced civ (on average) in each galaxy at the same time? There would still be billions of such civs in the universe but they would be forever seperated by time and space, each living in their own galaxy filled with planets "peopled" by single-celled, or simple multi-celled organisms. Lots of places to colonize and study, given time, energy, and money (in whatever form they use). There may even be a host of stone-age civilizations all over each galaxy...but there is no reason to presuppose that each MUST develop into advanced technological societies - ever.
The setiathome project is a worthy test-of-concept project that just MIGHT (slim chance) find something. The projects more likely to find anything, however, haven't even been started yet. They require the best, most sensitive receivers that can detect an incidentally emitting civilization (detect their leakage) such as one like our own.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
You make some huge assumptions in support of your points:
1. "Such civilizations [KT-II] are resistant to almost all hazards on galactic scales and will thus be the dominant form of life in galaxies."
All civilizations will always have to deal with self-generated hazards such as war (between themselves and other "alien" races), environmental degradation, and political strife. The greater their technology, the more terrible their weapons could become. You mention nanotechnology as a conduit to upward transition, yet there are scenarios, such as those presented in Kurtzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines", where flawed nanotechology could wipe out the planet, or deliberately designed nanotech weapons that could selectively destroy organisms based on genome.
No civilization is immune from self-destruction or competition with others.
2. "KT-II civilizations survive for trillions of years."
Given the universe is 8-12 billion years old, that's a pretty bold statement!
2. "Intentional communications generally occurs between entitites of approximately the same capacity. As we are at the sub-worm level in comparison to KT-II civilizations, they will not be directing communications at us."
Are you stating that If a KT-II civilization is aware of our existence, then they likely won't attempt to communicate with us? And although they might not communicate with us, we won't intercept any of there transmissions? Let me propose a scenario: Suppose there is a KT-I civilization on the path towards KT-II, that is grappling with the question "is there life out there?" To solve the answer, suppose they set up a listening system to catch wayward transmissions. Furthermore, they also decide to "talk" to the cosmos by blasting EM energy at likely candidates. What would the chances be that they could chose an enhabited system that was similarly listening? Another statement you make that could be clarified is why should we be listening in the MHz region?
3. "The fact that KT-II civilizations can each build billions of lunar diameter telescopes makes rationalizations for interstellar travel difficult (why go "there" when you can "watch" there?)"
In a universe dominated by KT-II's, none will have the desire to conquest, travel, colonize?
Great men in history are as rare as are great players in a sport. What would the Chicago Bulls have been without Michael Jordan? Well, we ran that experiment - the answer was a good solid above average professional basketball team. Jordan elevated them to the level of world beater. You don't replace a Michael Jordan. Sure there are plenty of others attempting to do the same things - THAT DOESN'T MEAN THEY CAN.
It infuriates mediocre thinkers that they can't think as well as great thinker can. Sorry about that, it infuriates mediocre athletes that they can't play in the NBA.
I'll state it again: great men are rare singularities - their achievements are not reproducible by others.
I particularly found the comments about Newton amusing. John Maynard Keynes denigrating Isaac Newton is like a modern day 6' NBA bench warming guard denigrating Wilt Chamberlain. Keynes must have been feeling particularly bitter and envious the day he said that.
By the way, people denigrate others in an attempt to tear those others down to their level; it is an attempt to look good by making others look bad. Isaac Newton would not have denigrated John Maynard Keynes; he would no more have said anything about him than Wilt Chamberlain would have found it necessary to comment on a six foot bench warmer.
I think all people are equal - but they are not all identical. People who are outstanding intellectually accomplish things that others can't. Sorry about that, but the world works that way.
We can see even today that what SETI is looking at is almost certainlyobsolescent technology, even for us--they are looking for broadcast TV, and not cable, etc. I suspect it will be less than 50 years before our airwaves become so polluted that everything will be outside of the frequency range they are looking at. How long until cell phone frequencies are saturated with users, for instance? As more and more people use technology, alternatives have to be found--everybody who has a cell phone today couldn't have broadband internet access using it, and some alternative technology will have to be found. I suspect that the communications will go more digital, and more optical, as time progresses, and that RF useage will become more and more constrained due initially to interference and later to lack of bandwidth as alternatives become available. Perhaps the only RF signatures of our planet 100 years from now might be things like GPS signals and some really tight band, narrow field satellite communications.
SETI really assumes that the signals are intentionally *beamed* at us for the purpose of discovery. Detection of the latest episode of ER or whatever is unlikely to happen because the strength of the signal is likely to be too low to detect, but a directly beamed signal will travel better, and is more likely to be dectectable.
If you are looking for signals they have sent to us to be seen by us, it's most likely going to be the most basic detection signal - radio. Unless a race evolves to use quantum-thinies before electromagnetics, which I think is unlikely, they should use radio to talk to us.
Of course, maybe they figure that we're not smart enough to talk to until we can use quantum-thingies. Perhaps the first use of quantum-thingies is a first contact event.
If they're not beaming at us (and it takes one hell of an effort to know about and beam to every Earth like planet is the galaxy), we might never detect a race far enough away... It's possible perhaps that we're just not being talked to...
-- IANAL, BIPOOTV
Well, my first thought is to include schematics / plans for a CD / DVD decoder, but trying to get them into a 0 level format would take up too much space (especially since you can't put all the info on another CD...). Alternately, including a cd reader (old audio CD players anyone?) would help, but would still require them 1: having our same type of power system, and 2: being willing /able to understand our language. What good would it do to explain everything via sound to a species that communicates via light? (how can they hear if they have no ears?)
"Hey Zborak, look ... another one of those d*mn earthling's blank CD's... wonder why they keep shedding all this junk."
But that's just my opinion, I could be right.
I am dyslexia of borg - your ass will be laminated.
What do you mean sad? Didn't you read the article? Now it is our duty to focus all our energry and resources into expanding our civilization into the universe.
BTW: Our sun will not last forever. And before then, some gigantic (unstoppable) astroid WILL hit the earth. We better start thinking that if we are the only intelligent life in the universe we better to what it takes to preserve ourselves!
This
...we aren't advertising that we're here...
The Question is: should we ? After all, with our limited ability to leave earth, we're basically a sitting duck right now. If ET behave like we did...For that matter, energy is energy, and spectrum space is spectrum space... this advanced society that knows better things than RF modulation as we know it will probably need all the wireless bandwidth it can find (_we_ always need more, no matter how much _we_ have). If they communicate by some "new" means in the RF energy spectrum range, most likely it will produce some effect on those bandwidths which our radio receivers can detect and determine to be "unnatural in origin".
11*43+456^2
I'll take the time to say that Judaism doesn't oppose life on other planets, and some Jewish sources openly say it exists. There are also predictions of space travel, so it's clear that Judaism isn't hostile to the idea of extraterrestrial life.
The first explanation ("Perhaps interstellar spaceflight is infeasible") clearly fails. No known principle of physics or engineering rules out interstellar spaceflight. Even in these early days of the space age, engineers have envisaged propulsion strategies that might reach 10 to 20 percent of the speed of light, thereby permitting travel to nearby stars in a matter of decades [see "Reaching for the Stars," by Stephanie D. Leifer; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, February 1999].
Yeah.
And 100 years ago, no know rule of physics or engineering ruled out traveling faster than the speed of light. Things change. Limits are found.
Seriously, you can't go making wild claims like 'CLEARLY, this explanation FAILS, because an article in a previous issue of our magazine ENVISIONED SOME STRATEGIES as to how it might not fail'. They teach you not to do that shit in grade 8. Until it actually, physically works, it's not necessarily going to work.
rhyac.
If Spielberg is to believed, these theoretical civilizations ought to be attracted to little gobs of Penut Butter wrapped in a crunchy candy shell. Following this line of thought, if SETI could convince Hershey Foods Corp. to manufacture an aerodynamic, heat shielded version of these candies that could be shot to various star systems at a constant rate (1 Reeses Pieces/yard would be acceptable), any alien race would follow this line of candy back to earth. Of course, they might resent having thier planet pelted with candy, and would be hostile towards us. The chance also exists that they may be content with the constant stream of candy, and would not be promted to find the source. Similar to the Desert Bar, Which Hershey manufactured for the US Armed Services during the Gulf War, these one-off modified confections could probably be marketed to the public, If HFC was able to yeild enough to satisfy SETI Demands.
Several arugments come to mind, but I only have a few minutes...
1. Does this alien race use RF for communications?
How successful would Samuel Morse have been trying to detect microwave communications?
2. Does this alien race know better than to assume the "White Man's Burden?"
Had European explorers and missionaries brought education rather than religion and instant medicine to Africa, is it possible that the Africa's severe over-population problems (famine, drought, desertification, etc.) would not have happened?
White explorer's and missionaries tampered with ecology out of ignorance and misplaced duty everywhere the set foot outside their own borders.
Cultures and ecology must evolve slowly and naturally lest they collapse. Let's hope that the aliens know better.
3. Suppose the alien space travel technolgy is something beyond our comprehension?
Sure, physics is (probably) the same throughout the universe. But 500 years ago, microwave technology that could cook food and send a person's likeness through the air would have been described as witchcraft and gotten you burned at the stake.
+++++++++++++++++++++
Come on, educated scientists. Get a clue. Just because our lives, cultures, and technolgies followed a certain progression does not mean that you can apply this assumption to the entire universe.
Blind egotism is an evil thing.
Acutally I am. Im using a 1000W magnetron to repeadly send out the binary for "First Post!" over and over. The only problem is that I keep killing birds that get in the way of the beam. Crap! There goes another one!
Truly advanced technology is legacy-compatible. If I were an advanced civilization, I'd make sure my technology picked up older or less advanced technology.
Besides, we may be sending stuff out from satellites and so forth, but it's not like we're sending satellites. Radio waves and microwaves are still receivable. It's not technology so much as it is physics, which is a universal technology. We didn't invent this stuff, it's just there and we've developed technology to utilize it.
Chris
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Um, has it occurred to you that alien galactic moderators may use planet-destroying beams as a way of bitchslapping unruly planets? Maybe that's what's been happening to our ozone layer, and the North Pole!
Your argument is not a convincing one. I see no impending break point in the history of Earth. In fact the most powerful common source of radio waves here is radar. A technology that was invented by British military science.
No country in it's right mind will freeze technological advancement - the risk of another country doing so, and then beating you to a bloody pulp, is too great.
Paul.
Great article.
The points you made about nano tech all reign true. It's the answer to our evolution, yet it will also probably replace humanity as we know it.
Human morbidity will probably stand in the way of our evolution, and since we are afraid of being replaced, how can we ever improve?
This all reminds me of Jedi talk from SW. "Use the metachlorines, Luke!"
One of the hardest parts in optimizing nano tech is trust related issues. We would have to give ourselves to tech, rather than control and dominate tech.
I don't know if we are ready as a species to do that yet, as we are not ready to suspend fear when approching a scruffy person near a 7-11 after dark.
I should add that 78% of SETI@Home users, that filled out the poll, are in favor for sending out signals to ETs. OTOH, that means that 22% have certain doubts...
What if they're not gas-giants at all?
:)
We know they're there by the deformation they cause to their stars. From this we presume they are of gasseous density. But, what if they are solid, but hollow, a Dyson Sphere?
It's an excellent point - whatever we are likely to see, we would tend to presume is 'natural', except if it speaks English. This is a very narrow view. An extra terrestrial intellect would probably seek to communicate with lesser life-forms in the simplest way possible. Maybe we are too arrogant to consider that the rhythmic pulsing of a quasar (as another poster suggested) is to simple, and that ET would never be so condescending.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Cool sounds instresting, I guess i have more surfing to do................. I think there should be a campaing to feed britny spears to the first sing of uninteligent alien life we find...
If we refuse to be flexible, we are in effect opting out of the game of life. The world moves on without us.
After reading about half the replies here I was thinking that a *lot* of people have a terrible obsessioin with "Aliens Made Of Meat"(TM).
Is there a "Universal Law"(TM) that "Intelligent Life"(TM) has to be in some form of shaped protein? Come off it. Why do you think protein has the Patent on "Intelligent Life"(TM) and your limitations also apply to the physical size and limitations you experience?
Why can there be no intelligence in [for instance] the Sun? Because it is too hot? Maybe the solar flares and waves of magnetic radiation *are* a way of communication for "Stellar Beings"(TM) but on a different scale or clock.
Think further.
What SETI is doing is scanning the cosmos for a sequence of electronic pulses that may or may not indicate that a form of communication is taking place and that this communication may or may nyet be aimed at us.
So what?
Maybe the only comunication going on "Out There"(TM) is in the form of gravity waves or modulated photonic streams or by flashing stars.
For now the means and ways we have at our disposal is the works of the SETI society and maybe when we find other means and ways to communicate amongst ourselves we may or may not use these to start listening to the Universe again and maybe we will hear something we are not able to detect now.
We just have to start listening somewhere/somehow and why not like we are doing now.
It is my conviction (sp?) that there is "Life Out There"(TM) and it may or may not be "As We Know It"(TM)". We are going to "Hear From Them"(TM) unless they are NOT trying to communicate with Us and encrypt all their "Interstellar Communications"(TM)(R)(C).
SETI has a function... If only to prove that "They" do not use this specific form of communication...
---
Free ?! Does that mean I can't get a Discount ?!
This message was
I find it hard to believe your linux box only beats your windows box by a couple of hours. They must be really fast ( i.e. your linux box finishes in 3 hours and your windows in 5). I have 4 linux boxes and 3 windows boxes. I don't even run the client on the windows boxes because it took so damn long it was driving my average score up waaaay too high. My Windows boxes (550, 450 and 233 mhz) sometimes took as long as 48 hours to complete a work unit. My linux boxes are usually at least twice as fast. I guess it's true what they say, YMMV :)
Enigma
also we assume they understand what we are transmitting... Our Idear of inteligence may be wrong or maybe its not understood. Alien Contact could be a smell we dont think twicce about
If we refuse to be flexible, we are in effect opting out of the game of life. The world moves on without us.
Unfortunately we don't have the luxury of assuming there's a better means of communicating that an advanced society would use over radio. We can't just play the part of the indians and assume neighboring tribes have advanced beyond the point of smoke signals, so we should give up looking for them and sending out our own.
We have to assume that our view of physics and technology is correct and work off of that assumption. If we wish to detect neighboring civilizations or be detected by them, our best (and, really, only) means for doing so is by radio waves.
You're absolutely right - it does not follow that He must do so. But it does follow that He could do so - we just don't know.
But either way, there's no indication whatsoever that He granted Earth exclusive rights to life, which was just the point I wished to make. You may (or may not) argue that man is the most intelligent life around (the pivotal being or something), but that's beside the point - you don't need that much intelligence to be alive. Bacteria, fungi and plants are very much alive, but possess no intelligence to speak of. Those lifeforms would not show up on SETI - we really need to travel to other planets in order to find out.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
This article was kind of a wake-up call for my SETI thinking. I think it is a reasonable notion to start thinking thart aren't many (or any?) smart ET's out there.
*BUT* it does pose some interesting possibilities in the way of human colonization of the cosmos. Run through the calculations and you will quickly find that terraforming a planet would take hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. But perhaps, as the article suggests, primitive life is almost certain to arise on any earth-like planet, and multicellular life is the true rarity. Well, that might mean that there are gobs and gobs of inhabitable, pre-terraformed planets with oxygenated atmospheres ripe for the taking!
Other advanced civilizations will not only transition quickly from narrowband RF to using either spread spectrum or advanced techniques we don't know how to look for, but will also certainly deploy compression and cryptography to secure their transmissions. We are certainly headed in this direction after only a few decades of promiscuous broadcasting. This certainly makes SETI@home's job much harder.
How could we tell what was natural pheomena and what was the work of ET? If ET's technology reaches cosomological in scale you could make a hypothesis that it would be impossible to know what was "natural" and what was "artifical," since we have always been assuming that everything we see is natural.
> However, intelligent life in a galaxy a gigaparsec from us is not terribly interesting; if that's our closest neighbor, then we might as well be alone. That is not true. If we find any life no matter how far it is away from us, that will change our view of the world and possibly ruin our respect for earth as something very special. I hope we don't get to know about extraterrestrial life before we at least have the means to put colonies on other planets or into space.
Okay then. Christianity doesn't preach either, although some Christians do.
Two can pick that nit.
People of the same religion attract each other, but those of different religion repel each other.
First of all, I would include philosophies like athiesm in that generalization. Athiests are drawn to one another, and away from people of religion, as evidenced by your little heated argument you've been having with "Dan Hayes".
Secondly, this is not an artifact of religion, but of human behavior in general. People like to surround themselves with other people who are like themselves, because it reaffirms their identities.
Neither of you is going to persuade the other of anything through this flame-fest, so please just drop it.
I kind of wish there was an automatic router in the Slash Code to send religion arguments to another location on the server... /dev/null comes to mind.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I hate to do this as I should have thought of it before, but here goes:
It's life Jim, but not as we know it"
The most (ab)used paraphrase from a populair TV series.
---
Free ?! Does that mean I can't get a Discount ?!
This message was
the "one intelligent person influences history" stuff
I agree, that individuals are probably not that important for thechnological advances. However, that does not mean, that technological advance is guaranteed to happen in a certain timeframe (say +-100years). IMHO the important "ingredient" are social circumstances. For technological advances to be made, society has to be tolerant enough to let people concentrate on "useless" things like pure science and help them doing so. Society has also to be tolerant enough to accept new technology and make use of it, because the use of one technology might be a prerequisite for another technology (e.g. electricity for computers). Of course economy plays a big role as well. Just take a look on the different cultures on earth, and see how they developed or not.Agreed -- we're arguing in a vacuum here (pun intended). It's basically an argument from silence -- both the silence of the cosmos (vis-a-vis signs of intelligent life) and the silence of the Scriptures regarding extraterrestrial creation.
There are certain biblical passages which imply uniqueness in the relationship between God and man, which might be taken to imply humanity's singularity in the universe, but nothing that absolutely forbids the contrary possibility.
In case you're interested in the possibility, the best Christian treatment of the question of extraterrestrial life is CS Lewis' Perelandra trilogy, a science fiction work which asks what extraterrestrial life might look like -- that is, not physically, but morally and spiritually. Interesting stories in their own right, I think they make good reading even for those who aren't interested in the religious implications.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
"Life will find a way."
Indeed. Live does so by using a brute force attack using a masssive parallel approach. It just tries all possibilities until it succeeds.In the US the majority are CDMA. AFAIK most cellphones in the world use TDMA techniques (GSM/DCS, and the japanese 2gen tech). These euro-japanese dominated markets are moving towards a mixture of these, the T-CDMA.
On the topic now for a moment: Will we really be using broadcast radio for long i.e. more that 50 years? I can't see that we will need it for anything apart from communication in unpopulated areas, if even there.
sigh
They're receiving those I Love Lucy broadcasts, but they've been modded down.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Note that the majority of cell phones in use today use digital CDMA spread-spectrum encoding. There are several benefits to this technology, which was originally developed for military use. CDMA transmissions are highly resistant to noise interference; are hard to snoop; and are very easy to hide in background noise. If you don't know what to look for, you won't see it. There's no intensity spike at any frequency.
This has been known for decades. It's entirely possible to foresee that all of our radio communications may use this technology in a few more decades' time, due to its benefits. This considerably increases the difficulty of anyone randomly discovering our existence by scanning our spectrum.
Giving ETI's credit for as much cleverness as we have, we are trying to find a ET civilization radiating within a few decades of its technological awakening.
Maybe we should be looking for smoke signals rather that something like Radio waves.... They may seam simple to us but it may be to complicated for them.. (assuming they exist)... maybe the only radio waves they can send our way are ones that we've sent, but RIAA has made it illegal for them to re-produce them and send them back!!
We're not looking for stray TV or cell-phone signals. We're looking for a specific signal, deliberately transmitted to us, on a specific frequency, by a civilization that has enough power to burn, to send this signal with enough energy that would power the United States. Continuously. Non deliberate signals, we probably would not be able to pick up, not at that strength, at that range.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
http://www.ozemail.com.au/~polsonhr/meat.html
Send out Napster user IDs and Passwords. Wait for aliens to log in and grab copyrighted music, then watch as the RIAA builds interstellar warships for the express purpose of protecting their "revenue streams."
SETI@Home announced a planned 2 hour outage for today 13:00 UT. Right now it's OK.
Since the xxAA's seem to think that these US laws apply all over the earth (like Norway for example) why should they be restricted to this planet?
All opinions are my own - until criticized
just to play devil's advocate, if you say that intelligent life may be super-rare, yes, the dimensions of space and time make it possible, but what is the probability that ANOTHER intelligent species arose *locally*, that is, within a meaningful locality. Intelligent species arising 5 billion years from now, or 5 billion light years away, may as well not exist, they may as well be in a different universe. Most dreamers believe that we will one day master faster than light travel, and populate our galaxy, but few believe that within the scope of the existence of Homo Sapiens, that other galaxies will be contacted, let alone travelled to and colonized. The distances involved are nothing to a dreamer, but if you've got ANY realist in you at all, you realize that other galaxies are simply way too far away.
So as the probability of intelligent species arising declines, the probability of their MEANINGFUL existance declines as well. If there are no others within this Galaxy, we might very well just hang it up. Of course, we'll never know until we've explored every speck of dust in the universe, not only for signs of current life, or evidence of the past existance. There's no way anybody can ever accurately say "there is NO other life in the universe".
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Or what if intelligent alien life is actually... alien? Let's face it; the aliens in Star Trek are all exactly like humans, except for a single key difference. The Klingons are exactly like humans, except more aggressive. The Ferengi are exactly like humans, except more materialistic. Etc. This makes for an interesting show, but realism it ain't.
Now for a plausible look at what intelligent alien life might be like, read _Solaris_ by Stanislaw Lem. The difference between us and an intelligent alien is likely to be far greater than the difference between any two terran species.
Causation can cause correlation
On the contrary, I think looking for planets is a good start.
Other things searched are meteorites (many of which can easily be found in Antarctica, lying on top of the ice!) for life traces and radiowaves (Is there a Natalie Portman on other worlds and are they doing anything this weekend?)
There are only so many means available until we actually send a craft to one of these extraterrestrial bodies and and look around. As much as Tommy Lee Jones joked about the tabloids being the best place to look for alien sitings, it would seem with all the coverage these things have, SETI should be focusing on trailer parks first. Maybe find some alien sonic screwdriver or sparkplug on the outskirts.
The scope of time is the most daunting. Only for ~100 years have we made enough noise and emitted enough light to be seen from space, nearly doing ourselves in back in 1962. Not even an eyeblink in the history of intelligent life. Odds may be that intelligent life will be found after it's already dead. I think that would be a pretty good wake up --
"SETI reports the sitings of large, bright flashes of light on planet x, followed by total cessation of radio emissions."
Personally, I think it would rock to find a planet ruled by dinosaurs and feed Britney Spears to one 8)
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
About the same time that you master enough technology to be heard outside your system, you master enough technology to kill off your species.
I didn't find his counterargument to this very compelling. For humans, the main reasons for expansion and colonization are :
* trade
* population pressure
* individual drive
Considering that sub-light interstellar travel takes centuries, I don't see how it addresses any of these. Trade might be possible, but it would take a very well-entrenched interest with a profit horizon magnitudes longer than any in human history. And the other two come down to individual motivations, but until cryonics becomes standard stuff and/or near-relativistic travel is a reality, the individual is never going to be able to step off the other end.
The upshot is, I don't see any reason that every new colony established by some civilization is inevitably going to send out its own colonizing force pretty soon down the line. It makes sense as a species to have several scattered colonies, and science would compel a civilization to send out long-range observing missions, but I just don't see that a galaxy-wide empire is the natural result of a spacefaring race.
I read a wonderful book (the author's name escapes me) where he suggested that there will never be more then one planet in the galaxy that is capable of acheiveing near relativistic speeds. The reason is that the species would destroy any other species in a pre-emptive defensive strike. Destroy the other species before they destroy you with a relativistic attack.
Take a big rock, about the size of a bus. Accelerate it to near relativistic speed. Point it at a planet. Watch the pretty light show. Throw ten of these rocks, a couple of hours apart, and destroy all life on the planet.
The nasty thing aobut this attack, is there is no defense. Since the rock is moving almost as fast as it's own image, it arrives when it is first detected.
The reason we have never been contacted is because we have not acheived the ablity to push things real fast. If it looks like we are able to do that, then our first contact may be our last.
The welfare of the people has always been the alibi of tyrants. - Albert Camus
Could a race like the Firengi exist (as in advanced technology but primitive ethics) ??
Ah, you've hit upon Ferengi's Paradox!
No, but when the pulsars were first discovered (1950's?), they were called LGM's, or "Little Green Men". The scientists who discovered hem thought that they were too regular to be a natural phenomenon. They thought that the pulsars were some sort of alien beacon system, too. Now, given the current theories of stellar lifecycles, we know the mos likely mechanism to create such a beast.
As for the Art Bell-type show guest, well, I'd take that for what it's worth...
Meow.
Windows is the Acme of computing -- in the Wile E. Coyote sense.
I never use the word impending. My arguement is that there have been times in the past when sufficiently large technological advances occur which were controlled by suitably small elites that technological freeze points were possible. I mention that one occurs after the development of radio and that this is the most likely civilization for SETI to find.
The advance has to be sufficiently large that it can control, read massacre, the non-equipped and the elite small enough that too few people tinker with it to give fundamental advances. No power on Earth could now freeze technology. Japan did so with guns from about 1600 till the 1850s. Could a planetwide society do the same?
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Simple,
:)
<br>
Just tell them that Our Cultural Tendencies to Over copyright bad stuff by encryption only purpose is to "Protect" them from our failures
<br><br>
Regards.<br><br>
assert(expired(knowldege)); core dump
...to colonize space? The last thing I want is for competing companies to set up rival colonies on Mars or the Moon. I'd also be skeptical about letting NASA take charge of the mission. Poor reliability vs. corporate cost-cutting...it's not a good recipe.
While it's nice to say that in five million years we will have colonized the galaxy, I think it's a little more important to have (and accomplish) short term space exploration goals.
It appears that is the way we are heading, in a matter of decades. It could be that detectable signals are only sent for a very very short period in the time of a civilization.
Your reply is also too homocentric. Human beings as a race tend to think that life will be similar to what they already know. Your assumption that "any advanced civilization surely has to operate within certain economic boundaries" is an example of that. And as for transmissions, Earth is always transmitting, perhaps not all the time from Aricebo; but there's plenty of other noise coming from this ball of rock, over 50 years worth at this point.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine...
If other intelligent, mechanically capable life exists in the universe, then why don't we see them?
Forseeable advances in technology include self-reproducing machines. (Call Von Neumann machines after this argument.) Other forseeable advances include our sending these machines into space to colonize other environments. At current rates within the century, probably within decades.
Even given the speed of light problem, within a few million years our machines likely will have colonized all corners of our galaxy.
The odds of intelligent life achieving technology twice at essentially the same moment are pretty low. Given what we expect ourselves to do, it is a pretty safe bet that if we locate extra-terrestrial intelligence it won't be in our galaxy, it will be in another.
:-)
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
OOps!! What Happen!?! Errr Code Twelve alert!
:)
correct version:
------
Simple,
Just tell them that Our Cultural Tendencies to Over copyright bad stuff by encryption only purpose is to "Protect" them from our failures
Regards.
assert(expired(knowldege)); core dump
Everything that is being done in SETI assumes modulated RF. What if after a while using radio, other civilisations simply move to something else like quantum coupled whatevers?
If the time that a civilisation uses RF signals is limited then so is it's exposure. This could even be a feature if there are other unfriendly civilisations out there.
Nah, SETI@home is interesting and I have about 430 workunits. There is still a time where a cvilisation is visible in the RF spectrum, even if it isn't the whole time.
Where would we all be without the USofA?
The machine gun and rapid advances in military science could have led to a European dominance and freezing of technology development.
Right! The fact that Europe was progressing very fast in the 19th and early 20th century does not lead to a freezing of technological development. Au contraire!
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
I would say that if not for Maxwell, Newton, Einstein, von Neuman, etc, that we would STILL end up with where we are...at some point in the future. If not for Maxwell, the equations would still likely be devised, but by another GREAT MIND. The same goes for Einstein's work, etc. SOMEONE at some point would come up with the basically same ideas but it would have been later and it STILL would derive from a GREAT MIND.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
There are theories out there that suggest planets and evens moons have life on them already but they are with the crust of the planet. I am not talking about the Lost World. I am talking about bacterial life that was formed from with the earth and then if the condtions outside were ok they came and formed into more complex lifeform the answer may not be above but below
If you accept the Big Bang theory, then there is a finite amount of time that the Universe in its current form has existed. Granted that it's possible for many technological civilizations to arise, perhaps we're just the first.
One of the Psalms addresses God using female pronouns.
In Genisis, one of the terms used in reference to God roughly translates to "Man And Woman".
Genisis also states "He created them, man and woman, in his image".
Judaic scripture uses male pronouns the vast majority of the time because God is a patriarchal figure throughout the Torrah. Christian literature also uses male pronouns, for three reasons: 1) Prior to modern feminism, male pronouns were often thought of as being gender neutral, 2) It follows the Judaic tradition, and 3) Because Our Lord is the "father" of Christ.
Nowhere does Hebrew or Christian scripture make the claim that God is specifically male, because He transends humanity, and therefore categorires like race and gender simply do not apply.
So, what you said was not really out-of-line with Christian fundamentals; it was just pedantic and tedious.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I read that SA article a couple of months ago when it was in the July, 2000 magazine. Are you really so overwhelmed with story submissions to /. that you can't sort through it? IMHO, some of the stories that are making it to the front page are too obscure; much too obscure compared to this.
-------------------------
Stupid people suck.
Does it necessarily follow that He must do so? Perhaps He simply chose not to.
If his point was to maximize the good in the universe, then he would be obligated to create as much life as possible to interpret and appreciate the good, and give thanks to its creator.
If his job was just to create it and watch, he's doing a bang up job.
--
+&x
If nothing else, at least the SETI@Home gives people the illusion that they are using their otherwise wasted CPU time for something useful.
And hey, someone just might find something, but that won't happen if nobody is looking!
---
This message has been ROT-13 encrypted twice for higher security.
seti@home won't find alien life because it is just a distributed MP3 compression job on the Aricebo astronomers CD collection.
Bob.
Evolution is usually defined in terms of `Survival of the fittest'. My research suggests that this basic idea is misdirected. Evolution occurs to those populations that survive. Those populations that are particularly unfit go extinct. In essence, Evolution should be coached in terms of `Survival of the good-enough'. Those who are not `good-enough' die, the rest evolve. With this re-definition in mind, we can re-examine what an advanced civilisation would look like, indirectly, by re-examining ourselves.
It is satisfying to our own human egocentrism to believe we are the most evolutionarily advanced animals on this planet. An examination of our strengths and weaknesses argues this is wrong. We, as animals, are not the best at anything. Our flaws are the fundamental reason that we became tool makers, our tools making up for our relatively poor biological adaptations. We are who we are because we substituted technological innovation for biological evolution, and yes, even to this day, that substitution interferes with biological evolution (but will never replace it, for certain). What the substitution did do was to allow the human animals to `fit' into more niche's much more rapidly than normal biological evolution allows, mainly by allowing us to conform an environment to our needs.
In essence, we are evolutionary misfits, and are doing so well because this is true - we were forced to learn a new way of coping.
It is by a great accident that we, misfits every one, managed to survive. That there is life on this planet (and, I believe, on most planets) is of little surprise. My research suggests that WILL be the case pretty much everywhere. That a technological civilisation of any sort came from that process is far more a wonder.
There is a presumption behind the SETI work that if life appears, a technological civilisation will likely appear, at least some of the time. It is this assumption that is likely the most flawed, following from the above arguments.
We may eventually find that relatively few techologically enhanced organisms are produced because evolution is poor at generating them, generating more `fit' organisms most of the time, that only a few civilizations ever do come into existence, precisely because the species that are likely to develop technology are biological evolutionary misfits (as only the misfits need technology to survive), and so are so very likely to become extinct before they master technology. What is worse, because we sidestep biological evolution, we are poorly adapted to handle the problems technology forces upon us, something we still must face as a species.
In conclusion, I think it unlikely that we will find ET intelligence anytime soon, probably not until we actually get OUT THERE.... Is the search worthwhile? I think so, mainly for the scientific derivatives. Will it be successful? I don't think any time soon.
There IS a silver lining to the dark cloud I have painted. The ET's we do encounter are likely to be more like us then we might expect, precisely because they too will be misfits.
Shannon Mann - in need of time to finish his thesis....
A comment overheard in a corn field `If you have better ideas, lets hear them. I am all ears.'
I recall having read (somewhere or other) that some radio astronomers were beginning to think that communication signals don't actually propagate very well across interstellar space.
IANARA, but I believe it depends on wavelength (freqency). Most SETI research is concentrating on wavelengths that are least attenuated by the interstellar medium. Stray signals such as TV & radio programming don't propagate very well for two reasons. One is that those wavelengths get absorbed more, and the other is that the signal follows the inverse square law: the signal decreases in intensity with the square of the distance from transmitter to receiver. A beam of focused radio energy (radar, essentially) would only be attenuated linearly with distance.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
Check out:
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/RamseyTheory.html
Ramsey Theory is:
"The mathematical study of combinatorial objects in which a certain degree of order must occur as the scale of the object becomes large. "
(Quoted from the above link)
Applying this to the origins of life:
If the number of combinatorial objects (planets?) becomese large, then a certain degree of order (life?) must occur.
Ok, the quote is not from me, and I can't remember correctly, but here goes: "To say that the Earth is the only populated planet in the whole Universe is absurd as to assert that in a field sown with seeds, only one grain will grow." -- Can't remember name, some 400-500 BC greek philosipher Something to that effect anyway...
---
Mouse location changed. You must restart Windows for the changes to take effect.
I think you need to go back and read the thread again. You seem to have grasped the wrong end of the stick somewhere.
Heated? I dont think so.
This is certainly true. I'm not advocating that we should, just pointing out that we aren't. Which may come as a surprise to some people.
I can see arguments both ways. One one hand, it would be ironic if the galaxy were populated with thousands of races all of which were scared to send out a signal for fear of being overrun by little green men. On the other, it would be pretty presumptuous for one nation or group of people to decide to send out a message and risk the lives of every (future) being on the planet. Then on the gripping hand I wonder how hard it would be to obtain our exact location from a radio beam unless we told them where we were (which we did in the broadcast to M13). Could they narrow it down to a single star or only find out what direction we were in?
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
The crux of this argument rests on the assumption that removing one thing from history would create a void that wouldn't be filled. But, in the long run, the effects of these accidents of history are probably quite small.
The Earth-moon combination might be rare, but if there are are about a hundred billion stars in the galaxy, and about 1/2 of them are unary stars (IIRC, about 1/2 to 2/3 of stars are thought to be in binary systems), and most of these have planets (which is, I believe, widely suspected by astronomers), then we have 500 million stars with, say, an average of 9 planets each. Rare as an Earthlike planetary configuration might be, it seems likely that at least some of these 4.5 billion planets (give or take a few billion) orbiting single stars would have Earth-like conditions.
Sixty-five million years ago, a meteor caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and many other species. But mass extinctions are common. IIRC, an average every 200 million years or so some catastrophe or other drives most species (90% or so) to extinction. The first occurred when oxygen-excreting bacteria nearly suffocated themselves with their own waste gasses. That is to say, the chances of a random species surviving for more than 200 million years is quite small.
The development of intelligent life is something that may or may not happen as a matter of natural evolution. Remember, though, that there are other species besides humans that are highly intelligent, including some who form complex societies and who make tools. If humans didn't evolve, who is to say that, 10 million years from now, chimpanzees or dolphins wouldn't have developed a similar level of intelligence?
The black death may have promoted technological advancement, but it was hardly the only event. Other events and conditions have spurred technological change, both within Europe and without. Don't forget, too, the setbacks incurred, especially in Europe. Some of the technology and knowledge lost to Europeans after the fall of the Roman Empire was not regained until the 19th or 20th Century, yet this did not prevent us from achieving the level of technological advancement we now have. Technology would have advanced without the Black Plague; perhaps a little more slowly, but advance nonetheless.
The efforts of a few brilliant individuals are, IMO, overestimated. In the short term, their contributions are enormous, but someone else would have eventually come to the same conclusions. The Chinese invented printing centuries before Gutenburg developed his press, and he wasn't the only one in Europe working on that technology either. Calculus was invented simultaneously and independently by Newton and Leibnitz. Einstein was the first to figure out relativitiy, but suppose he had been run down by a bus in 1900. Would someone else have figured it out in the 1930s? 1970s? Maybe it would take until the year 2100, but probably someone would come up with something similar. To us, it is a big deal because we might not have nuclear weapons today if Einstein's ideas had to wait until 2100 to be discovered, but it probably won't make too much difference 10,000 years from now.
As fot a long period of time without a natural catastrophe, it has only been a few tens of millions of years. That's not especially long. I believe that life on Earth is generally thought to be about 3.5 billion years old, and with the Sun having a natural life of about 5 billion years more, that gives us a window of 8.5 billion years or so to have a mass extinction-free period long enough to allow intelligent life to prosper.
Don't confuse how things happened with how they need to happen; the accidents of Earth's development were sufficient to bring about a technological civilization, but it doesn't seem that these accidents were at all necessary causes.
There's no such thing as Scotchtoberfest!
The point is for such a CD to be a rosetta stone. While I can't say that I think like an alien, I have to imagine that a species that could intercept such a device would A) be curious as to what the CD was, and B) have the technology to look at really small things. So they put it under an electron microscope, and ta-da! you see a long grove whith markings on it.
Now, while aliens probably don't use ASCII, if they have anything that we would consider intelligence and technology, they will figure out they are looking at a binary code--after all, that is the second simplest numerical system possible, after tick marks.
From that point, whether an alien will be able to reverse engineer ISO9660 is up for debate, but one of the most important things is that it is undeinable proof of an intelligent species. Of course, so is a space vehicle. Anyway, if it were ME discovering that CD, and finding that it had binary encoded data on it, I would certainly work real hard to decypher it. Honestly, if a species can unravel quantum mechanics (another must for high technology as far as we know), they can figure out how to read a CD.
Evolution concepts are not flawed, especially if you've put more effort into studying them than switching on the Discovery channel. Evolution is a more complex process than just the fittest surviving. Biological organisms strive for homeostasis, the point where they function best at. If you run around and start burning up calories your body will sweat and dialate capilaries in order to shunt the heat produced by the extra expenditure of energy. This is merely a simple example of an organism adjusting it's internal processes to maintain homeostasis. When evironmental conditions around an organism change which cause it to adapt and stay in such a state that new set of biological criteria will be addended to the DNA of said organism and eventually get passed onto progeny. After a few generations the adaptation will become a staple part of that organisms characteristics. Darwin originally proposed that random mutation was the key to evolution but he did not fully grasps the sub-cellular chemistry of biological organisms. Humans are not misfits of any sort. The monkeys living on the coast of modern day Somalia started moving into the water for short stints to gather food and escape from predatores. Evidence of this can be seen in the slight webs of skin between our fingers and our downwardly sloped noses which facilitate surface swimming. Such factors led to us having oposable thumbs and a greater adeptness for using our brains for problem solving (like using rocks to crack open shellfish or using stucks to pry shells open) when they began to stray from the water they kept their afinity for tools. From there we see an increased use of tools as the homo genus spread around adapting to more and more areas leaving their monkey cousins behind. Over the years we lost our fur and developed more complex brains due to our increase use of tools. We first use of technology is what retarded some of our more primal characteristics such as claws. We didn't need technology to survive originally, we've just built our society around it and couldn't fathom not using tools to asist what we left behind on the shores of Africa.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
We've seen the spectacular results so far of the researchers finding Jovian sized planets orbiting at Mercury sized orbits. So far, they're detecting really elliptical orbits, and at least some of the speculation is that these planets formed further out and migrated in, cleaning up the dust and the little planets. Doesn't paint a happy picture for the [percentage of Sun-like stars that have an Earth like rocky planet in the water zone.] We may have a galaxy with lots of Sun-like stars but relatively few Earth-like planets. Has anybody seen an article that relates the 50 or so found planets to the number of stars searched? Has anybody seen an article that extrapolates from this data to how what percentage of stars have nice round orbits with nice blue planets ruled out?
Peace.
I urge everybody to read it. I know that if you are posting here you have "supposedly" read it, but hey, this is slashdot ;o)
Anyhow, I have read it in one breath, it's marvelous, kudos to Mr Marwick!
Now I can start dreaming of extraterrestrial civilizations...
Sigged!
It seems to me that the current lack of success in the Christian religion is indicative of the fact that we really are alone in the cosmos. If there were other superior entities out there we would see evidence for them - after all, they would likely have been around for millions of years already, and in that time their handiwork could easily have reached a scale where we could see them from Earth. But we only see natural pheomena.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
But the problem is that we're not transmitting such a signal. So if the above is accurate, we're basically looking for signals from civilizations quite a bit more advanced, or who place more emphasis on communicating with ETs, than ours. There could be thousands of civilizations a lot like ours that aren't detectable, most of whose members could care less about communicating with ETs and thus aren't putting any effort into sending out a message.
You're thinking of colonization the wrong way. Instead of sending humans and animals to distant planets it would be a much better thing to send a genetic legacy to the far reaches of space. There have been those that have proposed that we are indeed the end result of inter galactic genetic seeding. Arthur Clark being one of those, in the Oddessy series the monoliths were evolutionary guidestones that would eventually get life on Earth to where it needed to be. Thats how you colonize a galaxy.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
The chance that a "Prime Directive" not to interfere in other civilizations is part of the cause is actually more likely than at first glance. Assume that civilizations arise at the rate of one every few thousand years. This means that the first civilization (Civ A) to arise has that amount of technological head start over the next (Civ B). At this point, we've hit the Clarke "Magic" level of technology for A over B, where civilization B could be stepped on like ants by civilization A.
Thus, we don't need every civilization to decide not to interfere. We only need the first to decide on a Prime Directive and decide to enforce it.
That reasoning doesn't work.
This logic simply doesn't work.
I've clocked up 270ish units so far with SETI, but following the conversation here I'm inclined to find a new distributed project to take part in.
I'd like to do something that is going to "expand the sphere of human knowledge" rather than cracking encryption and the like.
Any ideas?
Our society will quickly develop past this "noisy" stage where we are leaking radio patterns into space. Our communication will become more efficient and indistinguishable from noise to anybody else. Likewise, we can't expect to detect any other civilization who happens to be in a similar "noisy" stage -- it's just too short and the universe is very old.
We will gain control of our technology, after having some very close calls with mishandling it. We will use it to enhance our lives and ourselves, and learn to leave the planet alone. Our intelligence, knowledge, and power over matter and energy will expand. Our understanding and ethics will continue grow. Eventually we will master interstellar space travel.
The civilization that is already out there that can travel through interstellar space is extremely advanced beyond our comprehension. This civilization consists of massive intelligence and the ability to form energy and matter into anything it needs at a whim. It is very organized and disciplined, unlike our own present raw immaturity.
The worst we'd see from them is not the total destruction of our society like in countless alien movies. They have no reason to waste this much energy on us. Instead, they're probably watching us, taking samples, etc. to get a detailed idea of where we stand. All we notice is the rare "tagging" of our planet (crop circles, etc.) for whatever reasons they may have, and the unconfirmable stories of UFO sightings and abductions.
The point is that they definitely don't want to disturb us. Our civilization is still in its infancy. We might become something interesting and useful when we grow up. When we do grow up, we'll probably know by then that they are there already and say, "Hello, we think we're ready!" Then we can be expected to be treated like a know-it-all teenager.
Of course, this is all opinion, and it is going to change in the future...
Further, when rebutting a post, don't you think more than a glancing reference to the posters text is appropriate?
I consider humans to be misfits because, from a biological perspective, we are poorly adapted to any particular environment when compared with other animals in their native environments. We don't have a native environment. I put forward the hypothesis that our `misfitness' triggered a reaction that led humans to evolve to use and develop technology, which enhances our continued evolution by skipping need for the slow accumulation of DNA changes biological evolution requires.
Repeating Evolution 101 speaks not to the issue, but, like a mantra, soothes the soul into ignoring a valid scientific hypothesis. You state that `Humans are not misfits of any sort' and then point to hypothesis after hypothesis, stating them as fact. Given the nature of evolution and archeology, we CAN'T know these as fact, and should keep in mind when we start treating them as incontravertable.
If someone needs evidence to show flaws in evolution, you need only ask two questions:
Firstly, evolution is always looked at in hindsight. We see the traces of these changes in our archeological investigations. We take these changes and see a pattern, new features slowly flowing from previous features - we label this evolution. It is a given we cannot know with certainty what processes are at work. And for this reason, Evolutionary Theory is always on shaky ground about giving specifics as to what processes are at work. Evolution cannot be done in a lab.
Or can it?
I think it was Valera who helped evolve a new kind of amoeba, one who had developed a symbiotic relationship with an invading bacteria, a relationship that the new amoeba variety depended upon. Removal of these bacteria killed the new variety of amoeba. Lab experiments such as these CAN be done, and can prove or disprove whether someone's hypothesis about the changes we see in humans were actually from the influences those hypotheses suggest. Fundamentally, lab work will make Evolutionary Theory less like sociobiology, and more like biology.
Secondly, the lack of a bootstrap for evolution was the SPECIFIC reason I went to look for other explanations of evolution. Existing theories were poor at best at explaining how the whole process got started, most centering around purely random events. Possible? Yes. A satisfying answer? In my mind, hardly at all. Evolution has proven to be a robust and undeniable force of change. Something that forceful suggests that a significant process started and continues. The organising principles that brought about evolution in the first place should still be operating, and so, we should be able to derive a science based upon that knowledge.
From these beginnings, I posit my hypothesis. You don't have to like it. If it makes at least one person think (instead of repeating the course material learned in University) I will be satisfied. If it makes someone actually challenge the hypothesis itself, forcing me to modify my hypothesis, I will be ecstatic.
Finally, why is this important?
If there are ET civilisations out there (and I believe there are), knowing how we developed may give us insights into how they might have developed. That understanding may be crucial to our continued survival.
A comment overheard in a corn field `If you have better ideas, lets hear them. I am all ears.'
Perhaps, but see we don't care what they're using now. All they had to do is blast EM noise for a few years so that so that we pick it up. To use your analogy, the aliens went from runners, to cell phones, skipping smoke signals completly. It just doesn't strike me as that plausable.
I'm lookin' for you, dad, I'm even running the Seti@home client on several dozen machines at work .. why won't you talk to me, dad! Why don't you ever call?!
..you gotta be kidding me.
The very fact that we have never encountered so-called "alien lifeforms", must be a sure PROOF of intelligent life out there!
- Steeltoe
Trolls may be the first sign of alien lifeforms though... So there goes that theory about alien intelligence down the drain.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
N = N* fp ne fl fi fc fL
The equation can really be looked at as a number of questions:
N* represents the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy
Question: How many stars are in the Milky Way Galaxy?
Answer: Current estimates are around 200 billion.
fp is the fraction of stars that have planets around them
Question: What percentage of stars have planetary systems?
Answer: Thanks to advances in technology, new planets are being discovered every month. Within a few years we may have a reasonably accurate estimate. For now we'll say 20% (a standard estimate given my many including Frank Drake).
ne is the number of planets per star that are capable of sustaining life
Question: For each star that does have a planetary system, how many planets are capable of sustaining life?
Answer: If you base it on our solar system you might say 3 planets could possibly support life - Venus, Earth, and Mars. There is also the chance that one or more of Jupiter's moons could support life. If our system is typical the answer may be between 3 and 5.
fl is the fraction of planets in ne where life evolves
Question: On what percentage of the planets that are capable of sustaining life does life actually evolve?
Answer: Current guesses range from 100% (where life can evolve it will) down to close to 0%.
fi is the fraction of fl where intelligent life evolves
Question: On the planets where life does evolve, what percentage evolves intelligent life?
Answer: Guesses range from 100% (intelligence is such a survival advantage that it will certainly evolve) down to near 0%.
fc is the fraction of fi that communicate
Question: What percentage of intelligent races have the means and the desire to communicate?
Answer: Who knows? Let's guess 10% to 20%
fL is fraction of the planet's life during which the communicating civilizations live
Question: For each civilization that does communicate, for what fraction of the planet's life does the civilization survive?
Answer: This is the toughest of the questions. If we take Earth as an example, the expected lifetime of our Sun and the Earth is roughly 10 billion years. So far we've been communicating with radio waves for less than 100 years. How long will our civilization survive? Will we destroy ourselves in a few years like some predict or will we overcome our problems and survive for millennia? If we were destroyed tomorrow the answer to this question would be 1/100,000,000th. If we survive for another 10,000 years the answer will be 1/1,000,000th.
When all of these variables are multiplied together we come up with:
N the number of communicating civilizations in the galaxy.
(Oops, I accidentally hit submit too early)
One interesting comparison between us and the hypothetical advanced aliens is modern radio compared to the drums that certain primitive people use to communicate. Radio frequencies pass around them, but there is nothing they can do with them because the do not have the technology to use them.
It's very possible that advanced forms of transmissions are unknown to us, passing through us. Sorry, no links, but I think abcnews.com had a story recently.
What if there's a certain technological advance
that every civilization is bound to make, that
effectively wipes it out? For example, a chain
reaction that creates a Nova? Also, it is impos-
sible to predict. Think about it: the way we
find out about the world is, by most part, experi-
mentation. It's quite plausible that one of these
experiments is bound to be performed by *any*
technological civilization. Like splitting the
atom. Which reminds me, when there was a first underwater nuclear test, some scientists feared that it might set off a chain reaction where all of the oceans undergo nuclear reaction (with all the catastrophic consequences). Something like that may still be ahead of us. And, I suppose, it should be fairly close, cause if it wasn't, other civilizations would have time to expand to other planets/solar systems and therefore would be warned about that experiment, which apparently hasn't happened.
-- ATTENTION: do not read this sig. It doesn't say much.
Send a sattelite into orbit around the sun. It unfolds some huge mirrors, capturing the Sun's light and reflecting it. Other's observing our star will notice the difference in brightness. As the sattelite rotates around the sun it reflects the light in one direction, just like a lighthouse.
Look at how we study stars now. Our star may look normal, let's try ot make it look abnormal. No matter how we communicate I think any civilization of any advancement will notice if a star begins to look 'different'.
Human civilization has only made technological use of radio waves for an extremely short period of time as compared to both the length of time we have had human civilizations and the length of time that humans have inhabited this planet. At the current rate of technological advancement, or even one half that rate, before we've even hit the midway point of the 1000 year duration of our civilization (according to the scale used in the article) we will be long past the "primitive" use of radio signals that we have employed over the past 100 years. To think that an advanced civilization is necessarily going to produce detectable radio signals is, in my mind, extremely short-sighted. But that's what we can look for with our SETI telescopes. And hey, I enjoy pitting identical machines running SETI side by side and watching the Linux box beat the Windows box by a couple of hours every time.
Windows is going the way of phlogiston...
Granted there can be much debate over the possibility of SETI@Home's success or failure, but one thing is for certain. This is by far the most popular use of mass parallel computing to date and I think it is going to be just the beginning. How many other scientific problems await the eager idle cycles of millions of PCs in the world?
Would someone tell me why we assume the following? If there's ET life out there, it's carbon based If there ET life out there they will talk using radio waves If there's ET life out ehey will talk at all My thinking is, as diverse as the universe is, if there's life out there, we may not even recognise it! They may have figured out a way to communicate instantly using what we have labeled "spooky interaction at a distance" (I may have gotten that title wrong, but the more-clued will know what I am referencing) So, there's my problem with this whole concept - we go forth looking for ET assuming they will have something in common with us (I mean that abstractly: i.e. they will "talk" or "see using light waves" etc), and I think that's short-sighted...
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
http://www.sciam.com/2000/0700issue/0700crawfordbo x5.html
This graph seems misleading to me, if you don't know your scales. It's plotted on a log scale (right?). If we could graph that whole thing on a normal scale, wouldn't it look quite different? Anyways they're using subjective terms, like "thoroughly searched". Come on, my room is thoroughly clean according to me, but ask my roomates what they think...
One of the major reasons that ET will prove so elusive is the fact that we're not only looking at narrow slices of space, on narrow frequencies... but we're also looking for a signal that may encompass a very narrow slice of time for a civilization.
Putting aside the argument that intelligent life is not the "goal" of evolution (which is also a very good thing to remember), let's assume that an intelligent civilization DOES evolve out there. How long are they going to use radio for communication?
I don't claim to know tons about the area of the EM spectrum we're currently searching, but don't you think there will be better ways to communicate?
Analogy: Two tribes in two valleys separated by hills communicate via smoke signals. This is, to them, not only the best, but one of the only ways to communicate. Yet, all around them, even passing through them, are our radio waves, from our civilization, carrying speech and music, microwaves carrying our voices... Is it really so hard to adapt this analogy to our situation?
For all we know, there could be civilizations all around us, communicating; we just don't have the technology to detect the transmissions.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
The winners write the history. Anyone who knows anything about technology knows (for example) that Tesla was far superior to Edison in intelligence & creativity. He was as responsible for the light bulb as Edison was (worked with him in his lab), AND Telsa invented flouresent lights, independant of Edison. Edison did not invent something someone else COULDN'T. He PATENTED something first. Do a patent search, Edison vs. Telsa. Who holds more patents? Who created more? Who is responsible for the electricity your computer is using RIGHT NOW? One man will not make or break technology. It will happen in time. Comparing mental intellect to physical prowess is also bogus. They are not interchangable. Intelligence & creativity are not things you can "learn" or "practice" like shooting baskets. It will not matter in 100 years that my hometown St. Louis Rams won the Superbowl. But it will matter that someone invented alternating current.
assertion: a positive statement, usually made without an attempt at furnishing evidence
Thus, we don't need every civilization to decide not to interfere. We only need the first to decide on a Prime Directive and decide to enforce it.
It gets even more likely as we go farther back: if we assume a few million years between civs, civ A is now so overwhelming that it could do anything it wanted without effort. (To paraphrase a line from Gardner, "(They) had a billion years of evolution on humans. To call them godlike would be demeaning.")
Eric
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Wow - this guy really hit a nerve with the moderators.
I've had moderator access six times in the last four weeks. I wish I had it now so I could mod this one up. Whoever moderated this as flamebait and troll doesn't know flameage from clear thinking. The comments were insightful and succinctly stated. I can only conclude the moderator has some ideological axe to grind against religious expression.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Entropia looks interesting, but i'm not a member and don't know any of the specific projects off hand. There's also distributed.net, which does code cracking. again, not sure it's more useful...
do a search on most search engines for distributed projects, there's a whole list.
You people got it all wrong.. The problem of humanity isn't about wether or not we can colonize every part of the universe or not. See: http://www.sciam.com/2000/ 0700issue/0700crawfordbox3.html
If this is true, then humans are just like they said in Matrix: A virus, up to no good other than abusing its environment for its own selfish goals.
Compare this to a computer program: What good is it to produce huge quantities of programs with the same quality and complexity? Sheer quantity is not a human solution. Do you feel happy in huge cities?
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
The problem is, you'd need to want to do this for 5 million years (at the conservative end of the estimates). If you're living on a perfectly good planet, would you want to endure a decades-long trip to another, uncivilized planet? One that took years to even communicate with, once you got there? Just because some scientists decided that we should go explore the galaxy? The chances of a civilization maintaining this same difficult goal for millions of years is implausible.
"To the extent that planets are necessary for the origin and evolution of life..."
How can such a statement be made? Planets are certainly necessary for terran life to evolve, but why the assumption that all life in the universe will be like us? Is this a remnant of the biblical 'Crown of Creation' story of the origin of man?
The way I see it, we are making two major eroneous assumptions. The first is that life in the universe will be like us; communicating, traveling, living, and reasoning like humans. The second is in the prevelance of intelligent life. I agree that life will be found to be fairly ubiquotous, I disagree that it follows that intellegent life will be. As far as we know, in all the history of life on earth exactly one intellegent species has arisen. This after at least four major epochs of the evolution of complex lifeforms: no intellegent fish, no intellegent reptiles, no intellegent proto-mammals, and no intellegent dinosaurs. (by intellegent here I mean tool makers, which are the only ones we seem to care about)
"Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi"
Why? It's true by definition that an omnipotent God is capable of creating life elsewhere. Does it necessarily follow that He must do so? Perhaps He simply chose not to.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Sure, I think all that stuff ought to be tacked on to the end of the Drake equation.
/. discussion a few months ago about some type of new drive that could propel a probe to a nearby star in about 10 years or so? It generated a magnetic field that worked like a solar sail against the solar wind - we'd get some nice photos, and a return trip as well. We'd have to loft a lot of Pu tho.
Which would explain the current results.
As others have said here, I think our best bet is to refine our technology for locating planets around other (local) stars, fish out the best likely candidates, and start sending probes. There was a
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
It's a good thing, since we'd probably try to destroy any extraterrestrial culture we bumped into.
Or they'd destroy us.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
There are atheistic "fundamentalists" out there just as there are religious fundamentalists you know. People like Dawkins use every piece of scientific knowledge as a weapon in their fight against the idea of God, and are quite outspoken about the "evils" of religion.
And when I said alone, I meant in a spiritual sense. In that sense, an atheist can be assumed to worship themselves as a god, but I think that may be taking it a little too literally.
One of the problems I see with shooting CD's into space (or even into orbit around our own planet) is that it would require a future race to have developed the same technology as we have. What if our race took a completely different technology path of everyone else (I recall a email joke I received once of an alien race meeting humans, and deciding that it was impossible to deal with us, since "meat" was talking...
In my typically fatalistic mental pictures, I don't think the future societies who receive our CD time capsule will have the ability to decode the data. For example, consider the ancient Egyptian heiroglyphics. We know they were a technological society, with engineering and such, but not too much else has been gleaned (although, IANAHistorian). But, from what I know, had the Rosetta stone not been found, the glyphs we know would not have been translateable. And that's just over time, knowing that we have very much in common with the other race. How much more difficult would it be for a completely alien race to decode our technology?
"Hey look Zborak, another AOL coaster..."
I know this is rather rambling, and combining 2 slashdot stories, (this one, as well as the time capsule one).
I am dyslexia of borg - your ass will be laminated.
Trollbait indeed! ITS UP TO A 4 FOR INSIGHTFUL? My God (no pun intended) what the heck are the moderators doing?
Sig it.
- are as rare as Crawford maintains, based on the unlikelihood that simple life forms evolve into more complex ones
- are in all probability very, very far away from our galaxy and therefore more difficult to detect by conventional means
- have been broadcasting (purposely or inadvertantly) in a different medium than the ones we consider likely.
For example, a truly advanced civilization may have learned how to propogate messages through "gravity waves" or the extra dimensions (six, IIRC) that superstring theorists postulate must exist, or using the "spooky action at a distance"property of quantum particles. And these are only the examples we know enough to guess at.Obviously we have good reasons to be searching the radio frequencies for signs of intelligence - after all, such frequencies are commonly emitted by all sorts of cosmic objects and can be used fairly easily to transmit messages over long distances. But perhaps the very fact that these frequencies are clogged already would lead other (more?) advanced civilizations to avoid them and look for other, clearer means of transmission.
Coupled with Crawford's theory that intelligent life has a low probability of evolving out of simpler life forms (i.e. bacteria or protozoa), and the follow-on assumption that such civilizations would thus be spread very thinly around the universe, this hypothesis could be a plausible explanation for why we haven't found anything yet. After all, we've only just started looking.
Was that out loud?
If flee evolved as dominant somewhere else, that would explain why they haven't come here...
"Those humans, there they go again, killing each other..."
"What for THIS time? Oil? Race? Religion?"
"No, I keep picking up something about a flaming troll..."
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Here's some thoughts I've had about SETI:
Something I've never seen is any information about how powerful the extraterrestrial signals have to be for us to hear them- to do that, we need to know how much gain the receiving antenna has, what the sensitivity of the receiver is, and the intensity of the background noise. From that information we can get an idea of what sort of transmitters (at what distance) we're looking for. For example, a big radio station in the US is about 100KW, with antennas that point the signal more or less to the horizon. We make it a point not to send too much energy up- the intensity pointing straight up at the sky is many dB down from the main lobe. Just how far away could the Aricibo antenna hear a station that had an effective 1KW (isotropic) pointed in their direction?
Of course the Aricibo antenna doesn't listen at the frequencies of FM radio, it listens to signals in the microwave region (for SETI work, from what I understand). At these frequencies, it is even easier to point the signal from an antenna. Unless someone is broadcasting to us intentionally, I have a feeling we're never going to hear them.
There has been much talk about how we've been broadcasting to the universe- but at stellar distances, all those signals are going to look like they're coming from the same point, albeit diverse in frequency. But everything at the same frequency gets added together- and if you add enough non-correlated signals together- guess what: it looks like noise! Can our signals compete with the EM noise put out by the Sun?
Another thing: as our technology improves, our signals look more and more like noise, and we use less effective power- consider any sort of spread spectrum- the energy has been spread out over a wide area to combat interference, lowering the peak power at any one frequency. At the same time we're making improvements with our receivers so that we don't need to transmit as much power. It all ends up as more efficient use of what we have (more bandwidth for the same power) I can't think of any expanding intelligence that couldn't see the utility of that- so as an intelligent race expands, the overall amount of unintended radiation may not go up proportinately.
On the other hand, I support SETI- I've got it running on 4 machines, and I've completed over 350 SETI@Home work units. If we don't look, we won't find anything until they land on the White House lawn. These are just some things I've been thinking about.
Note bene: this is called the God of the Gaps argument, and you've gone an excellent job of showing why it's a pointless position.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Why do we believe that to be intelligent you must have a technological civilization? It can be argued that dolphins & whales are intelligent. Could not an alien life form reach intelligence but not have the means to create technology?
The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data.
The author seems to vastly overestimate how easy colonization of other planets would be. It's obviously very hard. If we all had to move to Mars tomorrow, well... it just wouldn't work out.
He says that they would have "evolutionary advantages" on their planet. sure... but not on arbitrary other planets. the universe is vast... i don't see aliens climbing aboard large spaceships for multi-generational voyages to set up shop on some unknown planet.
"Luck is the residue of design" -- Branch Rickey
...and so is www.seti.org
:) Maybe they're /.ed. Or maybe they've decided to close up shop and try again in 50 years.
Both just time out. I wanted to get the client (b/c obviously they need the help
While I have no problem with your belief I can't help but note that religion is constantly losing ground to science.
The bastions of religion are all in areas which are unknown or "unknowable". As science begins to peer into these subjects religious dogma is shown to be innacurate or downright wrong.
Do religions or their champions collapse? No. They simply retreat back into less-explored regions.
>> The face that life on Earth arose so quickly after it's formation - about 500 million years later - is a sure sign of the Lord's hand at work.
Is it? We just don't know - and unless YOU are God you don't either.
My point isn't whether your statement is true or false. My point is that if science gets closer to the truth of this you will cede this ground and move onto some other "sure sign".
The first is the existence of moon of sufficient size to help create tides and provide a just the right amount of long term stability to the earth to allow life to evolve. Back in the sixties I read a book on the probabilities of life in the universe that pointed out the importance of the moon to life on earth. If current theories about the formation of the moon are correct the moon was formed by the collision of a mars size planetoid with the proto earth. That is a rare event.
Rare event two: the extinction of the dinosaurs by an asteroid impact.
Rare event three: birth and procreation of mutated ape of sufficient intelligence to create civilization. This ape was an omnivore: hunter killer explorer and able to exist on plants as well - a land animal; a social animal but not a herd dweller. Imagine for a second that the creature that sprouted first intelligence was a dolphin like creature or a cape buffalo type animal. In that case the course of intelligent life on this planet might have been very different.
The black death in europe. It has been pointed out that the decimation of europe's population allowed both the freedom to develop technology and the need for labor saving devices.
The existence of a very few brilliant individuals; remove 20 or so people from history and we never develop technology. Remove the printing press and everything changes, remove Isaac Newton and everything changes dramatically. Who knows what things we have failed to learn for want of a person to show us the way?
A long period of time without a life killing catastrophe of natural origin. A mild nuclear flare up from the sun - a major impact from a large asteroid - a 'nuclear winter' from a volcanic event, an ice age at the wrong time.
We may well be the only technological civilization in the galaxy - or even the universe. How sad, how terribly sad.
Where do you think NSA gets all the processing power from?
Unable to read configuration file '/bigassraid/htdig//conf/14229.conf'
Geocrawler error message.
How many stars have we seen VS. How many stars are out there.
Sig it.
One of the assumptions of those who believe that SETI will yield a positive result (signal from extra-terestial civilization) make some assumptions about the probability of life springing up on other planets that may be incorrect.
We have all learned in elementary school that if you put some hydrogen, amonia, methane and other gases in a chamber and apply some electricty, that simple amino acids are formed. And the hypothesis goes, once you get amino acids, simple organisms are certain to appear. However, this may be an over simplicity of what really needs to happen.
One of the characteristics of life (as we understand it), is that a means for self replication of the genetic code is required. This requires two 'matching pieces' of genetic material, DNA and RNA. DNA on its own cannot self replicate - it needs RNA to complete this process, and the RNA must exactly match the requirements of the DNA to cause the self replication.
Considering that in the primordial soup, the random arraingement of amino acids join together (defying entropy since the universe in general tends towards disorder)to form an ordered chain of DNA,
AND
that an arraingement of amino acids join together (again defying entropy) to form an ordered chain that makes the complimentary RNA chain
AND
that they just happen to be floating in the primordial soup with sufficient proximity that they 'hook up' ( a significant statistical improbability)
THEN
you may or may not have a DNA chain that is capable of self replication, let alone one that is yields to a single celled organism, something that we would recogize as life, from which all other live could eventually evolve from mutations in its cellular division.
I am not implying that we are alone, just that the universe may not be "teeming with life" as we might like to believe.
Huh. I kinda expected the article to be one sentence: "SETI has not found aliens because they don't exist."
The Drake Equation is merely an attempt to break up an extremely difficult question - "how many communicating civilizations are there in our galaxy" - into more manageable parts. By focussing on each individual probability and attempting to improve limits on those we can improve the reliability of their product.
I don't think Frank Drake, or any serious-minded person who quotes this equation would fail to acknowledge that most of the probabilities are unknown at this stage. That's no reason not to make educated guesses...
Dang it, I can't find the URL -- but the general gist was that we could only detect signals from within a small radius, and that a civilization outside that range (even if broadcasting continuously) could not be heard unless the sender was using truly huge quantities of power (ie., more power than any transmitter on Earth has ever used).
I dunno, it seemed plausible to me. But then again, I'm an idiot, so . . .
I have no
This assumes that ET societies evolve along similar lines to ours in terms of the balance of technology and ethos. History is full of nations where this is not the case. Israel, the historical kingdom, was far more advanced in theology than it's contemporaries. England frequently in government, Germany repeatedly in science, currently the USA in entreprenership. Why should it be assumed that this would not carry over to whole societies? Could a race like the Firengi exist (as in advanced technology but primitive ethics) ??
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
All comments are welcome, and they take a point of view of christianity. I'd moderate it up, because its a good point for them. Even if you disagree. I'm glad all the flamebait is gone. That's some good moderating...
If you disagree, don't bitch and cause flamebait, just make a good counterpoint.
-- "Almost everyone is an idiot. If you think I'm exaggerating, then you're one of them."
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Even if you remove the "few brilliant individuals" from history, we would still have technology +/- a few years. "Necessity is the mother of invention", remember? How many things have been discoverd in parallel by independant groups (e.g. calculus)?
I think that technology develops at the time it does because the world is ripe (that is, the state of the art for many different areas of knowledge are sufficient) for that discovery to occur.
Also: why is it sad if we are the only civilisation in the universe at this or any time? Does it really impact _our_ existance? Sure, there's a lot of space out there, but it doesn't give or take any meaning from our existance (not that we have ANY meaning in this existance, just that ET civilisations are independant of our existance).
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Of the ten commandments, these would be most objectionable:
1 No other gods before me
2. No graven images, etc
3. Something about a name and vanity
4. something about keeping a day holy
5. adultery is in the eye of the beholder
6. something about treating servants and wives as property.
But, then, I'm not exactly straight thinking, in your eyes-- since I believe that the "ten commandments" are the product of but one religion, and should not be posted in, say, courtrooms.
What if there is an alien race which has a huge case of xenophobia (due to a previous war or something, who knows)? They have a number of wandering probes that survey the galaxy as possible, but mostly they listen intently for the wailing of new civilizations across the stars (aka: radio waves). After hearing a new threat come into existence they send out the fleets to destroy it. Might take a hundred years or more for them to reach the newbies due to distance or course.
Sure it's a thought with plenty of holes in it, but my random goal of the week is to see how many kooks I can set off. Ever see a guy try to saw down a broadcasting tower?
"They're going to hear us, you have to stop transmitting! Ahhhhh!"
Andrew Borntreger
Andrew Borntreger
Champion of cinematic disasters
Even if Earth was deliberately seeded with life, as some scientists have speculated, it has been left alone since then.
Well that is a possiblity that hasn't been explored in the article at all. If there is a colonization "wave" as suggessted, maybe the ETs were moving on trying to colonize the galaxy (and beyond? ;-) ) asap. So they quickly "seed" the "third rock from the sun" and move on. They ETs or their generations must way way beyond any reachable distance by now.
That also means that the ETs may be eactly like us... or us exactly like them. Am not a christian, but doesn't the old testament say something like "God created Man in his own image?" or something to that effect? i wonder if "God" are these possible ancestors who hovered around in the skies till they were sure that the seeding went properly...
The first is the existence of moon of sufficient size to help create tides and provide a just the right amount of long term stability to the earth to allow life to evolve.
If you do believe in evolution, which from you post you seem to support, then surely an animal would adapt to the enviroment around it. I mean, a climate change, or even say on Mars a micro-organism wouldn't develop a depency for O^2, no instead it'd delevop a life support system designed for Mars.
A lot of people I've talked to think, "how lucky it was that earth was so habitable for us". It should really be, how lucky it was for us to be able to adapt to earth's enviroment.
A more concrete example would be the grasshopers that live in the small underground tracks created from lava that was spewed from exploding volconos. The grasshopers don't have any eyes, because it is completely dark in there. So over time they adapted to their enviroment. This example is just a small one. But you can see how something might adapt towards ANY enviroment, regardless of how hosptial it seems to us.
To quote that annoyning ass-clown from Jurassic Park, "Life will find a way."
Open Source, Open Standards, Open Minds
There aren't any other creatures on the planet even close to our intelligence. I know that Koko has been taught sign language, but does Koko have anything to say? Mostly it is "Koko good - give me a banana". If intelligence wasn't a rare mutation we would expect to see another instance of it in the 4 billion year record of this planet - we don't.
Point 4: The great man theory of progress. Eliminate Edison and tell me about MP3's. Edison's patent for the phonograph didn't have even a single prior art reference of any type that anyone could find. To claim that someone else would have invented it is specious at best. Why are they called Maxwell's equations? By your, and other people's line of reasoning the correct name would be 'electromagnetic equations which anyone could have come up with but chance gave it to this guy'.
The attack on the great men of history was created by a bunch of mediocre thinkers who can't imagine any other method of thought than their own. It is designed to denigrate and deny the existence of greatness and to exalt mediocrity. The idea is "If I'd been around then I could have come up with XYZ" Yeah, BULLSHIT, if you aren't a great thinker now -if you can't come up with great accomplishments now - what makes you think you could have then?
The other people who were working on a given 'idea' (if there are any others) all FAILED. There is no reason to believe that they would have eventually succeeded. We remember the ones we do BECAUSE THEY SUCCEEDED.
While the 'anyone would have done it' theory is all nice and Politically Correct it is not provable.
We study the great thinkers of history because they taught us different ways of thought - they had an influence on the way modern man thinks. They weren't a bunch of Cliff Clavins sitting in some bar spouting random made up BS. The supply of great men is very small.
I'm not sure about the first point, the only time I've read about the importance of the moon to life, it was in an Asimov science-fiction book :-)
I'm not sure if a huge moon is really needed to have life, it helps yes but is-it a requirement?
I don't know..
I agre with your points two and three but not about the "black death" and the "existence of very few briliant individuals".
Both factors may have accelerated the technological evolution, but they are not "mandatory".
It is quite common that different teams achieve identical discovery independentely nearly at the same time, and sometimes some discoveries are made, then lost and found again by other people..
I'll bite the bait - if your God is omnipotent, why do you place boundaries on his work by claiming that we, the lifeforms on Earth, are the only ones he made? It would occur to me that a truly omnipotent God would have created beings in his image lots of places. Everywhere would not be a problem, since he's also omnipresent. He just hasn't seen fit to tell us about it, or something, I don't claim to know how your God works. I see NO reason why believing in the Bible would exclude believing in extraterrestrial life - I rather think it would include extraterrestrial life because of the omnipotency. What happened to being humble before God? Your cocky claim that you know EXACTLY where his work ends is in glaring contrast to the humbleness towards an omnipresent/omnipotent God that the Bible actually teaches us.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
(One sq. km will allow you to detect an Earth-size planet, at a distance of 1 AU from it's sun, at a resolution of 1 pixel.)
You also want to place the dish(es) in space, to reduce noise pollution from unintelligent life-forms, such as humans.
(A reasonable starting configuration would be two dishes 500 miles in diameter, shielded by the moon from Terrestrial interference, and placed far enough apart to use interferrometry, etc, to guague distance and motion.)
Then, you have to use a practical time-base. Most modern radio telescopes use as long a time-base as they can get away with, to maximise signal gain. For SETI work, you really need the =SHORTEST= possible time-base your equiptment will allow, so that signals aren't smudged into the background.
Third, it's easier to detect complex, unstable atmospheres than it is to detect a signal, so using the absorbtion lines as a filter would help. This would avoid false positives, such as reflected signals, because ALL the signals you're looking for would need to be reflected in just the right way to appear to come from exactly the same distance and direction.
Lastly, assumptions about the nature of the signal should be avoided at all costs. Checking a few thousand, a few million or even a few billion channels in a very narrow band is really not going to have much chance of success. To carry out a SETI search, you must check several septillion channels, over a wide band, with checks for all usable rates at all frequencies scanned, with and without allowance for doplar on one (or both) ends, without excluding "random noise". (What may be "random", when examined over one interval, may stand out as "WOW! II, the Real Signal" over another. By recording the raw data, and examining it using a variety of methods, you stand a much better chance of locating a signal.)
Oh, and don't forget aliens with CB's, who only use the side-bands.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I wonder what aliens would taste like?
Chicken?
---
"There aren't any other creatures on the planet even close to our intelligence."
No, the sea-going mammals are waaaaay ahead of us.
Think about it.
They've figured out that all you need to do is swim about, have fun, have sex, eat fish and play.
Compare that to YOUR working week and tell me who's more intelligent.
--
Peter
SETI must count on one of two things happening to ET societies. First, the rare one which everyone dwells on. A neighboring civilization arises at very much the same time as ours and we pick up very similar to our radio signals from them.
Much more likely is that a neighboring society arises to a break point in the technological chain and freezes there. This break point is after radio is invented. Where it not for the USA's rapid growth and evolution in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (and Japan's rise in power), Earth could have hit one of these break points. Basic radio would not have advanced without American hobbyists screwing around with it in the first few decades of it's existence. The machine gun and rapid advances in military science could have led to a European dominance and freezing of technology development. If small power elites control technology and the technology is sufficiently advanced then such a breakpoint can be reached. Post radio break point societies is what SETI really looks for.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Personally, I always thought that the SETI project was interesting from a theoretical point of view, but it has little chance of actually finding something. The main problems are:
(a) SETI assumes that the extraterrestrial race uses radio waves,
(b) the extraterrestrial race is of a similar technological level to us, and
(c) the problem of distance.
Issue (a) can't be helped. Radio astronomy is probably our best technique for exploring interstellar space at this time. If some extraterrestrial race uses some other technology for communication... well, we can't do anything about that. Issue (b) can't be helped either. If the extraterrestrial race has, say, Industrial Age technology, then they can't be detected. Not our fault. As for issue (c), remember that a finite speed of light means that anything we see or detect has a "time lag". Many of the stars scanned during the SETI project are hundreds or thousands of light years away from us.
For instance, imagine that we find simple radio transmissions from a star 500 light-years away from us. This means that 500 years ago, there was something there, at approximately our level of technology. In the present though, that extraterrestrial race may or may not still be there. If it is still there, then they likely 500 years ahead of us in terms of technology. If instead the race is our equal in technology, then signals from the planet would have just recently been transmitted, and would not have reached us yet.
However, I think the SETI project is important and will continue to be important in the future.
The ESA Hipparcos satellite took very precise measurements of star parallax for over 2 million stars and after years of data reduction has determined around 120,000 of them to be within 3000 light years or less. The other 1,880,000 are apparently farther away than 3000 LY since their parallax was below the insturment measurement threshhold. Of the 120,000 "local" stars, only around 40,000 are considered to be of "constant" luminosity like the sun; the rest are variable luminosity stars probably hostile to life. Thus despite huge estimates of 100 billion stars in the galaxy, the number of "local" "constant" stars within 3000 LY is only 40,000 - a much smaller sample of possible stars that are a very daunting distance away for ET detection. So, Where Are They? I think they are Probably Further Away Than We Can Detect...but my SETI screensaver churns on anyway.
- the existence of moon of sufficient size to help create tides and provide a just the right amount of long term stability to the earth to allow life to evolve. . . That is a rare event
- the extinction of the dinosaurs by an asteroid impact
- birth and procreation of mutated ape of sufficient intelligence to create civilization
- The existence of a very few brilliant individuals
- A long period of time without a life killing catastrophe of natural origin.
I think that if the probability of intelligent life arising naturally is nonzero (i.e. there is no divine intervention or the like required), then it must have happened many times throughout the universe; the universe is simply too unimaginably huge for it not to have. However, intelligent life in a galaxy a gigaparsec from us is not terribly interesting; if that's our closest neighbor, then we might as well be alone. The interesting question is whether there is intelligent life close enough that we might be able to interact with it someday, and on that question we are basically ignorant. We have no idea how typical our own planet and solar system really are. We have begun to see signs that planets, at least, are not all that uncommon, and this is progress, but we have no idea how likely the coincidences that allowed technological civilization to evolve really are. Any attempt to generalize from the one example we have to the galaxy as a whole is mere speculation. Not that there is anything wrong with speculation, mind you, but we should take care not to confuse our speculation with fact.Granted, but is this the only stable configuration? What about moons around gas giants? What about configurations that don't occur at all in our solar system?
Why is this necessary? Who is to say that the dinosaurs wouldn't have spawned an intelligent race on their own, had they survived. Or maybe they would have died off for other reasons; the late Cretaceous is not the only mass extinction in earth history, after all.
We have no data on how rare this really is, nor can we be sure that something resembling a primate is the only sort of life that can develop civilization.
This is a very distorted view of scientific and technological progress. Closer examination of history shows that when the time for an idea is right, there are usually many people working on it independently. We remember the one who got there first, and we forget the also-rans, but that doesn't mean they weren't there. If Newton had died of the plague, others would have picked up the torch. Maybe we would have had to wait another decade or two, but physics would have developed, just the same.
Sure, but how rare is that, really? With only our own planet's history to draw from, it's hard to say, exactly.
Since we are too ignorant to predict from theory what we might find out there, our only recourse is to look and see what we can turn up. SETI is a crude tool; there are too many ways for it to fail to detect something that really is out there. For the moment, however, it is the only tool we have. Someday we will have space-based interferometers that are capable of resolving nearby planets directly, and that will tell us a lot more about how typical or atypical our own planet really is. And after that, who knows? We may never find out whether or not we are alone, but if we don't look, then we'll definitely never know.
``Sure the game is rigged, but don't let that stop you. If you don't bet, then you can't win.'' --Robert A. Heinlein
-rpl