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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
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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?
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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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
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
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
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.
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
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
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 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?
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
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
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.
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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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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.
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.
I totally agree with you. particle entanglement is the cheapest way to go for faster than light communications (more expensive ways include bending space with gravitons, wormholes, etc), but that doesn't change the fact that if a civilization in this galaxy, wanted to explore it, they would be everywhere by now. Maybe they don't want to be found, and that's a possibility (and if they didn't want to, I guarantee they'd have the technology to do it), but I don't think it's the case. I think ETIs are in other galaxies and not in ours. Just my opinion.
[...] 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.