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SETI Predicts We'll Find ETs by 2020
FTL writes "Based on the Drake Equation, Moore's Law, and the Allen Telescope, a new prediction has been made that Earth will make first contact with aliens within 20 years. Of course once we find the first aliens there's the question of can we decode their signals, would they spot our reply, and what's the lag time."
A misleading article summary on /.? I'm shocked and appalled!
A better way to state this story is that within 20 years, SETI will have the capacity to detect transmissions from across our galaxy, rather than just a small slice of it. Whether or not there's any signal to pick up is another matter entirely...
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Museum tour guide: This fossil is two million and nine years old.
Surprised visitor: How can you tell the date so accurately?
Guide: Easy. I've been working here nine years, and it was two million years old when I joined.
My point is, the Drake equation has so many variables that we can't even get a ballpark estimate of that any prediction based on it could easily be off by a couple of orders of magnitude.
To answer your rhetorical question, it was Hitlers speech at the Olympics held in Munich in 1936. It was the first radio broadcast strong enough to make it into space.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
To Serve Man
Spoiler: The Joy of Cooking , with only one main ingredient.
From the link:
"To Serve Man" (March 2, 1962) adapted by Serling from Damon Knight's short story, is one of the most famous Zone episodes with its "Soylent Green" ending. A 9-foot tall Kanamit (Richard Kiel) has come to earth to create a golden age with the advanced technology of his race. However, Michael Chambers (Lloyd Bochner), a government decoding expert, learns to learn the true meaning of the title of the book left by the Kanamit. Not as much fun the second time around when the ending seems so obvious, "To Serve Man" teaches the old lesson that appearances can be deceiving, especially when dealing with strange visitors from another planet.
It's time for my usual rant... SETI isn't a guy, SETI isn't an organization, SETI isn't a project. Saying "SETI predicts we'll find ETs by 2020" is like saying "Political Science ate tuna for lunch today"
This prediction wasn't made by "SETI," it was made by a person, Seth Shostak. Seth Shostak doesn't work for "SETI," he works for an organization called the "SETI Institute." Some people at the SETI Institute do search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but I would guess that most do not. As a corellary to that, most people in the world that search for extraterrestrial intelligence professionally are not associated with the SETI institute.
Seth is also an optimist and to some extent a salesman. He's not going to get donations for the SETI institute and the Allen Telescope by saying that it's never going to happen. Therefore he uses an optimistic Drake equation that results in 50,000 communicating civilizations in the galaxy.
I, on the other hand, am more inclined to base my predictions on what we actually know, rather than optimism. My computation of the Drake equation puts an upper limit to the number of civilizations in the galaxy at 750,000. It also puts a lower limit of one civilization per 2 million galaxies. We don't have enough information to make a more specific prediction than that!
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