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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.
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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