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Explaining SETI
Lisa wrote to us about
an interview with Brian McConnell, the author of a new SETI book, who talks about how the search has touched many different scientific disciplines, and has spawned improvements in astronomy, computing, and wireless communications.
The best evidence for extraterrestial intelligence is that none of it has tried to contact us.
:If aliens wanted to talk, I think they would have done. Obviously they still consider us to be too primitive
We aliens from fr5xg27hYarrhtzzz.
We send messages by post account anonymous coward on slashdot interspace message port.
Nobody replys to us.
Perhaps humans think we be inferior life form.
Our friends from 31337 system have same problem.
Surely the question should be the other way around - the ancient Egyptians had scads of spare labour and piling up a big heap o' stones is about the easiest way to do monumental architecture. So why did it take them hundreds of years to develop the techniques and organisation that resulted in the Gizan pyramids? My theory is that Evil Extraterrestrial Oppressors (ETOs) were kidnapping anyone showing signs of inventiveness and independant thought. Only after the ETOs were defeated by the Benign Extraterrestrial Resistance (BET) were humans able to emerge from the shadows of their oppressors and demonstrate their true rock piling capabilities. The reason there is absolutly no evidence in the archaeological record for the existance of either the ETOs or BETs is because both sides used their Advanced Alien Technology (AAT) to build Stealthed Black Chariots (SBC) for their war. I found a fragment of one of these SBCs during a recent visit to Egypt, but I put it down in my bedroom and its stealth technology is so advanced (even now after thousands of years) that I can't find it again. Can I have my royalty cheque now please? Luke
Heh, if it eats, procreates, and maybe eventually dies, it counts as life in my book. I think people set their sights too high on what constitutes "life." Even a bacteria is the result of millions of years of change.
Also, about the changing of the conditions: you have to remember that we are talking about an entire planet here, over millions of years. As long as the conditions aren't overly esoteric, it is a good bet they existed somewhere on the planet sometime in the past. If it's too hot in an area, let the continent move farther north, or let an earthquake expose some minerals not normally found on the Earth's surface, or have the area form on the top of a mountain with lower pressure, or the bottom of the ocean under great pressure.
From what I can tell, the sience was there all along, everybody just failed to notice it.
Of course this is all IMHO.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
Great point. So what if it takes 100 years to answer them. A lot of the research that hubble is doing is looking at light that left galaxies man more years ago than that. Look at a hubble deep field shot - most of that light left before the Earth was even here. Yet we still learn things.
What if someone 100 light years was to pick up a transmission that left earth 100 years ago? What would it be...not "First Post", but probably some very weak radio program - if even that (though I feel bad for them when Erkel gets there).
Besides if we do find a signal, it gives us a target to go visit when we do get to interstellar travel.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
You can't justify SETI by its technological spinoffs; it's like justifying the entire US space programme by Teflon(r) or the whole of Particle Physics by the WWW.
In all these cases it is likely that the same amount of money invested in more directed research would have produced more and better tangible results (in the short term, anyway..).
In my opinion, pure scientific research should be justified only on its own merits. (And, incidentally, I think that SETI is a complete waste of money and clock cycles - spend the money on building warp drives, and your CPU time on "curing cancer". :-) )
Of course, that $50-an-hour valuation is only valid if you *do* work during the time that Teflon saves you - if you're anything like me, that's unlikely... :-)
I liked Sagan's (only intentional) sci-fi novel on SETI called "Contact". The book is better than the Jodi Foster movie based on it.. The first part of the book gives a reasonable scenario of how SETI happens. The latter part of the book drifts into scientific and philosphical speculation, tan may turn some people off.
This may sound like a unusual idea, but came up at a UC Boulder session(*) on science funding last Friday. A prominent SETI researcher was on the discussion panel and contrasting how his field was funded compared to more traditional hot fields like genomics and computer science. But then the half-joking question came up as to why doesn't a SETI organization float stock to fund research? However, the SETI researcher replied that people have seriously considered that. He said "imagine the financial worth of a discovery, especially if some advanced alien technology was communicated". Though the chance of success is very speculative, a SETI break-through stock play could make the InterNet stock bubble seem mild.
(*)The University of Colorado holds the week-long World Affairs Symposium each spring in Boulder. It assembles a couple hundred scientists, artists, policy makers and philosophers into 200 publicly open dicussion panels and workshops over the week.
Astronomy has a long, rich history of important contributions by amateurs (i.e. people who aren't paid salaries for this work). And SETI may be the most distinctive and grand project in this line.
SETI has been an orphan of official goverment research funding. Investigators would cop a few hours here and there on radio telescopes. It finally garnered a few tenths of a percent of the NASA budget at one time, but was perodically the butt of "mad-science" jokes in Congress and finally terminated. However, it is as strong as ever from private individual funding, typically from computer entrepenuers such as Hewlitt and Paul Allen. University chip R&D project prototype new chip designs for SETI's insatiable signal processing needs.
SETI has also spawned the worlds largest hyper-computer and public-donated computing resource. At last count there about 2.4 million SETI@home screen savers out there, diligently searching for spectral peaks in small chunks of radio recordings.
No, what's in the bible is stories which were handed down as oral tradition for centuries before being written down. That's hardly evidence. Now the discovery of a layer of radioactive dust under the present-day location of Sodom and Gomorrah, or a crater at the center of the site might be evidence, but just being in the Bible doesn't make it evidence.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
The difference is that the blank tape could have been easily caused by aliens, but any hidden message in the digits of pi could only have been placed there by God or at least something with very powerful control over our universe. This really was the whole point of the book, although I admit it would be a little harder to get across to the average movie-goer. Sometimes the big thoughts are hard to explain, I guess.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
motto: "Gne's Not English"
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
An excellent book is "Captured by Aliens" by Joel Achenbach. He covers both the scientific search for extraterrestrial life, and also a rational approach to the phenomenon of alleged alien encounters. He has excellent informative and funny style. Its a great read !!!
oreilly.com: What could we learn from another civilization?
McConnell: One of the things I discuss in my book is how it is easier to undress and petrify hot young actresses than most people imagine. All that is required is a scientifically proven magical petrification ray and a giant aibo. But what we cannot do is undress and petrify hot young daughters of famous open source programmers. If there is another technological civilization nearby, it will be possible to communicate using equations, images, and algorithms. And one of the things we'd like them to communicate is a method for creating a naked and petrified Heidi Wall. I discuss this at length in my book.
I don't know about any of you, but that's a book I'm going to have to purchase. Also, I'm going to start donating my cycles to SETI today.
--Shoeboy
There isn't an easy answer here. In a society where the taxpayer decides what the taxes pay for, you have no guarantee that the taxes are going to fund things like "feed the hungry."
As a society, we must spend our money on many different issues, trying to address many different problems. You rely on the taxpayers to bicker it out amongst each other (directly or through their representatives) how to spend the money, and how much they're willing to pay.
Personally, I think the "feed the hungry" banner is flown a little too often (yikes, here come the flames). Many countries are hit by famine not because they don't have enough food, but because of wars, because of corrupt politicians, whatever. It doesn't do any good to send a barge of food to a third-world country if the dictator siezes it upon arrival and shares it with his supporters.
Yes, even the so-called wealthy nations have hungry people living in poverty. But at some level, that's not my fault, and I shouldn't have money taken away from me to fund their food. Before you talk to me about being out of touch, I lived off state-provided money for about 7 years of my childhood. I know what it's like to get foodstamps and government cheese. I also know what it's like to pull yourself out of that gutter, and I know plenty of people who never did. We need a system that feeds those that really need it, without making it so easy for people to milk the system that they stop trying to get off of it. That's a delicate balance, and a problem that won't go away just by throwing money at it.
Why dedicate any money to funding the arts? Why dedicate any money to researching cures for AIDS (after all, it's fairly easy to avoid catching the disease, isn't it [tongue in cheek here, folks])? Why go to the moon?
Millions of reasons. Here's one for you. Because if we hadn't gone to the moon, if we weren't building rockets and space stations, what would I have had to dream about as a kid? What would have inspired me to learn enough math and get good enough at it to get scholarships to college?
We need money to keep people alive, yes. But we also need to keep their dreams alive. IF (and this is a huge IF)...IF we ever find anything out there, it will be the biggest thing to happen to our society EVER. Considering how cheap it is to continue this research, we would be terribly remiss in stopping it.
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There is something I never understood about SETI. Suppose there were the same anthenaes and systems used by SETI in Alpha Centauri, used by another civilization.
Would they be able to receive our own signals (TV, Radio and such) and interpret them as an inteligent signal comming from our solar system? Would they think this could be some sort of interference instead? What do our waves have that makes them an "inteligent" form of transmission?
Thanks and no flames, please.
There are two sets of odds which must be considered when calculating the probability of SETI working. First, the chance of life developing elsewhere. Second, the chance of elsewhere developed life becoming intelligent. The first can be relatively common (or more specifically, only rare, not extremely rare) but the second be extremely rare and SETI still won't work. And this looks like the case.
Personally, I'm all for SETI. As long as it's zero success rate proscribes it's receiving massive funding. I know that when scientists have to scrounge, have to be imaginitive, they are often doing their best work. Should Aricebo be used for SETI? Occasionaly, but there is plenty of other science to do as well.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
While Sagan's book is really good about the SETI side of things, I thought it really, really came up short on other issues. Sagan helped me get into his alma mater, but we squared off on the roles of both capitalism and religion. He basically thought they had little or none in the modern world (or at least the modern mind.) These deep beliefs pervaded both his book and the movie. Then again, I think he would have regarded the movie as a decent adaption of the better book.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Now, I have to disagree with you on the pi issue, or lack thereof. I thought the dialog between the bureaucrats about how long the blank tape lasts was a suitable replacement and a lot less technical for the average movie-goer.
Sagan's normal arguements on faith were two pronged a) disprove an interventionist god, b) apply the Principle of Parsimony (Occam's Razor) to refute the need for God. I thought the movie paralleled this M.O.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
The main gap in the argument is the assumption that the travelers do, in fact, colonize other planets. Given the technology to maintain a self-contained habitat for generations, building a few more out of a few stray asteroids is more efficient, and closer to the lifestyle to which the travelers have become accustomed, than colonizing a planet.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
The knowledge of the star Sirius does not predate the 20th century (for the Dogon). They incorporated some things Western visitors told them into their beliefs. The source of the Dogon knowledge is perfectly prosaic.
The underlying theme of the whole book is Faith (with a capital F), particularly faith in religion. How do you prove the existence of God to a scientist? Ellie is unable to accept the existence of God since she is a scientist and there is no "proof" (remember the pendulum experiment where she challenges her friend to step a bit closer to the huge swinging pendulum to see if his God would protect him?). Then she returns from her voyage and is ironically unable to provide any proof of their existence and everyone will just have to accept her testimony on "faith". Ellie continued to search for "signals" and ultimately found "proof" in the immutable fabric of the universe...in the digits of pi she ultimately finds another signal to decode, but this is a signal from God, not from other beings.
The signal in Pi was left out of the movie completely and totally ruined it for me. YMMV of course.
SuperID
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The jumpstart idea is definitely attractive. Sometimes I wonder-- how we got up off our knuckles so quick and started building the Pyramids?
What you say here is so true-- shortages in the world-- food, fuel, medecine, water, information-- are politically organized. Access to resources, particularly those that are vital to life have been used to manipulate the populace time and again by just about every political unit out there. Control of the flow of resources is the outward sign of some group flexing their political muscle. It is an effective tool to uproot populace and move them to new area, destroying their identity in the process. Buckminister Fuller claimed that we have the technology to provide for all the world to live in comfort. Why don't we utilize it? Because exercise of power is the most hoarded resource of all.
But that's not why SETI is a futile waste of time. SETI is futile because we are deliberately ignorant beings. Hell, my president can't even communicate with me. If I can't figure out what he has to say, how can I communicate with someone who probably has a completely different sense array? Even if searching for ETs is futile, the process is probably good for us. As the guy who sent himself up 16,000 feet in a lawnchair with 42 weather balloons said, "A man can't just sit around."
Dogs flew Spaceships!
The Aztecs invented the vacation!
Our forefathers took drugs!
Men and women are the same sex!
Your brain is not the boss!
Yes, Everything You Know Is Wrong!
-Firesign Theater, "Everything You Know Is Wrong!"
Well, perhaps we're looking in the right place, but we just don't know what we've found. Take the sugar that was found in a cloud of gas near the center of our Milky Way. If that isn't a calling card for carbon-based life, I don't know what is. Since we search for electro-magnetic signals we make assumptions that other life will be of a similar tech than us. We are really a fledgling race in our capacity to study the heavens constantly being startled by the phenomena we find in space. It is still too early for us to identify when something is not standard out there. That supernova might just be a distress beacon.
An excellent novel (if a wee bit cycical) dealing with some of the problems of our search for sentient life is His Master's Voice by Stanislaw Lem. He proposes the problem of how to interpret a purposeful signal once we find it. The scientists in the book are attempting to decipher a neutrino stream that they accidently detect coming to us in a repeating pattern for a fixed amount of time. The answers are not entirely satisfying. Do we really have the capacity to think outside our little box?
Firesign Theatre rules! My family has actually long been friends with the quartet, and I'm always glad to see references to them and their work :)
http://matt.waggoner.com/ (see how many Firesign references you can find)
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Don't let's forget The Skeptic's Dictionary, which contains hundreds of entries on everything from the Bermuda Triangle to Amway, Zombies, Ghosts, UFOs, pyramid power, etc. One of the best skeptical sites on the web.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I believe the big thing thats standing in SETIs way is that the signal to noise ratio of transmissions from other planets (or even those we are sending out) is so low that their signals can't be separated from normal stellar noise at the interstellar distances we are talking about.
This is not an original thought though, does anyone have a good link?
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
The only use for long straight lines is for runways? I'm driven on some really long straight roads before, and something tels me i wasn't on an airport runway.= \=\=\=\=\
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The whole SETI project thus far has had to assume two things.
We have not looked for a signal less powerful or direct than this, because it would be expensive and difficult. SETI is having to travel the cheap and easy path.
Its all white noise... Spread-spectrum is great for communication between two parties who already know each other is there, and know what form the communcation will be in, but it is not useful for signalling.
The real quandry in SETI is this:
On Earth, we have decided that it is cheaper and easier to look for signals from alien civilizations that it is to send out our own beacon. What if everyone else makes the same decision? The sky may be full of ears, but no mouths!
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
you might want to check out "rare earth" which is excellent book on topic of possibility of intelligent and non-intelligent extraterrestrial life.
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
More modern systems with weak or no carriers, like spread-spectrum systems, devote only a few percent of their signal energy to synchronization information. So they're far more energy-efficient. But they look like noise unless you know what you're looking for. (This is why modern modems sound like a white-noise hiss. Early modems, up to 300 baud, had audible audio tones. The same thing is true of radio modulation.) That's a problem. Finding a spread-spectrum signal when you know nothing about the transmission system is very tough.
But it's not impossible. Any transmission system must have some fraction of its energy, even if it is quite small, devoted to synchronization. And to get through noise, there has to be some redundancy. That's what to look for.
I think SETI should be looking at the nearer stars, picking up stuff that sounds like white noise, and crunching real hard, looking for sync patterns and redundancy.
Two possibilities
1) We're the first form of life an alien race has ever found, and they are interested in studying us; alien antropologists. And want to remain hidden away perhaps for centuries.
2) They know more about the universe than us and are able to travel at near or greater than the speed of light. Warp drive, subspace, jumpgates, instant transmission, transporters, something undiscovered by us as of today.
Didn't you know we're working towards opensourcing the English language?
-f
-f
www.blackant.net
Also, Teflon saves me about 15 minutes a day in ease of cleaning my dishes. Figure, my time is worth $50/hour, so that's $4562.5/year, or (considering 40 working years) $182500/lifetime. If I worked during the time that Teflon saves me, and i invested all the money when i make it, and then at the end of my life i donated that money to charity, then i would be donating a few million dollars. Multiply that by the percent of people who use teflon dishes, and you have a good donation.
-f
-f
www.blackant.net
The '70's Asimov book was Extraterrestrial Civilizations.
I wore that copy out in my elementary school library.
I totally agree. I read Daniken when I was a little kid. Entertaining hogwash.
However...
The one thing that still intrigues me is the Dogon people of Cameroon (?) Gabon (?) Totally Other Place In Africa who Know Too Much about Sirius. Ever heard of them? I am just curious if any of these sites have a cultuaral explanation for Dogon astronomy: observation...or simple coincidence? Not arguing...just curious. Gracias.
Hey thanks, asshole.
God forbid anyone render any form of constructive encouragement or critcism.
You might say "UFOs" but then were is their base?
Don't you mean where are there base?
forth ?love if honk then
It's very cool place to visit, BTW. I would say something like "visit it if you're in the area", but it's the ONLY thing the area - if you're actually in the area, chances are you're already going there. :-)
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1. SETI has searched almost exclusively in the frequency channel around 1.42 gigahertz, which corresponds to the emission line of hydrogen, the most common element in the universe. The idea is that if extraterrestrials had to pick some frequency to attract our attention, this would be a natural choice.
ISSUE: Although this may be a reasonable assumption it is not necessarily true. Perhaps the extraterrestrials would chose another frequency for reasons not know to us. In addition, the shift in frequency caused by the expansion of the Universe rules out the possibility of receiving signals from other Galaxies.
2. SETI assumes that intelligent civilizations would have the power to send wide-beam signals into space.
ISSUE: The further a message has to travel, the more power it requires. In addition the wider the beam is, the more energy is required to send it at the same relative power. These power requirements are orders of magnitude greater than we are capable of and it does not necessarily follow that other civilizations would be capable of producing such power.
3. SETI assumes that other civilizations would send continuous messages into space.
ISSUE: To date, Earth has only sent out a limited number of messages. These were tightly beamed messages to specific stars in the Galaxy. Earth lacks the power to send wide-beam messages. It is a big assumption to think that other intelligent life would behave differently than we do. Perhaps they spend most of their time listening as well.
4. SETI assumes that intelligent civilizations are long lived.
ISSUE: The reason the night skies are not completely filled with stars is that stars have limited lifetimes. During the 5 billion years since the formation of earth, we've had the capability of sending narrow beam signals to other stars for perhaps 50 or so years. Based on our consumption of natural resources, it remains to be seen if we will continue to have this capability for thousands of years.
My main issue is that these assumptions are glossed over. SETI needs to be forthcoming about its assumptions and how they may effect the probability of success. They need to do this so that in 10 years if donations start drying up, they'll have some credibility and be able to explain the lack of results in terms of their assumptions.
Frylock: That's not a toy!
Master Shake: You say that about everything you own. You should own toys. They're fun.
we haven't filled the Galaxy yet and there's no reason to assume that other life forms like us would necessarily be significantly more advanced than we are.
You're thinking on too small a time scale. Remember, the galaxy is about 12 billion years old. We are about 2-300,000 years old. We've only had technology for about 4-10,000 years, advanced technology only a few hundred, and space travel for 40 years. That's nothing! The odds of two species evolving at precisely the same time is vanishingly small, given the time scale.
I guarantee that in the next 1000-5000 years, we will launch multi-generational space ships to colonize other planets. Then those people will colonize others, and so on, geometrically. In only a few million years, humans will populate the entire galaxy, even if we only have sublight travel!
Let's say it take an average of 2 million years for a species like us to fill the galaxy. The galaxy is 6000 times older than that! If species like us are relatively common, it should have happened by now. Keep in mind that once a planet is filled with a particular species, it's unlikely than any other species would ever evolve on that planet. Once the galaxy is full, that's it.
The reason I specified a galaxy rather than the universe is that the distances between galaxies are so immense, that it's unlikely that we would ever populate other galaxes at sub-light speeds. It's just too long of a trip, even for the most intrepid explorers.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
That's a reasonable point, but it still only holds off the inevitable. What would make people want to colonize another world, other than adventure? Probably for more room, because of overpopulation. How long will it take for the solar system to become crowded enough for people to want a whole new world.
Also, colonizing an asteroid is not the same as living on a whole new world. It's possible we might get the technology to create whole new planets out of stray matter (or blasting off a chunk of jupiter or something), but I have a feeling it will be a lot easier to move to other planets.
I think there are always going to be those people who just want to just create a whole new world. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them are religious cults wanting to start a whole new civilization. That's how the pilgrims got started!
But still the point remains: if intelligent life were common, then it seems likely that one would have arisin in 12 billion years that had a trait that they like to travel and populate other places.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Ultimately I think there are just so many scenarios that allow for intelligent life to exist in our galaxy without our having discovered them as of yet.
True, but the point is that it only takes 1 space travelling civilization with an expansion desire to dominate the galaxy. If self-aware intelligent life is relatively common, then it would be likely that we would see at least 1 in multiple billion years that meets that simple requirement. It seems unlikely that if the galaxy were teeming with intelligence that every single one of them would be "homebodies" or would have some show-stopping problem.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
What happens of only 1 in a billion ships survives radiation storms or from being coated in dark-matter dust or whatever para-scientific jibber jabber stuff may or may not be out there.
Well, you can play "what if" games all day long. Given our current state of knowledge, we don't know of any reason why a species wouldn't propagate through interstellar space. Given the amount of time it takes to populate a galaxy, and the amount of time that we've had for it to happen, then you have to conclude that we've never had aliens able to do it.
To tell you the truth, this just sort of backs up my gut feeling that self-aware life is hugely, insanely improbable. It just doesn't seem like it to us, because we obviously didn't sense the passage of time before we came along to think about the fact that we're here. I think there is probably quite a bit of "life" in the galaxy, but self-aware life is most-likely improbable.
But who knows? Maybe the very first alien race populated the galaxy, decided to move to the black hole in the core, and then blasts any ships that try and move between solar systems so that overpopulation doesn't happen again.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
It's actually pretty easy to prove. The galaxy is what, 12 billion years old? Once a civilization creates space travel, it doesn't take that long (relatively speaking) to fill up the galaxy with life, even at sub-light speeds. I forget the exact amount of time, but the fill rate is geometric. X time to travel to the next star, X time to establish industry, and then send 10 more "seeds" to the next one. It only takes a few million years to fill the Galaxy.
Since we're alone on Earth, we're alone in the galaxy.
And is it all that surprising? I would imagine that lower forms of life might be relatively common, but I think it's probably likely that self-aware life is unbelievably unlikely. It only seems likely to us because it happened to us.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
What if they don't WANT to be noticed.
Who is "they"? Either self-aware life is common, or it isn't. Human's have existed for a very, very, very short period of time. If self-aware life is common, they we would have had one a long time ago that colonized the whole galaxy. Like I said before, it doesn't take that long compared to 12 billion years of history. Do the math, don't give me this fuzzy "I just know" stuff.
and even we are on the verge of faster than light travel through gravity warping,
We're not on the "verge" of jack. We don't even have any decent theories that say it's possible, much less practical, much less on the "verge".
We are NOT alone, don't want to go into details, but we are definitely NOT alone, and haven't been for a very long time.
You're thinking emotionally, not rationally. Again, do the math. Figure out how long it takes to fill the galaxy if you have a race that wants to travel, even at sub-light speeds. It's a blip in the history of the galaxy. It only takes one race.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
They could exist on planes or as forms of matter that we don't even imagine.
So what? Sure it's possible, but the only form of life that we know is possible is our own. The point is that it only takes one race developing intelligence and space travel to fill the galaxy in a relatively short time. Since that hasn't happened, it must be the fact that life like ours is extremely unlikely.
Sure, it might be the case that there are other forms of intelligence that are occur much more frequently, but don't tend to fill up the galaxy. Possible, but it doesn't seem very likely.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
how do you "Explaing" missing a typo like that?
*shrug*
YMMV
E.
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heck, if they have anything like a trek subspace transmitter, radio would be obsolete. Obsolete as Napoleon's Semaphore system. A good place to look is the Dead Media Project, as discussed and linked in this slash article. Technologies go obsolete all of the time, so why not radio, tv, etc.
Then there is the matter of interstellar politics. Let's face it, if the local area just had the equivalent of Attila the Hun go rampaging through, it might be a good idea if no body visited. and it would be understandable if no body was transmitting.
And then again, maybe we *are* the first ones, at least for practical purposes, in our section of galaxy
And so on. There are many possible scenarios.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Your argument says nothing about the existance of aliens who aren't capable of interstellar travel. You have no proof that interstellar travel is viable. What happens of only 1 in a billion ships survives radiation storms or from being coated in dark-matter dust or whatever para-scientific jibber jabber stuff may or may not be out there.
What's the selection ratio for sperm to reach egg?
What makes spaceships more likely to reach their targets.
I've got to admit I agree with your conclusion (no aliens), but I don't agree with how you got there.
And I'm a mathematician, before you ask, so don't tell me to do the maths. I have plenty of other maths that I would use to dismiss the hypothesis.
FP.
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Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I never knew what SETI was, this book is a must read for everyone, even for the non-space inclined. My kudos to the author.
Different aliens could have been turning up every 5000 years or so without us realizing. Nobody would have written it down
Or perhaps they werethe ones who kickstarted modern society. Alternatively, if aliens have been here all along, where are they now?
Budget cuts? Change in scientific emphasis? Extinct? Cultural change caused them to adopt the Prime Directive? Lots of potential reasons.
You might say "UFOs" but then were is their base? There are no anomalous items in nearby space and certainly nothing on Earth.
They might have set up shop under the sea, oron some unremarkable asteroids. Admittedly they would have to be sure to keep radio noise very low to stop snooping. I think they just left.
All of them describe meetings with some sort of angel, or flying being. All of them talk about the chariots of the gods. The Nazca plains in Peru have long straight lines that could only have been used as a runway.
If aliens wanted to talk, I think they would have done. Obviously they still consider us to be too primitive
I hate this argument when it is used to counter any funding on any pure science. It is naive to beleive that spending any more money on the starving people is going to make much difference since most of the problem with the starving people of the world is POLITICAL and not a matter of funding. If the governments of the world cutinue to war with their people burn fields and bomb rail lines then their people will starve
Of course science funding could help people more than spending directly on foods by coming up with things that help distribution of food like refrigiration did. Or maybe enhance the quality of the food they can grow like golden rice. Or we could just spend the millions of dollars to ship food that will be hijacked by some guerilla army and get no real benifit from it.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
"if there are so many aliens out there, where are they?"
/. while their computers are frantically searching the universe for life...
That's an easy one. Assuming for the moment that there are aliens out there, they're posting to
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Yoo hoo. Psst. Over here.
'course they are.
You aren't allowed on those channels, only the aliens are.
No, no, no. I'm not trying to start an
intergalactic war, but you biobags stole
Itchy and Scratchy from us !
That's right, we aliens content homesteaded the
Lascaux caves that wonderful summer of 8000 B.C.
All those wonderful bloody drawings are under
galactic copyright protection.
Were also looking for one of our runaway
children, Lvis, have you seen him ?
You earthings owe us alot of back royalties
and our lawyers are converging on your
position at the is very moment.
And another thing kids, will you turn it down !
You can here it half way across the galaxy
I found it interesting that this article is posted at O'Reilly & Associates web site. O'Reilly is making a big noise about peer-to-peer applications, of which SETI@Home is one of their primary examples (even though it seems more like client/server than P2P to me.) As far as spending money on SETI rather than feeding the hungry, etc., my take on it is that SETI research, like NASA, is notable not for what it is itself but for what spins off from it.
I think the really big thing is not what the possibly existing ET have to say, but the mere knowledge that they do exist. Propably their reply is something like:
'First Post!'
'All your planet is belong to us'
'Goat secx'
Guess what - the [odds] are stacked against [life]
Certainly against complex and intelligent life sending out radio signals in the correct time frame for us to receive them. We have an extraordinarily gentle planet that's given us a long time to get our cortexen convoluted, but we're never getting off of it. We'll always be the dominant species, but within the next couple of thousand years (tops) we'll be back to living a low tech sustainable agrarian lifestyle, not through tree hugger lobbying, but through bare necessity.
The good news is that we won't even have to wait for the next planet killer rock. The next ice age or supervolcano will knock us back far enough that we'll never recover, what with having already raped all the easily accessible fossil and mineral resources.
Of course, we could get off Earth and colonise other planets right now. It would take a New World Order and a diversion of all spare resources to building a fleet of colony ships and just punting them out there. OK, that's stupid and pointless and not economically justifiable, and the colonists would almost certainly be doomed. But there's a small, a tiny chance, and really, what's our alternative? The ISS? Don't make me laugh. I keep hearing that described as a "first step". I'm still waiting to hear what the second step is.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I knew I'd screw up the link. Here's the right one:
http://seti.harvard.edu/grad/d_thes.html
We have just barely become a technological civilization; we are arguably the youngest one in the galaxy. Sending out signals and waiting for a reply would take millenia. We need to start out by listening first, which is what we're doing.
Besides, do we really want to get a bad interstellar reputation by shooting our mouths off before we've even checked to see who's already talking? Darren
Start looking for terrestrial intelligence first...
The original:
http://totl.net/STI/
An immiator (wizzier graphics!):
http://www.wymsey.co.uk/sti/sti.htm
THL.
--
Keeping
For example, from the interview (and this one is real, and not about young Miss Wall!)
"
Because the number of potential sites is so large (20 to 40 billion sun-like stars in our galaxy), this means the odds have to be stacked against the formation of life in a pretty big way for it not to develop elsewhere.
"
And?
Guess what - they are stacked against it.
When it comes to creating complex organic molecules by trying to recreate early atmospheric conditions, the scientists have done a fairly good job - and created dead stuff.
By focussing on creating more living stuff they've done a fairly good job of creating self-sustaining complex-molecule-building reactions, but nothing that matches even the simplest virus for complexity (Tobacco Mosaic, for example).
And that's from scientist that have had the ability to _direct_ their experiments ("let's increase the partial presure of Oxygen by 5%, and provide a transition metal surfaces for molecules to bind to catalytically." each new day. The dear suns and planets don't get that option. The planets can't slow down of they're too hot and need a farther orbit. They can't decide to melt their ice caps or condense their atmospheres to provide surface water.
Sheesh - where has the _science_ gone?
THL.
--
Keeping
"This argument always annoys me when it pops up, and unfortunately it tends to do so all too often. I find it fairly safe to assume that any alien civilization with technology advanced enough to cross light-years and keep our planet under continuous observation for thousands of years could reasonably also be expected to have stealth technology as far beyond ours as their propulsion and communications systems. Most likely, their technology would for all intents and purposes appear as "magic", according to Clarke's Law."
Crossing light-years and keeping a planet under observation doesn't require any new science. Just a lot of time and energy. A "cloaking device" requires new science. If we are going to posit the existence of a "cloaking device" why not just have them watching us through wormholes in the comfort of their own homes? Or maybe just sensing our "thought energy" across the light years? Or some other equally scientifically unsupported and unfalsifiable means? The question here isn't "could aliens logically be ancient gods." After all, we could be brains in vats owned by the aliens. The question here is "do we have any evidence of or reason to believe that aliens beings were ancient gods." Answer: No.
--
324006
That second book that I read (mentioned in another post) specifically addressed UFOs and ancient astronaut ideas. It took them seriously, but then showed how it unlikely they were.
For instance, ancient astronauts: The Earth is 4 billion years old. Recorded history is only 1 millionth that long. The chances of aliens showing up *just* when humans are starting to write things down is therefore pretty low. Alternatively, if aliens have been here all along, where are they now? You might say "UFOs" but then were is their base? There are no anomalous items in nearby space and certainly nothing on Earth.
--
324006
Incredible. Last week I checked two books out of the library about SETI. One was by Asimov, published in 1979. It was a little short on hard science, but did a very good job of showing calculations indicating the number of habitable planets in the Galaxy. Another was by "some guy", written in 1989 (ten years later). The writing style was chaotic, but the upshot seemed to be "if there are so many aliens out there, where are they?" The most interesting thing about this book is that it mentions much the same stuff that Asimov did--but then shows how it doesn't apply or has been changed, or whatever.
Now this thing is out. Up or down?
--
324006
The social ramifications of such a discovery would change the world; even if no actual contact was made for generations.
That said, I think the SETI project has very little hope of actually identifying an alien intelligence. It is either arrogant or optimistic to think that an alien intelligence would be broadcasting on a wavelength we can detect with a signal we could comprehend.
To paraphrase Billy Bob Thornton from Armageddon "We can only watch about 1% of the sky and, begging your pardon sir, but it's a big-ass sky."
I should add that I *do* participate in the SETI@Home project, but that's mostly because I find their peer to peer computing model interesting and a group of my friends participate so the comarderie and "racing" aspect of it is entertaining. Maybe we'll identify an extraterrestrial intelligence with it, but I doubt it.
-Coach-
Perhaps the world's greatest tragedy is that ignorance is not impotence.
Also possible that, as others have suggested, the alien intelligence finds us too primitive and not worth bothering with. Perhaps they've seen Pauly Shore and David Hasselhoff and decided that they'd go see what was happening on Mars instead.
Or, we could be as mysterious to them as they are to us. Perhaps we pass through the same space on a regular basis but neither party is capable of reliably detecting and identifying the other.
I suspect that the alien intelligence being bipedal and oxygen breathing is more a matter of Hollywood than reality.
-Coach-
Perhaps the world's greatest tragedy is that ignorance is not impotence.
Humans tend to assume that intelligent life is going to have spaceships and clothes. Maybe Earth is just a marble in some alien kid's collection?
If the universe truly began "all at once" and the conditions that created us are relatively new, its also possible that the same conditions created more beings of a similar type elsewhere in the universe - and at roughly the same time. Perhaps they're right now trying to find a replacement for their space shuttle and listening hard to see if anybody else is out there.
Just because only a few humans (of undetermined mental state) claim to have perceived alien life doesn't mean they aren't out there. David Spade has a succesful TV show -- that's as much evidence of alien intelligence as anything!
Chances are good that your dog is not really aware of fish...but that doesn't mean there aren't any fish. Maybe humans just aren't capable, currently, of perceiving and identifying extra-terrestrial intelligences?
-Coach-
Perhaps the world's greatest tragedy is that ignorance is not impotence.
one letter (i) missing is an abduction - two letters both missing (explainINg) is a conspiracy!
;)
just like the conspiracy theorists who think that SETI@home is using your cycles for more than just the search for ET
i was angry:1 with:2 my:4 friend - i told:3 4 wrath:5, 4 5 did end.
i was angry:1 with:2 my:4 friend - i told:3 4 wrath:5, 4 5 did end.
i was 1 2 4 foe i 3 it not 4 5 did grow
How do you know that we aren't being visited? Because YOU haven't experienced anything yourself. What if they don't WANT to be noticed. Given the fact that the Earth is relatively very young in the Universe, and even we are on the verge of faster than light travel through gravity warping, to say that no other intelligent life has also followed that path of discovery and conquered these problems eons ago, is well, silly at best. We live in a universe where the size is very hard to comprehend. We live on a non-descript planet in a non-descript solar system in a non-descript galaxy filled with billions of stars, in a universe filled with billions of galaxies, where our closest star is over 1 light year away. We are finding life building carbon rings in empty space, protiens and bacteria on asteroids, a new solar system is found almost weekly now...so to say we are alone in this vast universe, when you know the full scope, is just plain silly in my view. I mean, how egomaniacal are we to think this? First we were the center of the universe, then we were the center of the solar system, then we find that not only are we STILL fighting our own ego's, but that it is still prevelant. Open your mind man. We are NOT alone, don't want to go into details, but we are definitely NOT alone, and haven't been for a very long time. The fact that this notion is perfectly in the realm of being possible should be enough for you to not say that we ARE alone, unless you know something that no one else is privy to, which you are not, of course. Thanks.
Because, intelligent life uses discovery to evolve it's intelligence. This drives intelligent beings to pursue further into the unknown, and what is more vast than the universe?
Do we want to be like a guy who lives his entire life in small village, works on his farm (or nowadays, watches TV), sees nothing, meets nobody and eventually dies after a boring life? Or de want to actually accomplish something in the Universe and be like Marco Polo or Christopher Columbus even if it will be hard and many of our crew will die during the voyage? Do we want to discover something new, do we want to create something extraordinary?
For me, the answer is clear. I'd much rather be like Marco Polo than this guy in his little village even if it means a high chance that I will fail and/or die.
When men used to be men
Here, this is to help you understand. THEY'RE STARVING BECAUSE THEY BREED LIKE RATS IN ECONOMIES THAT ARE AT (OR BELOW) HUMAN SUBSISTENCE LEVEL. Hope this helped.
McConnell seems to be attempting to simultaneously embrace the alien abduction crowd and hard scienctists, a very difficult task.
Most astronomers don't appreciate Stonehenge conspiracy theories, and most Roswell believers don't appreciate the real science behind SETI.
In the end, you would have to educate the masses as to the unlikelihood of intergalactic travel, the slim chance of intelligent/civilized life and the odds that we're essentially attempting to talk to butterflies, or even that we are the butterflies, with no way of understanding and of little significance to any aliens.
But, alas, anal probes are so much more relatable. Call it a religion for some, but if you're attempting to win the respect of the Scientific Community, it's probably better not to cater to the fanaticism.