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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."
... in three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being ... The machine will begin
to educate itself with fantastic speed. In a few months it will be
at genius level and a few months after that its powers will be
incalculable ...
-- Marvin Minsky, LIFE Magazine, November 20, 1970
From the first sentence of TFA:
If Intelligent life exists elsewhere in our galaxy, advances in computer processing power and radio telescope technology will ensure we detect their transmissions within two decades (my emphasis)
Even if ETs do exist, there are a host of long-standing doubts about whether they'll be using "transmissions" (questionable), or whether those transmissions will be distinguishable from random noise (OK, probably).
Sensationalist, moi?
Go here to read a story about just that. It turns out that everything we humans have ever done from making fire to shaping stone tools, has been covered by inter-galactic patent law for quite some time. The best part is, the aliens aren't mad, they just want us to pay them for licensing.
Seriously, has anyone considered the possibility that the only intelligent life-forms in the universe maybe humans in past, present and future form ?
And if you don't mind a little neo-liberal dig here, the unrestrained market is a superior rational process to the scientific method for estimating likelihood of events occuring. Especially events which involve a great deal of uncertainty, divergence of opinion, and emotion.
Having said that, Mr. Shostak is boldly taking a stand by stating any sort of probability at all and I approve of it. It's very possible that this new information will change singificantly the odds on the Foresight Exchange as the traders digest it.
While the equation is clearly true since it's basically redundant, it may not elucidate the problem very well. This is because some of the terms may be nonlinearly coupled.
If interstellar propagation of a technological species is possible, the rate of emergence of such species is not independent of whether such species have emerged in the past. There is an ecological competition between hypothetical spacefaring species. Unless two such species emerge simultaneously and accomodate each other, the emergence of one will essentially foreclose the emergence of another.
If the rate of formation of stable technological civilizations is sufficiently low, and the rate of interstellar spread of such civilizations is sufficiently high, there will only be time for one such civilization to emerge per galaxy. By the time the second one could emerge, the first one would have filled the entire niche.
In this scenario, by virtue of the fact that we have emerged, we can conclude that no stable competitors have emerged yet.
In fact, my intuition is that the universe is in precisely this regime, and therefore that we are very unlikely to succeed in SETI.
mt
I fully agree with you, but consider that as our tech increases, we will (obviously) be aware of the new tech. Thus, once we come up with the next groundbreaking communications method, we can start looking for that as well. So now, we are looking for radio waves, maybe in 20 years, we'll all be communicating with psions or something, and someone will make a telescope that can look for those, too. Then our range of possible encounters will balloon. As we continue to develop new tech, we will continue to attain the ability to find those others out there using that as well as the older stuff.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
:wq!
Proof? Easy. Look up The Fermi Paradox. One of the corollaries that convince me is the fact that, even at sublight speeds, it only takes 1-10 million years to fill up a galaxy, since a race would tend to fill up in a geometric progression. Given how old the galaxy is, it should have happened by now. It only takes one race in billions of years to have wanderlust for earth-like planets, and boom! No more intelligent life rising up.
That it hasn't seem to have happened means we are alone.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I'm not convinced that there is life outside of earth to find. Even more so, I really doubt that if we find another planet that harbors life, it will contain intelligent life. Scientists are just beginning to learn how unique our planet really is. Things such as our cosmic location to even our (relatively) overly large moon add into the stability of our planet. Also, (and this is more of my own opinion) intelligence seems to be overrated as far as what we see on earth. For instance, apes are among the most intelligent creatures on earth, yet they do not have radio communications. Ants, on the other hand, have been around for millenia, yet are very simple creatures. If intelligence was such an important factor to survival, I think we would see more animals on earth nearing human intelligence. I also believe in divine creation of humans, the idea of which, I think, is helped out by the fact that we are so unique amoung all the species on earth.
SIGFAULT
David Brin has a rather lovely little story in his collection "The River of Time." that tackles this: Human beings have been exploring the galaxy, but finding hardly any habitable worlds and no sign of anyone else to talk to. Then they find an artifact, which contains the coordinates of a bunch of other habitable planets. What's been happening is that the universe is still too young for there to be more than one space-faring race around at a time. So the first race to realise their predicament left artifacts with pointers on all its planets for the next race that would eventually come along, and so on. Also included is the coordinates of a particular black hole; when each species gets bored of kicking around with no one to talk to, it departs for a near-event horizon orbit around the black hole, where it waits, along with the other early races, for the galaxy to fill up with interesting people.
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
or maybe when we switch over to unencryptable-uninterceptable quantum cryptography for all communications...and cable tv for our tv signals...and wired phones. it is possible with current technology for us to use means of communication that are undetectable now.
random noise from machinery would likely appear the same as random noise from a star.
Similarly, perhaps said races have been checking up on us ever 1,000 years or so. When they last visited in the 1400s, we were busy trying not to be killed by our own microbes, we couldn't comprehend electromagnetism, and couldn't even leave the surface of our own planet without a physical structure to support us. Maybe we'll show more promise next time around, assuming that we haven't managed to exterminate ourselves in the mean time.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Years ago I read a few books by Erich von Däniken. I can't say I believe a lot of his theories, but I remember one point he made which made a lot of sense to me:
Basically he said it was naive to be listening to radio signals, and his reasoning was like yours (how long will we continue using such a techology?). He wanted to explore other alternatives, such as telepathy. Now, I don't believe in telepathy, but I thought his point was good.
Ironically, the man who wanted to explore telepathy is a founding member of SETI.
Carl Segan believed that there was definately other life out there, but that the odds of finding eachother was incredibly small. The vastness of both space and time may make it unlikely.
Imagine two random grains of sand on the beach. Imagine those two grains could exist at any time in the history of the beach. What would the odds be that these two grains would be near enough to eachother in both space and time to find eachother?
There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
See this.
If "over 400 government, military, and intelligence community witnesses testifying to their direct, personal, first hand experience with UFOs, ETs, ET technology" isn't good enough for you, then start here to research our gov's own documents, and then go here and dismiss these reports with "swamp gas" or "venus" or "a flock of birds". This "we may contact other intelligent creatures someday" is a farce. They are here and have been for millenia.
Read "A Mote in God's Eye" by Larry Niven for an example when it really is a good idea to instantly nuke them.
Suppose we were colonized by some brotherly (fatherly?) entity (such as via living cell deposits in the fresh ocean, which were somehow known would evolve into more complex organisms in this environment) and we are simply temporarily ignorant of our relation to "the rest of our civilization" because there is something significant about "growing up unique and without outside interference", but that at some point in the future "the news will be broken to us", along the lines of a child one day being "old enough" to learn about sex from the "elders", even though the sexual potential was actually there all along? Along those same lines, perhaps it is possible for a civilization to learn of such a relationship "prematurely".
" Is there any harm in SETI? Perhaps if our resources were limitless, and the persuit of a project like SETI didn't potentially take away from resources for more worthwhile projects, then I might not be arguing that the harm is in fact there, and very, very real."
I don't quite agree with this logic. I mean, there's a matter of priorities. However, today, those priorities still seem to allow for the existence of Seti. (It'd be stupid to run it if we were fighting an army of Terminators, for example.)
The problem with what you're saying, at least in the case of taking it to an unusual extreme, is that the result is that we only look for stuff we know we can find. We simply cannot be that efficient at allocating the resources to only the right areas. Suppose in the tower example you provided that it failed, but radical new engineering enhancements were made that made buildings more earthquake proof? Who would expect that building such a seemingly dumb project would make Earthquakes more survivable? Nobody can predict that.
Resources are limited, they'll always be limited. Investments (even gambles) need to be made that new discoveries will come about. If we stick to making decisions based strictly on what we know, then I would fear the risk of exhaustion of our resources because too much time was spent on predictable outcomes.
Hope that makes sense, and I hope you can forgive the "taken to extremes" rebuttal.
"Derp de derp."
Just a thought - is there anyone on earth working through not-so-positive first contact scenarios? I know the US government sponsors groups that work out worst-case scenarios with regard to war and terrorism. Does NASA cover this kind of stuff? What would we do if we were confronted by a hostile race with technology vastly superior to ours? If we had to, are we even able to hit an object in orbit with a cluster of nukes? I don't think that it's remotely probable, just more interesting than work on a Friday afternoon.
So then you have to wonder, what caused the abiogenesis on earth? And what's stopping it from happening on other planets?
I'm a big fan of SETI, but they tend to downplay the fact that we're only likely to be able to pick up signals beamed directly at us.
That may be true now, but not necessarily in 20 years. Heck, in 20 years we may discover a more practical way to transmit over vast distances... and suddenly discover aliens are already trying to communicate with us.
Or maybe not. A lot can change in 20 years though.
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?