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.

Comments

We're looking for smoke signals

[Verteiron]

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.