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Beyond Contact: a Guide to SETI
Some readers may recall what Stephen Hawking said about his book, A Brief History of Time:
"Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales. I therefore resolved not to have any equations at all. In the end, however, I did put in one famous equation, E=mc2. I hope that this will not scare off half my potential readers."
Hawking was facing the same challenge as Brian McConnell faces in this book. Both are trying to turn advanced knowledge of their field of endeavour (which requires heavy math, heavy astronomy, heavy physics, heavy programming, and so forth) into a work which can be comprehended by lesser beings. McConnell has taken a different path than Hawking - his book has plenty of advanced equations, diagrams, and concepts. McConnell does a reasonable (and often very good) job at trying to bring readers up to speed when he thinks he's going to go over their heads, but it is still not a book for the faint of heart or mathematically-challenged. There are enough equations in the book to bring its readership down to (.5)n -- oh, roughly zero, give or take.
In any case, it's a good book, but technical. You were warned.
The first couple of chapters cover the history of searching for extraterrestrial life, "are we alone?", the nature of intelligence, and similar areas. Drake's Equation is the famous set of fudge-factors that would tell us whether we were likely to find other life forms, if only we knew what the values of the variables were:
N = R * fs * fp * ne * fl * fi * fc * L
Fill in values for all of those and you'll be famous forever. But what it means, as our knowledge stands now, is that we have no clue at all whether there is likely to be life out there or not. Comforting, isn't it?
The next several chapters cover the technical aspects of communicating over interstellar distances. The electrical engineers in the audience will have a leg up here; everyone else has the opportunity to learn the basics of signal processing and the peculiarities specific to communication across galaxies. Pretty thorough and informative, without being overwhelming.
Finally, the latter half of the book covers the 64,000 lightyear question: what to say? How to communicate with an intelligence where you can't assume even the most basic things in common? Yes, yes, you've probably heard of the idea of starting with the periodic table or basic mathematics and working up. But that's sort of like a dot-com business plan:
- Establish Contact
- Send Periodic Chart
- ....
- Communicate!
McConnell fills in the "...." part, and it's obvious that a great amount of thought has been put into it. Pretty quickly McConnell is describing how to send entire self-executing programs (see Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep).
This book is a bit of an oddity. If we're just talking about entertainment reading, it falls short - too technical. If I was grading it as a scientific work, again it would fall short - not technical enough. :) But as far as I know, this is the only work which tries to explain what SETI really is in terms that educated, reasonably bright laymen can understand, and as such, it does a fine job.
You can purchase this book at Fatbrain. Want to see your review here? Check out the book review submisison guidelines! :)
3. Wait 40 more years
Don't forget to join the Slashdot SETI@Home Team!
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Here is a link with the stats and stuff:
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-J
Alexis 'jeriqo' BRET
crunching? Missile ranges? Nuclear calculation?
A few sys admins at The Swedish Radio
where fired some time ago because they had seti@home running on some machines.
The management said that didn't know what seti@home acutely did.....and of course that it was a security threat....
Just my 0.02
Say I was only interested in this aspect of the book, is it worth getting? The idea sounds facinating, but there's no details in this review! Can anyone tell me more?
The simplest way to communicate with extraterrestrials is to ask them how to do it.
to analyze radio transmissions from space. If there are other lifeforms out there, what are the chances that they would be on the same technological level as us? Considering how briefly we have had RF compared to the "cosmic big picture" I find it doubtful we would be on the same wavelength. (please pardon the pun) Even if we did receive a broadcast, how many years would have passed between the time they sent it and our reply would be received? Their "equipment" would probably be ancient by that time.
Chika Chik-ah... do-e ow ow.
Probably the single greatest challenge facing SETI-like projects is not the daunting task of acquiring and analysing the vaast ammounts of data, but the criticisms levelled at it by many politicians and scientists.
To date, most books on bioastronomy in general and seti in particular have been rather daunting and require a good grasp of not just physics and biology, but even philosophical issues such as anthropomorphsim and technical matters such as DSP; a popular book on the subject, such as this one, could go a long way to raising public knowledge of the subject past the "looking through telescopes for aliens" level.
Suggestions were based on the idea that you would knot know each others languages, and so had to somehow use models for communication. typical type things would be coins for modelling the solar system, etc.
of course, if you could actually talk, proof would be in the form of an actual scientific facts for which there is no correct evidence for on earth. doesn't even have to be that technical.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
"Alien Civilizations in a Nutshell" Then they could have put a cool animal on the cover. Now, what animal goes with SETI?
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Read the thread from the orginal article..
fc is the fraction of intelligent species that develop the ability and desire to communicate with other civilizations : after the aliens realize the voice of the UN secretary general of the time on the Voyager probe recording was a fucking Nazi, probably 0.
Therefore, N=0.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Ok, totally off topic.. but with video cards getting more and more powerful everyday, what sort of SETI/rc5 speed ups could be seen from harvesting the power of a GPU? Ok, sure, I'm sure they're optimized for doing graphics, but in its heart, its still just a number cruncher.
There's little chance the current SETI program will find ET. The problem is that SETI has no dedicated, high-sensitivity telescopes. They simply can't afford it. The best they've been able to do is "piggyback" with other radio astronomy projects and listen in. /., we can thank Microsoft's Paul Allen for donating the $26 million to fund the Allen Telescope Array, to be built in California in the next five years (I think), which should alleviate this problem. It'll be a network of smaller telescope arrays programmed to act as a single, massive radio telescope.
And although this may be unpopular on
>>> then why haven't we seen any evidence of their existence?
Maybe they're waiting for us to grow up?
Perhaps they're waiting to sniff our first Warp Drive trail (as suggested by Star Trek) or some other thing we've not discovered yet, that we are at a sufficiently high level of technology.
Or, possibly, they've detected some of the nuclear testing we did in the mid-20th century and have put us on the 'deferred' list for a while.
Or, they're pretty far away (tens of light-years or more), have detected our nuclear explosions and/or our UHF+ RF emissions, decided we're quasi-intelligent, and they're on their way right now, and we just can't detect their vehicle.
There are lots of possibilities...
And, it's all the more reason why I can't wait to get broadband so I can hook up my Alpha and start crunching SETI packets big-time!
I have the same problem with this author that I have with Gene Roddenberry: why must intelligent species on other planets be anthropomorphic?
The author's assumption is that the intelligent and man-like beings are sending coded messages via radio waves in hopes of finding other intelligent beings. This is fine, but consider that the author is framing his arguments in Mathematics, and more importantly, base-10 numbers. Look at your hands: there should be ten fingers. That is the origin of our numbering system. Our system of mathematics and our discipline of deductive logic is a product of the organization of the human nervous system. Simply put, the author and his compatriots have painted themselves into a corner and assumed away most of the problem.
I propose that intelligent beings in other solar systems are not anthropomorphic, do not have ten fingers, do not count in base ten, and probably do not even share this concept of "numbers" anyway. Keep crunching transforms for SETI, but don't assume you are speaking the same language as THEM.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
The simplest way to communicate with extraterrestrials is to ask them how to do it.
"Hey! How do we communicate with you?"
"Yack gra'phth: Orv'gth."
"...At the end of the day"..."when everyone goes home, you're stuck with yourself." RIP Layne Staley
"Me Human, You Alien: How to Talk to an Extraterrestrial" by Jonathan Vos Post (c) 1996 by Emerald City Publishing an excerpt from a book entitled MAKING CONTACT: A SERIOUS HANDBOOK FOR LOCATING AND COMMUNICATING WITH EXTRATERRESTRIALS, edited by Bill Fawcett, July 1997, New York: William Morrow & Co. http://www.magicdragon.com/EmeraldCity/extraterres trials/alien.html
This has original ideas on how you, personally, should best prepare to communicate with ETs, including what to carry in your pockets. It also has the best review of Science Fiction approaches to the concept, as well as anthropology and linguistics.
N = R * fs * fp * ne * fl * fi * fc * L
R = the rate of formation of stars in the galaxy
fs = the fraction of stars that are suitable suns for planetary systems
fp = the fraction of those stars with planets (thought to be around 1/2)
ne = the number of "earths" per planetary system i.e., planets suitable for liquid water
fl = the fraction of those planets where life develops
fi = the fraction of planets with life where intelligence develops
fc = the fraction of those planets that achieve technology which releases detectable signals into space
L = the lifetime of such communicative civilizations
i realize that ... you'll see this post in many articles today, regardless of author.
People, look around you and know that you cannot always prove
:)
something, but lack of proof doesn't make it not exist or not
have happened. Buy applying a form of deception called neo-
cheating, you can easily deceive without threat of getting caught.
We have many examples of this in society today, Microsoft has
done alot of it but so have many others, including individuals.
Now in the probability of there existing higher intelligent life
than ourselves, don't you think they would be better at such
deception on one hand, while on the other having reason to not
want to make contact, a least until we get over trying to blow
ourselves up?
We really don't know enough about physics, gravity, anti-gravity
or all the things that might be derived in technology from such
knowledge, such as what we call faster than light travel.
The point is, communication is a two way street! And unless all
seti is, is an effort to pick up signals sent so long ago that
the sending party is long gone and/or to send such signals that
we well be long gone to ever know if they were received, then
clearly:
WE ARE NOT WORTHY!
A little proof of that can be found here where anyone can
see that a world that spend three times the cost of solving all
the major problems in the world, on military strength for defense
against "threats" instead, certainly is a world bent on destruction.
I mean damn, here we are spending so much resource in a futile
effort rather than spending those resource (seti, military, etc..)
in a way that might show us as being civilized enough for another
intelligent life form to want consider contacting us.
.
2. Let's be generous and say there is a one in a thousand shot of a star having planet capable of supporting life (right distance from the star so that it's between 250-350 K at the surface, enough atmospheric pressuse so that water can exist as a liquid, protected by massive outer planets against constant meteor bombardment, far above-average abundance of Oxygen, Sulphur, Nitrogen, and Phosphorous, etc, etc.) That puts the number of *potential* life supporting planets in the galaxy at 400 million.
3. Let's be very, very generous and estimate that life actually *does* form on one in every thousand potential life-supporting planets. Most molecular biologists will tell you that even the most basic life is so complex that the odds of it forming from inanimate matter are staggeringly small, and we should count ourselves lucky that it managed to happen once in the entire history of the Universe. But we'll be liberal and say one in a thousand. That puts the number of planets in the galaxy with any sort of life at 400 thousand.
4. There is no reason to assume that just because life exists, it will become intelligent and start using EM communications that we can receive. I don't know how you could put odds on something like that. Let's just go nuts and say that ALL planets with life eventually give rise to intelligent life. So 400 thousand planets out there in our own galaxy will have intelligent life at some point in their history.
5. Now, here's the depressing part. Our planet has been around for 4 billion years. We've been using EM waves to communicate for roughly 100 years. So, in the whole history of our planet, civilization has only been detectable for 0.0000025 *percent* of the time. Let's say your typical advanced civilization (using radio waves) can last 1000 years before nuking itself into oblivion, and your typical planet exists for 5 billion years. That would mean that out of the 400 thousand planets with life, chances are only 0.00002 percent of them, or 0.08 total, are broadcasting at the same time we are receiving.
Thus, even with the most wildly optimistic estimates, there is only an 8% chance that there is even one civilization out there that we can listen to, in the entire galaxy. Forget about there being one within 100, or even 1000 light years.
Of course, you could simply throw those numbers out, and believe in a God who likes to put intelligent life on planets all over the place. But that wouldn't be very scientific.
dinner: it's what's for beer
Well, the reason that aliens in Star Trek, and other Roddenberry projects, are anthropomorphic is that they are played by humans. B5 had non-anthropomorphic aliens, played by cgi.
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Fermi's objection to the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations goes something like this: It should take a spacefaring civilization about 1-10 million years to colonize a space the size of the galaxy, even without faster than light travel (the idea is exponential growth -- we send two colonies, then they send two colonies each, and so on). Since 10 million years is short with respect to the amount of time the galaxy has existed (10 billion years) and the amount of time that life has existed on Earth (4 billion years), there should be evidence of colonization everywhere, even if there is as few as one advanced civilization. So, where is everybody?
I'd like to know if the book discusses this. Many SETI researchers are approaching the conclusion that humanity is the most advanced form of life in our own galaxy, at least.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
If you happen to be talking with someone via radio who has never seen a clock, try to explain to him what "clockwise" works. Maybe you would turn to the rising and falling of the sun and moon as a reference point, but if this person has never been outside or lives in a different solar system? Where is the common reference point?
How we know is more important than what we know.
miranda richardson is better looking then natalie portman
I've been crunching data for SETI@Home since it first began. I've currently got 4 computers going full-time at it. I don't think it'll find anything, but I think it's a worthwhile program.
There was a great piece in Scientific American last year about why there are no ETIs in our galaxy. I found it thoroughly convincing, at least if you think along these lines: If there were an extra-terrestrial intelligence in our galaxy, and they were explorers, like us (and really, that's probably the only kind of race we'll find until we go out, physically, and look for them), then they most likely would have already colonized the entire galaxy by now.
Chances are, we will colonize the entire galaxy before any other species gets a chance.
That doesn't mean there's not life out there. I think that life is probably commonplace in our galaxy, and I'm sure there's intelligent exploring life in others (but most SETI projects aren't looking that far yet). I would imagine most life in our galaxy is single-celled. Of the entire history of life on this planet, 85+% of the time, it was single-celled.
The conditions under which single-celled organisms evolved to multi-celled organisms was a fluke. In fact, many of the important steps that led to our evolution, were a series of flukes. Evolution does not necessarily lead to intelligence. The objective of evolution is to give you the tools necessary to procreate and continue to exist as a species. Once that job is done, evolution is done.
Humans have been around, what 100,000-200,000 years? The dinosaurs were here for 140,000,000 years, or roughly 1000 times as long as we've been here, and they never developed intelligence.
Anyway, until we have the ability to listen to search for ETIs in other galaxies, I don't think we're going to find any.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
So 8% in one galaxy time billions of galaxies...sound like good odds to me, even by your broken assumptions.
Sounds like REAL good odds.
I'm not even going to go into the mountain of proof that "they" are and have been visiting us for eons. Just ask the military/government/intelligence whistleblowers who have risked their careers, family, income, etc... for nothing in return but ridicule that they KNEW they were going to recieve. The almost BIGGER story has been the cover-up. Quite impressive.
I just realized that hardcore seti geeks are so mad that if they personally actually met some aliens they would get really excited...
alien: how are you gentlemen! We are aliens!
seti geek: omg! fuck! real aliens!
alien: take us to your leader!
seti geek: do you have alien computers?
alien: indeed
seti geek: are they really advanced compared to ours ?
alien: indeed
seti geek: Do you mind if I run seti@home on them ?
graspee
Radio waves are nice, but maybe this isn't the preferred way that ET communicates? Just think about it, we're bitching about waiting the 20 minutes that data comes sputtering out of Galileo around Jupiter, would you really want to wait four years for "Landed on Planet @#ASFDE, was promptly eaten by large mantis."
No, you want faster communication that the speed of light. At this point, the only type of "communication" that can be done like that involves quantum entanglement. Maybe that's the way to go....
B
Flamebait
Serious inquiries only.
Calculate your own values for the drake equation here
I know you will all like to argue that SETI does have a specific desired outcome, but to me, there's more important things to focus on here at home, like searching for a cure to cancer by crunching proteins, building better radiation containment containers, and other worthy causes that distributed computing can be so good for.
My $.02(US).
As a reluctant itinerate spokesman for life outside your grasp I have a few things to say that might clear up some problems you are having with what you call extraterrestrials. First let me point out that you do not inhabit your planet alone, as you believe you do. There are quit a number of cultures that inhabit your planet of which you are totally unaware. That's your fault not theirs. As to them and cultures from outside your planet your so-called governments have become rather hostile to their visits. The present ruling dynasties of you planet don't want their little applecart upset and see outside influences as a major threat. This makes communication rather difficult. We are sure that you will one day resolve these problems and normal communication can resume.
http://www.chipcenter.com/columns/bmcginty/col002
________________________________________________
As a professional astronomer, I never cease to be amazed at how freely people will donate their time and resources to a project, that for the immediate future has absolutely no tangible benefits or results. It really demonstrates how science can motivate.
Well, that and the competition aspect of it too...
But anyway, it was probably the best practical idea astronomers have had in a while -- if you can't afford a supercomputer, get everyone else to create your supercomputer for you! As we all know, people hesitate to spend money on hardware -- who among us would have even donated $5 to the SETI project? But when you pass that cost along as the associated cost of running the computer you've already bought, people readily shell out the "bucks" or cpu time. I wonder how much "money" has been "donated" to the SETI project in this way?
Is this based on life as WE know it? Of couse it is. To suggest that other intelligent forms of life would have to follow our own path, with what our own planet offered is what's absurd.
Extremeophiles would tell us that life can arise in the most extreme cases. Like on an asteroid, or just floating in near space.
"As WE know it" are four important words. For something to exist as life, it needs to be able to metabolize matter and energy from its environment, self-replicate, adapt, and pass those adaptations to its progeny. There are other, very basic assumptions about life, such as the need for a boundry between lifeform and environment. When you set these simple restrictions, the candidates for possible lifeforms built out of matter as we understand it become very small. The only good system we can conceive of at the moment is the protein-RNA/DNA life that we know of. And that list of criteria for a life-sustaining planet applies to any protien-DNA-based lifeform of decent complexity (remember, we're not just talking about life, we're talking about life that is capable of building a radio transmitter).
Perfect! Otherwise, how would the aliens know that Earth was tiny, flat, and stamped with the Queen's head on one side?
What if we are the first race? The ones the later races will call the Ancients and end up marveling our technology some day (when it has matured enough that is..)?
Yes - an American icon who lived in, worked in, was born in, and was a subject of England.
When we first started searching for signals, I'm fairly surprised that we didn't get blasted with millions of messages... which our scientists would work on for years to decode... only to find that they ALL say...
Hot young naked space-cam girls, FREE!
Scientists Decode the First Message From an Alien Civilization...
Simply send 6 x 10^50 atoms of hydrogen to the star system at the top of the list, cross off that star system, then put your star system at the bottom of the list and send it to 100 other star systems. Within one-tenth of a galactic rotation you will receive enough hydrogen to power your civilization until entropy reaches its maximum! IT REALLY WORKS!
M@
Krispy Cream is people
Good point. No, great point.
I would also suggest that the Earth is relatively young compared to the the current suggested age of the universe, and that there could concieveably be FAR more advance life forms out there if they MERELY have followed our own evolution.
I'd love to see that episode again, but I can't even remember what series it was on...Amazing Stories, maybe...or else maybe a renewed Twilight Zone or something else...
-sk
you may want to check this out if one is interesting in crunching data from their PC. http://www.mc.com/search/productslevel4.cfm?pid=8& subid=50&id=62&type=subproduct2
can scale to 16 boards (32 processors) with 128MB of ram for each processor. PowerPC's too. You wanna talk about some serious horsepower, there it is. Cost? You dont want to know.
Of course, an alien civilization might include in its analysis:
flubonium quantity in crust 0.1
mixlplitilik in atmosphere 0.1
continuous cloud cover to seal in heat 0.1
etc.
If life forms, its ability to thrive and use whatever is there (and not worry about what isn't there) is remarkable.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
They both can join my four-way with JLo, Yasmine Bleeth, and Kate Winslett.
Origins of life on earth, after all. Either that, or humans, the only intelligent life on Earth.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
You know you want to.
Seti is like standing in the jungle sceaming in english "hey animals, here i am"
Or sitting in the jungle listening for words in English from animals.
100 percent of the time you will find NOTHING because animals dont speak english.
If Aliens are more intelligent they dont need radio. Even Aliens which are at the same level may not have figured out radio, you see every technology is diffrent, one gruop of aliens may have mastered genetic technologies and communicates in some weird way, another may have mastered nano technology and communicates via telepathy.
Theres just no way to figure it out, radio is communicating with sound, this is assuming aliens even have ears.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Would not have radio technology. Perhaps their eyes however are so much more deveolved than ours that they communicate very well with holographic technology.
Perhaps they beam light from a laser with information on it into their eyes which gives them all the information of radio and then some.
You have no clue about aliens so why assume they are anything like us.
Even if they were exactly like us 100 percent, they still may have skipped radio, or simply thought radio was silly kinda like how we think some of the eastern sciences are silly.
Aliens also may have known how dangerous radio was and purposely kept it form transmitting into space, perhaps because unlike us they knew there was life out there and didnt want to be found.
Lastly, what if these aliens are so much more advanced than us that they mastered every technology we have and then some to such a point that they'd be a god to us. considering we are about 100 years or so from being at god level technology wise. Aliens that are 1 million years older than us most likely have the ability to travel dimensions, can prolly phase right into our planet at any moment and phase out without us being able to notice, lastly they could be monitoring us right now, and could have been trying to communicate with us for thousands of years already but because we were too dumb to understand it, we wrote bibles saying god spoke to us, made people kings and worshipped them, when these people may have just been the contactees.
Theres too many possiblities that people dont even investigate because they somehow believe that its unlikely, yet finding aliens via seti is far more unlikely than any of the stuff i've mentioned.
Smarter aliens you wont find, they find you and could easily shield their radio waves from reaching.
Dumb aliens are prolly like animals on earth.
So we must be looking for aliens exactly like us, kinda like screaming words in english in the jungle or listening for words in english in a forest.
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If I have correctly understood the technique that SETI uses to recognize transmissions originating from technological civilizations, they are looking for recognizible patterns in electromagnetic (EM) 'signals' collected from deep space.
This may not be a good assumption. As you increase the efficiency of your communication system, the entropy of the transmission increases. Maximum efficiency has the maximum possible information density and therefore maximal entropy.
A transmission with maximal entropy is indistinguishable from random noise.
If one assumes that there is a short period (maybe a few centuries on average) between the time when a new civilization developes radio and the time when they have fine-tuned their EM communication to maximum efficiency, then the time window for detecting these communications will be too small to be useful for us.
Unless other species are actively trying to communicate with unknown species, it seems unlikely that there would be anything out there for us (SETI) to detect.
they'd do the same thing. Deadlock!
We have installed SETI@Home on most of the machines in our office. We're split on the subject of finding a signal, but we all think it is a nice screen saver. We were interested in keeping track of the progress of the work units on several of the machines (in case they failed to upload) and in keeping track of our user statistics, so I wrote up a little utility which can parse the state.sah files on shares and display the progress. It also polls the SETI@Home website to retrieve our group statistics. It's hosted on Sourceforge and you can download it here.
I would suggest (yet again ; ) that the ability for life to adapt to it's environs is quite remarkable based on your assumption.
Of course for this to happen, you need replication with room for differences to occur. With our species this is achieved through sex - RNA/DNA convergence (this is not to suggest this is the ONLY way for this to happen, as you said "life that we know of"), trial and error if you will.
This is a requirement for a successful life form, as you stated. Wouldn't that be an argument for the apparent remarkeable adaptation of life, that in order for life to occur there needs to be a system in place that would inherently suggest great adaptability, and that this may not be such a strange assumption (the voracity of life to form/adapt in places quite unlike Earth)?
Learning kicks ass...thanks.
Now what are you trying to say there? Seti@home isn't an attempt to calculate a particular number or solve a particular equation, it is an attempt to detect radio signals that may be indicative of an extraterrestrial civilization. There's no solution, but there is a set of possible outcomes, the same set that is associated with such things as "crunching proteins to cure cancer"
IMHO, RC5-64 is a worthless waste of effort. What are you proving by yet-again finding the key used to encrypt a known message? Nothing. There's not even the potential to do anything new.
This can actually be proven given some basic assumptions and the (much underestimated) technique of proof through observational bias.
As a warm-up, consider the following computer program: Create an array of agents ("the world"), with 50% probability it contains 10 elements and with 50% probability it contains 100 elements. If an agent knows nothing about the world except the rules, for all it knows there is a 50/50 chance that there are only 10 agents in the world. On the other hand, if it knows that it lives in slot #33, it can conclude that there are 100 agents alive. Now for the twist. If it knows that it lives in, say, slot #9, there is not still a 50/50 chance. Instead the probability is 90% that there only are 10 agents because of observational bias. It is so improbable that the agent should find itself among the 10 first if there really were 100 slots that this strengthens the probability of just 10 agents (write the program and let the agents evolve their guesses through genetic algorithms or something, if you don't believe me). Furthermore if we improve the experiment and let the array be of random size, than the best guess for a smart agent would be that he lives in the last slot or in any case that it is very unlikely that the array is, say, a factor 10 more than its slot number.
How does this map to reality? Well, you and I know which slot in time that we inhabit (actually the time is not as important as our birth-number). Based on the same argument it is very unlikely that our race will survive for much longer. If we imagine that we will able to colonize planets sometime in the future, and thus increase our numbers even more, it makes the odds even worse.
On to the aliens. For the argument above to be fair, we cannot just make an arbitrary division and count the number of humans. We must count everyone/thing that can somehow reason about this issue. Using the exact same argument, we can note that if there is, somewhere in space-time, a race that spans a large amount of stars (i.e with vast technical superiority compared to ours), it is extremely unlikely that you and I would not be one of them.
The only escape from the logic of the above arguments is, as I see it, either:
1. In the future we will become like the Borg, one hivemind and thus the actual number of people does not matter, since that one mind does not affect the statistics.
2. In the future we will evolve to something very strange, which will be uncapable of posing these questions.
By the way... A little something to make your heads spin even more ;). The above argument also applies to your age. I'll let you figure out the consequences of that one for yourselves... This is not just some crackpot theory of mine, the people who support this theory is an impressive bunch (Hawking, Tipler, Barrow, Davies, etc).
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
I think it is worth noting, but taking into consideration that many of us believe we will soon be able to represent inelegance in information, ie strong AI or complete understanding of biological DNA/protein folding operations,(information that becomes alive though the process of being interpreted properly) it follows that our first communication will be the visitation. which in effect raises the bar of importance for projects such as seti,
While I do believe that any form of intelligence several orders of magnitudes above ours in intelligence however it would be rated, would be indistinguishable from magic or god-like interpretations, or misconstrued scientific theory, even under direct observation, trying to extrapolate our own technology's effects on a future society can leave us dizzy and more importantly without a real clue where were headed. In much of that same way the search for extra terrestrial intelligence mirrors the Christian/ western religious ideas of believing without the ability to confirm or deny its existence, that is we are searching for something that is intangible and defies our current logic. So while the seti projects are very important in case probability and logic take the back seat to dumb luck, it is also important to note their relative significance at the same level of hoping to make communication with god, (much "chage" can potentially come of it, but highly unpractical achievement for the time being)
http://www.mammothhungry.com
why do people post crap like this. "ooh look, a creationist says chances of ET life are slim to none"
big fuck-de-do. anyone who thinks the earth is 6000 years old is a moron and not worth listening to IMO
[...] even without faster than light travel (the idea is exponential growth -- we send two colonies, then they)
Just to be pedantic, let me point out that this is not exponential (2**n) growth, because it is limited by the speed of light. Instead, there would be no more than cubic growth (n*n*n), because the rate of growth would be limited to the size of a sphere expanding at the speed of light from where this intelligent species originated.
The numbers that you mention already accomodate this, but I thought this subtlety might be of interest to slashdot readers anyhow.
SETI turns down alien help
SETI@home is a complete waste of resources, UFOs and ETs have been visiting this planet for years. Please donate your unused resources to a more worthy cause such as research for a cure for disease.
*Please* fax/write your government representatives to take action in disclosing some of the most important universal knowledge and technology since the beginning of human existance as we know it today. This is of the greatest importance in our lives.
For more information refer to:
http://www.cseti.org
http://www.disclosureproject.org
...my Microstatic Dweebelizer works just fine, thank you!
> I wonder how much "money" has been "donated" to
Don't give the IRS any ideas. They're thuglike enough as it> the SETI project in this way?
Um, this would be a tax break for the people who run SETI on their PCs - you'd get to claim a donation. Of course, SETI would end up with a mammoth tax bill on all the "income" they get in the form of CPU cycles.
Care to elaborate?