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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."
And I predict that I'll get laid by 2020....
I'm glad "sending a radio message back will take centuries," because I'm not sure that a response back of "humans on earth, eh? we'll be right over," is a Good Thing (TM).
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
...and monkeys will start walking erect, too.
Oh, wait.
I could be wrong.
I've seen it at least 10 times since it's first release. I'm starting to get sick of Elliot's whinning.
Kiss my bass.
This calculation doesn't include the number of people turned off from the SETI@Home project by the new BOINC software.
It is 2004, right? Wouldn't that set the date to 2024?
there's the question of can we decode their signals, would they spot our reply, and what's the lag time
And is their primary goal "To Serve Mankind?"...
2020, just in time to send my first and brightest to Battle School.
We're already here.
The green alien babes don't want you, either...
... they don't find us first?
The more important question is, will they be friendly?
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
Of course, if we ever find these ETs, at the rate Congress is cutting NASA's budget, we'll never be able to meet up with them unless they come to us.
Shostak assumed that computer processing power will continue to double every 18 months until 2015- as it has done for the past 40 years. From then on, he assumes a more conservative doubling time of 36 months as transistors get too small to scale down as easily as they have till now.
As has been seen with 65nm Prescotts and difficulties with die shrinks to this size by IBM and AMD as well, we may already be at or near the point that they had assumed for 2015.
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
Pinging aliens with 32 bytes of data:
Ping statistics for aliens:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 148 years, Maximum = 163 years, Average = 156 years
C:\Documents and Settings\Valentine Johnson>
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
SETI says 2020, so now we have a new Internet deadline to watch. I bet they strike gold next year sometime or the year after. And when they do, I bet the Aliens look like giant chickens and they kick our asses for KFC.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
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...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I'm pretty sure ET has already found me. At least, that's what the grey midget sticking the cattle prod up my ass while covering me in slimy Saran Wrap told me through my mind the other night when I was snatched out of bed via a beam of light.
Wait -- never mind -- that was Tequila talking after some really bad Mexican food. No wonder my ass hurts. Damn that Mexican midget waitress!
IronChefMorimoto
I guess I'll go read that fine article now. :)
Anonymous Kev
Proudly posting as AC since 1997
(Finally got a dang account in 2004)
"We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile."
will they get sued by SCO?
Doesn't this imply they believe that alien life is thousands of years ahead of us in technology?
Consider this paragraph:
Within a generation, radio emissions from enough stars will be observed and analysed to find the first alien civilisation, Shostak estimates. But because they will probably be between 200 and 1000 light years away, sending a radio message back will take centuries.
Ok, if they are on roughly the same time line we are, they'd have to have sent the messages 200 to 1000 years ago for us to GET the messages. It works both ways, they have to be AHEAD of us, significantly, to say that just because we're ready to hear them, if they exist, they'll have a message for us to hear.
Never confuse volume with power.
Is simply detecting intelligent life way out there 'contact'? Seems to me 'contact' is mutual recognition of one another's existence. That is, knowing they're there while they are oblivious to us isn't really 'contact'.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
...oops, a few years too early.
... 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
... are there actually aliens to find?!
Then, even if there are, had they advanced enough to send out the signals we can detect, long enough ago for those signals to reach us?
That there is a big difference between making "first contact" and "detecting their transmissions".
We could stumble across a repeating, non-natural signal tomorrow, and granted this would be one of the top 3 (if not the greatest) scientific discovery ever, but it is unlikely we would be able to do anything with this discovery for a very, very long time. Understanding the message would probably take decades, sending a reply would take light years, and holding any kind of meaningful communication would require technology totally and completely beyond our current levels.
...that Aliens are susceptible to Macintosh Viruses! (What was that movie? Was it "Judgement Day"? I forgot the name.)
Best Buy can have you arrested
Singularity or Alien Life. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that they're both going to happen within a year of eachother. What if the first transmission was source code for AI?
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
there will probably be enough lag for it no to matter. Ping: Reply from cs.otherplanet.gx: bytes=32 time=114yrs TTL=31536000000
I guess a game of Doom 3 with our new extraterrestrial friends is out of the question.
your fake Star Trek language skills!
I want my! I want my! I want my Eee PC!
Top Greeblorg scientists have determined that an alien species located on Sol 3 have discovered our civilization!
All radio and digitized light arrays should be temporarily taken off-line and back-ups of all data secured.
A phenomenon the Solerians refer to as Slash-Dotting is certain to disable all arrays with less than a direct quantum connection to the central data core
Greeblorg drones have assured the prime council that appropriate measures are in place to protect the central data core from damage, though interruption to communications to and from the central data core are likelyThat is all
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
Making the large assumption that an alien race will go through a similar radio transmission curve, and considering the fact that we don't know how far away said alien civilization is, the chances of us finding them between now and 2020 seems very remote.
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?
The first way we'll know if contact has been made is when all the grown-ups disappear. No parents!
What if we finally detect messages from alien civilizations and all they say are things like
- Enlarge Your Penis
- Make $$$$ At Home
- A Letter from Npambara Ngamba: My Dear Friend, I am trying to move a large quantity of money out of my country...
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
They don't really "predict" anything. Just because it's based on some other theories doesn't suddenly mean we really will contact aliens in 20 years just because they said so. Organizations like to make vague, arbitrary predictions like this to stir up publicity. It's like when "experts" make claims that we'll have robot servents by 2012. It's meaningless.
...one, someone keeps paying to listen (not a guarantee, but I hope it happens) and two, there's somone out there for us to here. If there isn't, it sure is an awful waste of space, seeing as how we're not exactly jumping to fill it. But that's another matter entirely.
Moo.
... 22 Dec 2012.
Didnt I see that on six star trek two outer limits and one stargate episodes?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Duke Nukem Forever has yet to be released after searching the whole galaxy for it.
N = N* fp ne fl fi fc fL
fl, fi, fc and FL (number of planets capable of supporting life, planets with intelligent life etc. ) are all more or less guesses.
Why would an advanced technology use a method limited to the speed of light to communicate across the galaxy?
SETI brings to mind a picture of some remote tribe looking for smoke signals as a sign of intelligent communication while standing next to a satellite dish.
Come on - how many others thought "Shostak? Is that some made-up alien name from a science fiction show on at 3 a.m. on a cable channel?"
Turns out it's an actual Terran name. Go figure.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
Now that sounds like a safe prediciton. Rather like the we'll have flat-screen televisions that we just unroll and hang on the wall in 5 years that I've been hearing for the past twenty.
Seriously though, the idea that life must exist elsewhere, and will communicate in a method we can detect across interstellar distances, is still just that -- a theory.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I've never watched that show though I liked the original womanizing (femalecreatureizing) Kirk.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
It will be 2047. The'll come fleeing another race. We'll build lots of stuff with them. And then the other race will come to hunt us both down. 300 years later, the earth is destroyed and we're homeless. But we also take back most of the known space about 10 years after that.
:)
I know this becasue I wrote it.
-=fshalor
... in 15 to 20 years.
Usually it comes in 10 to 15 years. In this case it must take the signal an extra 5 years to get here. Either that, or someone can't do arithmetic.
ping -s -R -A inet6 -a aliencivilizations
Duh.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
If the time it takes for a signal to get to us from then is really big, then wont the first things we would hear from them, be like their first radio broadcasts ever?
I mean I would assume that the frst thing that aliens would hear from us would be early radio broadcasts, wouldnt the first thing we hear from anyone be the same?
I think SETI should be a permanent project of man kind. SETI's search is not merely science, it is a philosophical matter of the highest importance.
The day this happens will change the way minkind think's forever.
I've been wondering this...and all of you people that think you're smart might be able to figure this out for me. SETI uses radio telescopes to search for E.T., right? Now, I understand that these radio telescopes don't just search for AM/FM radio signals, but basically waves within the full broadcast spectrum. So they're looking for AM/FM, TV, CB, Wi-Fi, wide band, short, wave, cell phones, etc. So I guess the basic thinking is that any intelligent race will use radio signals of some sort. How long have humans been using some kind of radio signals? In the general scheme of things, a very brief time. How much longer will we be using them? Is this something that will be with us forever, or will it die out as our technology advances? Assuming our technology will advance, somehow, to exclude broadcast signals, our planet, from space, will become rather quiet. Also assuming that all intelligent life evolves along a similar timeline, we can assume that these other planets will emit radio signals for only a brief period of time. But somehow we're assuming that that time will somehow coincide with our own. It makes finding a needle in a haystack even harder when the damned needle keeps moving around. Enlighten me. How can SETI possibly work? (That said, I do have the SETI@Home software running on all of my machines...so I'm hopeful.)
radio is too slow, what is it that the sun produces that travels way faster than light and goes through everything? if anyone is out there, thats what they are using...what ever happened with that experimental thing they buried 1/2 mile underground filled with water to catch those things the sun produces?
my prediction? we will learn how to use that and will be connected to countless civs' (if they out there)
Contact could have been expected by 2010, but release of the BOINC software has delayed the seti@home project by at least 10 yers.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
at this year's snowshoe institute at snowshoe in wv, dr. seth shostak of SETI will be speaking.
it's on july 31st, i'd love to go but dunno about fundage...
If anyone's played Starwars Galaxies, they know that it's hard to interact with any aliens if your ping is too high.
-- Fratz, human
What is this going to do to the Dept. of Homeland Security??? We've spent billions on setting up global war theaters! and now this?? what's the budget going to be for a universal war theater?? Get me Tom Ridge on the phone...
What an outlandish claim. This type of announcement reminds me of similar claims by Doomsday Churchs on precise dates when the Earth will be destroyed.
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.
If there are aliens on remote planets, it seems to me that it is extremely unlikely that they are at the same technological level that we are (either higher or lower), and since all of the pseudo-science / probability people say that there is an enormous chance that there is in fact life on other planets, it follows that if there is life 'out there', some of the civilizations must be extremely advanced compared to ours.
In that case, it is hard to believe that they are not aware of us. This is where you need to put on your tin foil hat. If they are aware of us, and have not contacted us, they clearly do not want us to contact them / be aware of them. If they have technology vastly superior to ours, isn't it possible they could filter out any signs of their existance - or even 'fine tune' our perceptions of the universe beyond removing just signs of their own existence?
From the article: "Shostak came up with an estimate of between 10,000 and 1 million radio transmitters in the galaxy."
The Drake Equation is just a fancy way of saying SWAG (silly wild-ass guess). Personally, I find this SWAG to be wild high by several orders of magnitude.
Personally, my guess is that our galaxy has 0-5 other species actively transmitting.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Theres a big difference between "make contact" and "detect"
good stuff, i've often pondered that myself, what if they're sending signals via something like "sub-space" (sorry to get Trekkie on ya, i just didn't know how else to put it)
May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage. RAmen.
And let me be the first to welcome our new alien overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted /. personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground mineral caves.
I am wondering what (if any) protocols have been formalised for how 'exactly' we will choose to interact with ET's. I read an article somwhere that plans were already drawn up covering what to do in the event of contact, but my brain is broken today, and i can't put a decent google together. Anyone know of these contingencies?
"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."
No.. the real question is whether they'll be interested in destroying our planet after they spot our reply.
"It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad."
While I like the idea of sending out ships with information, I do have to wonder about the wisdom of telling others exactly where we live. If we sent a ship out that did replies, I would have no issues.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The idea of meeting aliens within 20 years is absurd. So many things can happend within twenty-years to change what may or may not be a precised prediction. For example, lets say a meteor slams into the alien's space ship due to USA's laser defense system which they had fun to use shooting at meteors and breaking them into smaller pieces.
Getting a monkey to become president with a cigar and rollerskates.
That should take about 20 years right?
not without permission from the Alpha Centauri RIAA
If we havent decimated our existence or environment by that time. On that note, it will be interesting to know if the ETs want us to find them. It's very likely they know we are here, and want nothing to do with us other than observe how we have pretty much fcked up 60 billion years of evolution in 100 years.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Thinks of what will happen when our belief systems are overturned by the fact that another intelligence exists in the universe.
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats, living together... mass hysteria!
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
That is exactly what I would want to transmit to the aliens.
Technoli
What complicates matters is the assumption that a technological civilization that has this technology is still primitive enough to pump out massive amounts of EM radiation in all directions to communicate with other individuals around them.
Even here on primitive ol' Earth we can see where EM communication is going... directed beam, spread-spectrum, low-power wireless mesh, encrypted (ie. reandom-looking) digital, and that's all a mere 100 years or so into this radio thing. How many of the 10K-1M civilizations out there do we hope to accidentally catch in this tiny window of radio naivete? And since it will take 100-1000 years to send a message back, does anyone seriously think they'll still be listening attentively to their little alien vacuum tube sets when it gets there?
There must be ETs for us to find them in 20 years.
That is quite an assumption in the headline.
Though you might have been kidding about beeing affraid about the evil alliens coming to visit and do evil things to us like take away our freedom (or worse, steal our MP3's), this does seem to be a bit of an unfortunate trend in modern thinking. Just because they look different, think different and have a different believe system we don't have to instantly nuke them when they are within reach.
I for one welcome our new green-multi-mouthed homosapienphobic omnivore doomsday-device-wielding neighbours!
SCO would have found another source of revenue.
Rampant Ninja related crimes these days...Whitehouse is not the exception
Titled "To Serve Man"
Seriously, has anyone considered the possibility that the only intelligent life-forms in the universe maybe humans in past, present and future form ?
Reply to them like in the movie Contact.
Even if we can't necessarely interpret their signals, if we send their own signal back to them intact and with some sideband or appended information about us in it (or even just the signal) they'll be able to know it wasn't just a coincidence.
The problem with SETI fanatics is that they assume that aliens are using primitive EM waves to communicate. If EM waves were the only way to communicate, we would be bombarded with intelligent signals from all directions. I have a little advice for SETI. Aliens can communicate instantly using their knowledge of the non-local nature of the universe. Get a clue.
Shostak admits that there are myriad uncertainties surrounding his prediction
Yeah, no kidding, Edison.
When I plug *my* misapthropic numbers into the bloody bloody bloody bastard Drake bloody equation, I basically prove even WE don't exist. Plug in the dewey-eyed, rabbit hugging optimist numbers, and you get aliens already knocking on the door and introducing themselves as your new enighbors.
--- Ban humanity.
The good news: soon we'll discover the radio signals of an advanced alien civilization.
The bad news: their messages will likely be encrypted beyond comprehension so that we don't copy their programming and distribute it on P2P networks.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
It is another matter, but Shostak also addressed it in his prediction:
So not only doese he think we'll have the capacity to detect the transmissions, he also predicts that the transmissions are just waiting there for us to pick up, based on the Drake Equation.
Chris Rock once said in a stand-up bit that the reason was simple why we haven't made contact with aliens: "bad news travels fast." "They fight over black and white! We're purple"
You're better off doing addition in your head than with a sliderule. Sliderules are best suited to multiplication (although they can do other things).
what makes us so sure that they want to contact us? Calvin and Hobbes said it best "the surest sign of intelligent life is the fact they have not contacted us" I think if there were species in our sector of the galaxy or cosmos they would have sense our presense and or at least heard our radio signals....
A Lightweight Extraterrestrial Intercommunication Network Transmission Protocol. ALIENTP
Now, ALIENTP is a protocol for transmission of data through high bandwidth - high latency (anywhere from 5s to 500 million years) networks....ALIENTP is composed of three basic components:
The HUMAN, the SPACE and the EXTRATERRESTRIAL. The HUMAN (Huge Uber-Manlike Android Noisemaker) sends a type of EM AM signal through SPACE (Some Place Allocated for Cosmic Entities) to the EXTRATERRESTRIAL (Ex-Xenophobia Technical Race of Aliens Trying to Extract Ridiculous Rural Eccentrics Solely for Tests Requiring Initial Anal Lubrication).....
I'm sick. I know
--<Mike>--
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
But they will refuse to give up wasting their time searching for the non-existent.
It would be pretty damned stupid to assume that with all the planets of all the stars of all the galaxies in our enormous universe, we're the only sentient species.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
That actually covered by the fc and L factors. But it's still a useless equation.
If EM waves were the only way to communicate, we would be bombarded with intelligent signals from all directions.
At some level, but free space losses drop the signal levels until they get lost in the background noise, even in the microwave window. I design satcom links, and that's the biggest factor we fight: the signal attenuation simply due to distance. Hence, antennas in which you could land a small plane.
--- Ban humanity.
The real question is, "what's their IP address?"
Astronauts in weightlessness of pixilated space, exchange graffiti with a disembodied race. - Rush
Are you James T. Kirk?
Yes, but... What Would Bones Say?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
These are supposed to coincide, right?
"Anyone who makes a prediction for a technical breakthrough by twenty years will be automatically suspect and barred from publication in professional journals and receipt of public funding" You'd think we woulda learned from the AI and fusion power people.....
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
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!
Even as a christian, I have to say that you are wrong.
It says man was created in gods image, then if these aliens are the same they too have the name/class man (or whatever in their language). If they look different then either humans or aliens are mankind.
If you have nothing useful to say post as AC.
So, will it be anything like "Independence Day"?
supposing aliens are also listening for signals of aliens and they run into our noisy broadcast spectrum, how are they supposed to know what is just random chatter and an actual message? Will they go through all the AM/FM, TV, CB, Wi-Fi, Wide band, short, wave, cell phone messages just to deciper it?
did you forget to take your meds?
Top Ten Questions about the aliens:
;)
1) Will the aliens be allowed to backup media that they legally own?
2) Do they have oil? Maybe we can go to war with them...
3) Will the aliens be hit with DirectTV threat letters from their Uranus for intercepting a crappy signal?
4) How will the $3,500 DirectTV blood money be converted into their currency?
5) Will the patent office be flooded with new alien claims to gifs, automatic software download and Linux? Maybe aliens created ELF?
6) Will they be covertly tagged with RDIFs when they arrive, so they can be tracked by Walmart?
7) Are these the same aliens that are on Opra and Jerry Springer, which thrive in our trailer parks?
8) Will jobs be outsourced or "co-sourced" to their planet? Will I have to wait on hold for 6 hrs for someone to translate my problem?
9) Can they work 14 hr days? You know, because they would be salaried employees of course.
10) Are they democrats or republicans? You know we don't really like independants
int27h
that even if there are alien civilizations within transmission range, that: 1. They will use radio to transmit communications. What if they use a method of signal transmission totally foreign to our understanding of physics? 2. That THEY are listening. Just because we are preoccupied with finding extra-terrestrial life, that doesn't mean that THEY are. 3. That they would even respond. The assumption is that they are able to respond. It's very likely that even if we find intelligent life, it will be behind us or ahead of us in terms of technological development. If they are behind us, they may not be able to respond. If they are ahead of us, they may not feel we are worthy of a response. How much attention do we show to ants? Who says that ant crawling on your leg isn't trying to make contact.
Mod points are pointless when you browse at -1.
Let's be honest.
Whenever I encounter a new species, the first thing I ask myself:
Is it good eating?
- kgj
-kgj
The exponential nature of tech growth implies that we are like apes to a civilization even 100 years ahead of us, and like ants to one thousands or millions of years ahead of us.
Bullocks.
Are people from 100, 500, or 1,000 years ago "apes" to us? They didn't have all of the modern conveniences, but a lot of them did exist--and the average person, though less educated, was not a good deal less intelligent than they are today.
If they communicate with us, then come to attack us, we could always rely on creating a virus on a MAC that will take down their mother-ship. (Independence Day)
Why would that be stupid?
Borrow money from a pessimist - they don't expect it back.
... to bang the rocks together, guys.
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
Sawblade, Speak & Spell and a fork in the woods.
Alf was fake. The pickup never happened.
Phone Home!
Say it.
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
All this postulation about this space culture or that. But what if all the so called intelligent cultures are more or less at the same point we are - early 21st century give or take a thousand years. That would me that they about as blind to us as we are to them. Meaning that they might be far closer than say a million light years but because of their limited technology and power output they can't send a recognizable signal to us nor can they receive any recognizable signal from us.
Think of it this way - to some far off place the earth must look like one of a large collection of fairly strange radio sources that appear far more powerful than any natural occurence dictates they should be. But that raw output is pretty much all they would see, and that's only if they are practically next door. Much further than 50 light years away and we start to look postively preindustrial. So in order for us to find an intelligent source not only does it have to be fairly close to us it also has to be much more advanced else we would never see any nascent culture with barely the power or sophistication to transmit. Remember that is space distance equals time.
Umm, yeah. Because people at the turn of the LAST century were like apes to us...
However I do agree more with the second portion of your statement (Millions of years ahead, not thousands).
Simply phrased "Shot first, greet later!"
Times were simpler then. The world wanted to either be like or destroy the USA. Now, the world wants to the USA, or destroy itself.
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
Now we will have all those quake addicts complaining about the ping of Alpha centuari!
Sorry if I seem a little pedantic here, but the summary is quite confusing. I know you can just RTFA to straighten it out, but I don't really think there's much excuse for having to. 2004 + 20 = 2024. Not 2020! That is a difference of 4 years. While 4 years might not seem like that much at first, think about it in terms of, say, your own life. If I die at the age of 80 (I figure that's a reasonable guess, right?), 4 years is 5 percent of my entire life!
...wouldn't you still want to know?
-- http://frobnosticate.com
The fact is, we are all aliens.
Over time, we have moved from planet to planet, depleting resources and moving on to the next... hence the differences in races, languages, religions, etc. This is also the reason the dinosaurs on Earth died off - we could not co-exist with them. Destroying them was the answer. Upon leaving a planet, our technology was always at a point to where we could manage to create life on the next.
Studies on Mars will uncover clues to this.
The answers will come in time.
The odds or our own existence are sigificantly paltry. The odds of intelligent life elsewhere are practically nil. Get to know your neighbor and forget about ET. The univerese is full of gas and empty rocks.
Don't be silly. God was created in man's image, because we're the coolest, right?
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
I contemplated joining, but thought "what the hell, they may not even be approaching this right, why risk wasting CPU cycles on them?" Then I found out about Folding@Home, and am impressed with its goal. It actually will make a difference in the quality of human life by helping us fight more diseases.
SETI@Home might get us in touch with an alien race, but is that even desirable at this point? All of those people racing to contact ET forget that most of the abduction stories involving the "greys" are incredibly negative and traumatic. Do we really want to full open ourselves up to them others who may be just like them in their attitude toward human life?
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Stopped with the first sentence, huh?
From further down:
Within a generation, radio emissions from enough stars will be observed and analysed to find the first alien civilisation, Shostak estimates
I think they should be looking for subspace beakons
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
replicators don't spread by radio waves, what are you talking about?!!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
But we might be an abberation. The rest of the universe may be all "peace-groovy, brother" and we got saddled with the wingnuts. Probably not though.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
"exponential nature" being the key point here folks.
You [probably] paid for it.
Get it here.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
That as we continue along our current path, the odds of our complete self destruction rise exponentally - to the point of being almost 100% certain.
That being said, any sufficiently advanced civ would either have to overcome this tendancy (if they share it) or we would never meet then.
Of course, this says nothing about how they would treat us, only how they treat each other.
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?
Or, our first intercept might be something like "If you can read this, you are too close, and we are dispatching the Vogon Constructor Fleet." ;)
Or how about, "....indicates that the new species is attempting to observe our communications. Shows tendency to grow without regard for available resources. Unstable, shows potential, frequently inflicts harm on itself and surrounding life forms. Please advise. ~Gloobanerb Exterminators, Inc"
Getting even wackier, maybe the first message will be "...ooooooooooo! woooaaaaaaaooooouaaaoooooo!! oooooooooaooooooouaaooooo!" Captain, we're receiving whale song! ;-) Or, "....are likely to be eaten by a Grue. /n 71/80hp> _"
Hell, we've been broadcasting for ~50 years now... maybe message one will just be "SHUT UP!!!"
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
When you say give or take 1k years ...
Take 1000: no radio
Give 1000: Massively improved detection and broadcasting capabilities.
The odds of all the other civilizations being even within 1k years is tiny. What SETI counts on is that we won't be able to hear the people less sophisticated than us. The people much more sophisticated than us should be capable of blaring out messages so loud they would be hard to miss (if they are interested in sending messages).
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
What if everybody in the galaxy with radio tech is listening... and nobody's sending anything? Sort of a cosmic phone system where all the subscribers are sitting around waiting for someone to call their answering machines (we'll reply after we've listened to your message and decided whether we want to know you or not). Not much of a start for a galactic civilization, I guess... but hey, it's a dworp-eat-dworp Universe out there.
****************
"Nature never says yes to a theory. It is almost always no. The best one can hope for is a maybe." - Albert E.
funny, the aliens I talk to don't predict contact for at least another 50 years.
The rest of the universe may be all "peace-groovy, brother" and we got saddled with the wingnuts.
That may be by design... "Earth: Australia of the universe..."
d&r
People's desire to believe they are right is much stronger than their desire to be right.
Whatever. A few hundred years in technological advancement means nothing in the terms of "apes" or "ants" as you infer. Technology does not affect the ability of a race to learn, conceive, or use said technology. We've come across a number of stone age civilizations on our own planet and they are not like apes compared to us. They can learn and be integrated in rather well. Japan went from a fuedal society to a technological world power through their own acheivements in a few decades. Biological matters that will require us to think of other races as either apes or ants take evolutionary changes that are factors of millions of years. Even if they have the technology to change their genetic make-up to something advanced enough to consider us "apes", they'd have the same abilty to advance us the same way should they choose.
What will matter will be cultural differences. They will encounter us, we might be unwilling to accept their culture and technology, at least in a large enough step to catch up with them. They will have the advantage of a higher technology and how they treat us may depend if they have a klingon type of civilization and enslave us or Federation and simply leave us alone. Most lilkely it will be something in between and they'll off shore factories and work to our world because we're backwards, have unexploited natural resources and work for cheap.
...may have invalidated the theory that singularities can be used to travel around the universe at will. If you go into the black hole, you're toast.
The Drake equation is a way of phrasing the question so that it's not a "SWAG" based on nothing but intuition. It teases out the variables in the equation so that you're able to think clearly about what the chances are, assessing what you think each variable might really be. Choose your values:
I'm struggling to see how your "0-5" guess approaches anything like the same level of considered thought. I can sure rig one of the Drake calculators out there to get such a result. But you don't want to even bother with that, so you dismiss anything like a real, thoughtful guess as just as haphazard as yours?
Ignorance and incuriosity are soft pillows, but only for hard-headed people...
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
What do you mean 'no other'? I've yet to be convinced there's intelligent life in the galaxy at all. Cogito ergo spud.
Ignore the parent comment I posted. Sorry
One reason why aliens are expected to be friendly is that the resources required to successfully undertake interstellar travel are so high that a society that performs such a feat can't afford to spend resources (mental, economic, whatever) on negative efforts, like genocide.
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
It seems I must once again post these rules:
1. No matter what you predict in the future, you will be horribly wrong.
2. The people in the future will mercilessly mock you for it.
This is way too optimistic. I think it will be more like 2030.
As T-Bone Burnett put it:
We come from a blue planet light-years away
Where everything multiplies at an amazing rate
We're out here in the universe buying real estate
Hope we haven't gotten here too late
We're humans from earth
We're humans from earth
You have nothing at all to fear
I think we're gonna like it here
We're looking for a planet with atmosphere
Where the air is fresh and the water clear
With lots of sun like you have here
Three or four hundred days a year
[chorus]
Bought Manhatten for a string of beads
Brought along some gadgets for you to see
Heres a crazy little thing we call TV
Do you have electricity?
[chorus]
I know we may seem pretty strange to you
But we got know-how and a golden rule
We're here to see manifest destiny through
Ain't nothing we can't get used to
We're humans from earth
We're humans from earth
Response: deathray aimed at source of annoying frequencies ticking off all the local residence of our sector. After a breif squeal of about 6.2 billion voices screaming, at last peace and quite.
SPAM solution made easy: 1 spammer, 5 cords of rope, 5 hourses, and fireworks. Be creative.
I guess a lag of a couple days would rule out any Counter-Strike play. Which is sad, since I was really looking forward to owning some aliens...
Are you telling me that you don't see the connection between government and laughing at people? - Interviewer
Remember the episode of STTNG where Q loses his powers and hides out on the Enterprise, and a moon is going to crash into the planet, and Picard asks him for advise? Q's response is "Oh, just change the gravitational constant of the universe.." Picard goes "How?" and Q says "What do you mean how? you just do it". Try explaining the nature of the Schroedinger's Cat Paradox to a 2 year old. If the kids a freakin' genius, (s)he might understand part of it. That's the relationship we're hoping for. Now, try to explain it to a fruitfly. We might discover that we are that fruitfly.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
Even if we DO hear alien broadcasts by 2020 the civilizations will most likely be hundreds if not thousands of light years away. 1) there is no way that we can currently travel those distances and in any sort of reasonable time 2) by the time we hear them their planet could already be dead and gone
-Cnik
... the Sigularity being transhumanism's (Vinge's?) word for the time when a man-made AI entity exceeds the intelligence of any human. As unlikely as I think THAT is, it seems more likely that the first "alien" intelligence we meet will be one we create rather than one from outer space... or from deep in the ocean or in the Earth's core or wheverever an alleged ETI thing is hanging out.
If it were inside the Earth, it would be an ITI (Infra-Terrestial Intelligence), wouldn't it?
Tag lost or not installed.
sure to get us all killed.
Everyone thought we'd all kill each other with nuclear weapons. Since it hasn't happened yet, we've been lulled into thinking we were being paranoid. We were not. Not only could we have killed ourselves with nukes, we still can.
But that's not the worst of it.
Nuclear weapons were the first class of weapons which could kill everyone on the planet. But they aren't the last, or even the worst. Nuclear weapons, as should be filtering down to all of us via the coverage of the recent events in Iraq, are difficult to construct even for nation-states with BILLIONS of dollars to throw at the problem. Also, it takes a lot of time and, as Iran, North Korea and others have found out, is relatively easy to detect.
Biological weapons, however, are a different story. The knowledge of life and death are inextricably intertwined; how can you seriously figure out how to cure disease if you don't know how it is caused? Indeed, the primary way to study curing disease is to CAUSE it in test subjects and then try to fix it. The secrets of life (and thus death) are falling rapidly before us and it turns out to be frighteningly easy for small groups or even individuals to create disease that would encircle the globe and kill literally billions.
In fact, the only thing stopping this from happening is the lack of crazies who don't mind killing billions indiscriminately and have managed to keep it together long enough to get a degree in microbiology. Over the next fifty years, the bar for being able to modify life is going to keep lowering, while the population of crazies (along with the rest of us) will be increasing.
While the prospect of nuclear holocaust is a frightening possibility, it is much easier to prevent. The bar is high enough that one may operate at the nation-state level to ensure non-proliferation and as little all-out warfare as possible. But how can you prevent a single madman from using the techology we're creating to cure disease to create one which will fell us all?
I believe that life is a natural outcome of certain conditions that are likely to have existed sometime in the past 5 billion years in millions of places in this galaxy, to say nothing of the rest of the universe. Intelligent life with the ability to create a techology sufficient to spread itself to other planets is much rarer. Part of the reason is that intelligent life is rare compared to normal life and the other part is that the techologies likely to have co-developed with a potentially starfaring culture are too easily turned against themselves.
I'm starting to think that the Amish may be on to something. Then again, not many Amish civilizations would be detectable via radio telescopes.
..."c"restrictions from the current physics knowledge notwithstanding"
Uhhhh.
If by this you mean they will break the light speed barrior, you're guessing.
If by theis you mean they COULD travel, it will STILL take 20,000 years to visit many places.
*Exactly* how do you conclude they would have already been here. The galaxy is a BIG place.
I would demand considerable intel prior to engaging in any conversations with aliens. There are several reasons reasons why RF comm isn't common place out there:
- nobody ever there
- nobody around anymore
- nobody wants to be located
Is it a rule, that there's an exception to every rule?
I'm a believer in the possibility of intelligent life on other planets but since we really don't know how far along we are to finding intelligent life, how do we know when we're going to get there?
To give you a geek analogy, it's like your downloading a file of unknown length and you finally got a byte of data from someone and you think that oh I'll be finished by 2020 because this file couldn't be more than 2 terrabytes and I'm getting 1 bit a second. Unfortunately the universe is a big place and the stream of data might never end so estimating your completion time is meaningless.
Cheessuusss H Chriostmas! I JUST NOW got done recompiling all of my old WIN98 crap for UNICODE and .NET. And now I hear the alien alphabet has 6 quadra-trillion letters in it. Sonofabeast! How many bytes per character are in a 6 quadra-trillion char alphabet + all of UNICODE?
--Richard
I read this as
"I sure hope that we're not the PHBs of the universe."
Somehow, I'm afraid we are, however...
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
Once interpreted into a suitable phonetic representation: [eSti'AN RE mEf'ryn As`en]
Will it probably be distinguishable from random noise?
...or maybe we won't because we're afraid of being attacked. It's a good question. SETI is optimistic that any inately violent race will have self-destructed before setting up a high-power 'bait' beacon.
SETI is only looking for purposeful beacons aimed our way to say, "hello". They figure if there's an advanced friendly civilization they might decide to do something like that.
We're not expecting to pick up stray communications signals.
Another thing that bothers me: WE are not sending any 'Hello Universe!" messages into deep space (other than TV and radio), because, as I've read, it is just too expensive. In broader terms, it's a lot of hassle.
We only discovered nuclear power 70 years ago. 70 years is a blink of the eye in cosmological scales. In a thousand years we'll probably have the spare power to setup a beacon...
What do you think the odds are that there are a whole lot of races listening, and no-one is actually transmitting?
Math shows that even at sublight speeds it should only take a few million years for a race to colonize a galaxy. So if they're out there, they should as next door as possible. Maybe they're waiting for us to say, "hello," first. It would imply a certain maturity on our part.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
SCO will countersue them for communicating, having by then patented the idea of conveying ideas to others.
How can we expect to detect radio transmissions from another planet when we cannot even truly detect the planet itself.
Sure - we can see the wobble its host sun makes as it orbits, but do we actually have the resolving power to see it - could we even detect a tiny rock like ours, or are we still limited to the super massive gas giants?
Now, Consider the strongest signal WE could produce, how bright(radio strength) could we send a signal?
Could we send something out SO bright that it overrides the emmissions from our own sun.
Whilst I want it to work, I do not believe with current tech we will do so.
Perhaps, the aliens also come to the same conclusion, and find that the only way to light a beacon across the universe is to do something BIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIG.
What if some of the supernova we see are set off by intelligent life?
liqbase
Scenario 1: Aliens are on the same level as us, with no space travel. Having nothing better to do we chat back and forth, using the universe's slowest IM. "Hey Bill! How R U?" "My apologies Plugh, the human known to you as Bill died a few hundred years ago." Scenario 2: Aliens are savage, but have the ability of space travel. (No doubt stolen from the last morons to visit their world.) They promptly head this way for conquest/lunch. Scenario 3: Aliens are incredibly advanced, their ships arrive as soon as they get our message. Who gets to explain poverty, murder, war, child porn, etc, etc, etc to them? What, no one raises their hand? Well maybe we shouldn't draw attention to ourselves until we're ready for the consequences. Just a thought. Any other scenarios are welcome. ;)
I've held the same idea for quite a while now. Galaxies are like pools of gasoline. We are the spark. (What's the chance of an independent spark occurring elsewhere before we engulf and devour?)
But now I'm wondering about other galaxies. What happens when we take over this galaxy? Will we let all that energy go flying out into space? How long before we start encasing stars in solar panels?
Maybe the SETI people should start looking for the disappearance of stars and/or galaxies.
But then, a disappearing galaxy might be caused not only by the enveloping of their stars but also by the shadow of the robot fleet they've sent our way to start the process here.
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Hey, wait just a minute......we can't make "first contact" until AFTER the nuclear war, and Zefram Cochrane invents the warp drive in 2063. To do so otherwise would mess up the whole star trek timeline! Oh, what am I saying, WHAT timeline LOL..... (for those of you who take the whole star trek thing wayyyyyy to seriously, this was suppose to be a joke message).......
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Maybe so, but if someone had asked me 15 years ago what kind of video games i'd be playing these days, I would have said it would involve some sort of VR/immersion.
Flying cars, personal jetpacks,etc.. Technology doesn't always develope in the ways we expect. We are a lightyear ahead in some fields (than we were 20 years ago) but not much further in others.
It seems like everynow and then we'll have a breakthrough which kick starts innovation but after awhile it crawls to a snails pace. ie, airplanes, computers.
Take airplanes for example, we've been travelling in jetpowered planes for awhile. Whats the difference now? They are a bit safer, faster, bigger and efficient. But its fundamentally the same as it was a few decades ago.
A hundred years from now i'd be surprised if we have more colonies than mars and the moon. I'd be really surprised if it would be affordable for your average middle class person to book a trip or even move to one of these colonies.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
As long as all the other views are being represented I figure it's only fair to remind everyone that there is a third option; we may have already made contact, unbeknownst to the general populace.
My conclusion is that either we do happen to be the first one on the block, or that there may be a very few alien civilizations, that have chosen to be "quiet"...
Sort of like, eh?
Sometimes when you move in the neighbors bring you a pie. Other places, you have to bring a pie to the neighbors. If you don't bring a pie they figure you're too busy or not interested in chatting.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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And would we take the time to figure out which?
"Sort of like us, eh?"
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
100 years ahead does not translate to 100 years backwards.
/. example, eventually Moore's Law will run out--if nothing else, it'll hit plank-length constraints and speed limitations imposed by C.
Not on an exponential scale--but first you need to prove that we are on an exponential scale, and not merely riding the exploration of a half-dozen core principles.
At some point we will run out of basic principles to rediscover. To use a common
I'm sure that after the discovery of the sail, ocean travel and its benefits increased exponentially for a time--before finally the basic innovation ran its course, and was as fully understood as it could be. Multiple core principles doubtless build upon each other, but eventually the rate of "invention" will decrease and slow.
The Drake equation addresses the probability of ET life. Some of the values used in the equations are known, some are estimates, many are at best WAG's. I would NOT put a whole lot of confidence in any dates based on those values. Oh, but I forgot, Slashdot people are used to dealing with estimated software project dates. :-)
[Insert pithy quote here]
>Is it true, that there's an exception to every rule? Yes, except that one.
Six score characters.
Brevity being wit's soul
I have enough space.
At this point, we're reduced to problems of biology. We have easily produced amino acids in recreations of primordial Earth, so clearly organic compounds in general are not difficult. Similarly, life on Earth has proved to be ridiculously tenacious, reproducing and thriving in even the most disgusting conditions. Bridging the gap between amino acids barely capable of forming proteins and self-reproducing molecules is the only real unlikelihood here. But there are a number of plausible theories that don't involve seeding by extraterrestrials, merely time and chance.
If we assume that life can easily form on planets that can support it (which would definitely be backed up by the discovery of ancient life on Mars), it is highly reasonable to conclude that among the stars, life is as commonplace as dirt.
The development of sapience is probably the most unlikely item on the list. There's nothing about primates that tends towards intelligence that hasn't happened before, it just took a combination of the right evolutionary and environmental coincidences. On Earth, the inner workings of DNA and RNA biochemistry got about as good as it ever will eons ago. But it still took a billion years of recombination for sentience to develop. Whether or not it occurs elsewhere is something we'll just have to go and see for ourselves, but with (potentially) trillions of planets and eons upon eons of history to work with, the odds are pretty good.
Dyolf Knip
The prediction makes some sense, assuming that there ARE aliens to begin with. I personally believe that Earth is the only planet in the universe with life. I won't be at all upset, however, if I turn out to be wrong.
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.
Let me quote you:
The exponential nature of tech growth implies that we are like apes to a civilization even 100 years ahead of us, and like ants to one thousands or millions of years ahead of us.
"Like apes" and "like ants" is a clear indication that you were talking about intelligence. If you WERE talking about intelligence, then the encounter wouldn't be as harsh a difference as you suppose--see the problems the British had with far-less advanced natives in Africa, or the current struggles we're having in the War on Terrorism.
Read "A Mote in God's Eye" by Larry Niven for an example when it really is a good idea to instantly nuke them.
didn't mention Al Qaeda.
I totally agree that it should simply be "cautious regarding the unknown". That is proper behaviour. Avoiding hysteria is even a better thing to mention.
Yes, the MP3 thingy was humour. So was the "I for one welcome...". Though the last sentence was summing up some irrational fears. The phobia. Guess my post was a little too political, sorry.
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The problem is that any signal that doesn't look like noise is wasting bandwidth. About 80% of AM broadcast (including broadcast TV, which has an AM video signal with FM audio) is "carrier", so it's easy to find those signals. Most newer systems, like spread-spectrum cell phones, not only have no carrier, but they're spread out in time, space, and code. They look like noise unless you know how to synch up to them. There's redundancy, but it's inside the coding. You need to receive a high percentage of the bits to find it.
The SETI guys mostly look for "carriers", or at least signals with a big single-frequency component. The whole sky has already been searched for signals like that, and there are no high-power carrier emitters in range. Looking harder for carriers is a dead end.
In the spirit of this one liner that I frequently hear here:"I, for one, welcome our SETI overlords"
I think the RIAA should fund SETI. After all, what about all of that music potentially being enjoyed by aliens, and yet what revenue do they have to show for it?
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
The exponential nature of tech growth implies that we are like apes to a civilization even 100 years ahead of us,
Many of the key results of the 20th century involve the limits of what we can do. Godel incompleteness, and the speed of light to name two big ones. There is no indication at all that any civilisation, no matter how advanced, will be able to overcome the lightspeed problem and make us look like ants.
technology to visit the entire universe at will ("c"restrictions from the current physics knowledge notwithstanding).
You want the lightspeed thing to go away, don't you? Unfortunately wanting counts for nothing, and there's not a shred of evidence for that, and plenty against. Even given nigh-infinite knowledge, physical limits are physical limits.
Many, including me, believe that within about 100 years, a civilization like our would have the technology to visit the entire universe at will
It's entirely possible that a civilisation like our will, in 100 years, have A-bombed, bio-plauged, chemically poisoned or just polluted itself back to the early stone age. Or worse, wiped itself out entirely. I'm all for progress, but dude, go easy on the prozac.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
That's why I'm always eating garlicky foods. 'Cause everyone knows that the vampiric aliens can't stand the smell of garlic. But... if they're not undead, I guess I'm screwed.
If it were only that simple. First, no one can say for sure what the primordial earth was like. Second, these amino acids were created by an intelligent being (the scientists) in a strictly controlled environment (hmmm, intelligent being created... sounds kinda like Genesis 1), and third, these created amino acids lacked chirality.
Borrow money from a pessimist - they don't expect it back.
The odds of them being within a million years could be even less. We have no model for figuring the continuence of our or any other culture for a million years or any idea that if not when the age of man ends it is replaced with something LESS advanced. Who's to say that in a million years the dominant life form won't some kind of intelligent shellfish? There's no way to know but importantly there is no reason to assume that million years advanced earth dwellers resemble anything remotely close to us. There is no way to estimate how long the technological culture of Epsilon Eridani 5 is going to last either. It may have come and gone a million years ago and they took a look at earth and realized it was pre-intelligent or at best just not worth looking at.
...and will they think we're a planet of serial killers when they're asked to play Doom 6?
Will the lag time be low enough to play Doom 5?
Who's side would they be on....
Hmmm....
One thing I have thought of is that an sufficiently advanced race could have the technology to either move stars or simply igniting them as supernovas.
By doing this in patterns, a message, or atleast proof of tampering, could be created. Perhaps a subproject for Seti to work at?
I guess we all know the message we'll find though... "FP!"
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As I mentioned in reply to another post, you are equating 100 years forward with 100 years backward..
And as I said, you haven't given one spec of data to back up your claim that technology increases exponentially, and that this increase would cause any problems at all with peaceful or agreesive contact between us and a hypothetical alien civilization.
Once in L.A. after a rollicking night out, I was riding my bike home with my girlfriend. It was 2 AM. We had our blinky lights on. There was absolutely no one else around on Santa Monica Blvd.
Then, it dawned on me - who the hell has blinky bike lights on at 2 AM, except uber-nerds?
Were we just blinking "beat me up, steal our bikes, we are defenseless uber-nerds? "
So, we turned them off, and felt safer riding home.
Wonder if some of our extra-terrestrial searching efforts may be viewed in a similar vein.
What, me worry?
I think, therefore I thought.
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."
Beam me up Scotty....there's no intelligent life here!!!
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.
I've been computing for SETI since it started,
and with my few home computers, and a
little help from the odd work machine now and then,
I've recently hit 12000 work units!
Also, I got a dual 2.0 G5 recently and it works faster
than all my other machines combined
(2xG3 333, G3 450,2xG4 450) on SETI (on the average)
While I think the probability is high that there is
other intelligent life out there, contacting them by
2020 seems a little optimistic!
However, if we make contact in my lifetime,
I'll be shittin' my pants with everybody else.
I was really fascinated by the news
that the data had other uses, as well.
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
...left to evolve alone for a while due to some as-yet-misunderstood need for uniqueness, civilization ego development, "learning everything the hard way" or some such end.
Imagine what it would have done to the "worldwide ego" if our entire history was simply a footnote within the shadow of some much greater collection of civilizations that we are actually a part of. Imagine that instead of society learning all the collective lessons it has in the past few thousand years, it was all taught to us via some high-tech method.
Perhaps we have actually been colonized, but then left alone to evolve for some reason. Until some point in the future.
In any event, I think Seti@home is ridiculous because surely, future communication is data-compressed and the best compression methods produce data that cannot easily be distinguished from random space background noise.
The ET's already know all about us! They will ALLOW contact when they feel we are ready for it, or we force the issue by spreading out into space. Until then-NADA!
As others have said in different ways, Fermi's Paradox makes certain big assumptions.
The main one is that an intelligent race would want to spread accross the galaxy or universe. A race capable of doing that would need to be more advanced than us. What possible reason would they have for colonizing every planet they could get their hands on? If they've mastered interstellar travel, then the odds are good that they've found a solution to overcrowding, etc... And it is pretty unlikely that they would have advanced that far and still be driven by greed and avarice.
The other big assumption is that we'd actually be able to detect them. Maybe another race has colonized the entire universe. We've just barely begun to detect planets outside our solar system. Maybe once we have a telescope powerful enough to see one of these planets we'll see it covered with cities or whatever. Maybe they've left our solar system alone to give us a chance to develop on our own.
The most likely situation, given the age of the universe, is that they are billions of years ahead of us. If that is the case, then the intelligence "gap" between us and them is about a thousand times greater than the gap between humans and bacteria. When was the last time you tried to communicate with a bacterium? When was the last time a bacterium was able to detect the fact that the entire Earth is colonized by Humans?
Believing Fermi's Paradox requires you to assume that aliens are basically very similar to Humans, but with spaceships. Not likely, except in Hollywood.
You assume we will stay in our current form in the future. Presumably the bounds of acceptable genetic engineering will widen, so humankind could diverge and expand abilities. It may also be the case that computers will become advanced enough so that personalities can be uploaded/created on computer. Given more computer power thought power would have few limitations.
To play Duke Nukem forever with our newly found friends. Still, the lag will be kind of extreme for this endevour, no? Personally, I think aliens are vaporware.
It's been only 30 years away the whole time!
Physics is good
coseti.org promotes the optical approach to seti, which makes a great deal more sense than radio seti. Anyways, I don't plan on posting again here, so I'll quickly mention the #setiathome chan on EFnet, in case anyone wants to IRC the topic of SETI.
Bingo. Considering advances in string theory (T-duality -> large extra dimensional branes...), I'd say there's a good chance we won't even choose to exist in boring old 3+1 spacetime in 100 years. Observers that grow more complex in time form the largest subset of the mathematical ensemble, which is why what it is to exist is to be conscious observers. I've got a new paper -Statistical Metaphysics - about this stuff on my website, you should check it out.
All Abstract Structures of Objects and their Relationships exist.
*I feel like I should plug one of my favorite authors, Bruce Sterling, and my favorite series of stories by him, dealing with the Shapers and Machinists.
Galeon, anyone?
(Contraction: Gay (by spiritual/outward mood or carnal/corporeal orientation, either qualifies) + Alien, Extraterrestrials of extreme intelligence, biding their time on Gaia, writing software code, awaiting the Mothership's return...
Hist Fact: Former President Jefferson's Starship was late picking him up at the rendezvous...
Hist Fact: Greenbacks were inspired by Little Green Men...)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Why would Aliens use radio waves? My guess is that they would use some ridiculous HD holographic signal which allows our 5 sense (+their 3?) to be triggered by these images.
And off on this planet somewhere there is an argument as to wether or not they should use some type of more primative means of communication. Those in charge point out that any civilization using a more primative means of communication would not be worth finding. (A planet of caddle for example).
Thinking of how old we estimate the Universe to be, smart money says we are not the most advanced speces ever.
READ Macroscope be Piers Anthony. It's a good book, and I'm to lazy to bring up any of the good points made by his book. -thanks
I boycott signatures
Khaaaaaaan!
... will they find WMD? Or my missing socks?
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
Yeh, the SUPER-SIZING of AMERICA!
I KNEW the "Great Experiment" has a PURPOSE!!!
Pretty soon, we'll be inside gigantic Slurpee machines.
"Hi Mr. Bleextor? How would you like your Human Salad today? Sorbet? DOH!"
"Kleztrox, what's brown, red, clumply and screaming? The Hyoo-mon in Processing bay Four! DOH!!!"
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Who's to say that the aliens will communicate on the frequencies we're searching - they might even have a whole new way of communication that we've never even thought of. For us to have any chance of discovering extra-terrestrial life, the alien civilisation has to be at about the same level of technological advancement as us, and that's very unlikely.
We can't currently pick up ET signals equivalent to what Earth is broadcasting to space, even if they were coming from Alpha Centauri; they're just too weak.
This is an analog problem of signal to noise ratio, far more than anything else, so faster processing won't help a bit.
A cryogenic Allen array (to minimize thermal noise), especially in space far from Earth, or on the far side of the moon, would help a tremendous amount.
Usually discussions about SETI itself don't bring that up, because of issues of optimism and such, but it was easy to find web hits on the eseentially identical question: can ETs pick up Earth signals?
"No", says this Seti League guest editorial "ET Detection of Earth TV Unlikely" that goes into a little technical detail.
Similar comments by John Dreher, Staff Astronomer, SETI Institute, although he goes on to assume that ETs would be able to pick up weaker signals than humans are able to -- assuming implicitly that ETs will have better analog technology than we do (maybe they do, but that doesn't help us to do the same).
What about ETs actually beaming a signal at us? Maybe they do so to all nearby stars, one by one. Maybe...would we do that?
"...it has been agreed by all relevant groups that we should not be actively sending out messages to try to reach other civilisations", says another page
Ok, so we would not be so foolish as to attract undue attention from an unknown and possibly hostile galaxy, but maybe ETs will be more naive than that. Or a lot more confident (play ominous music here ;-)
So, bottom line, this is a cool topic, but are we planning to build a cryogenic Allen array in space in the next two decades?
I think we should, but any predictions really should be based largely on that one issue.
P.S. the recent lab verification of photons having orbital angular momentum, able to carry arbitrary amounts of information per photon, implies a new medium we'll need to check for ET signals. Maybe that's what all advanced civilizations use.
See e.g. Photons Spin More Data
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
Hey Traa,
No need to apologize, this is a discussion board after all.
Maybe I took your post about modern intolerance a little too personally. That was my half-joke / half-serious comment about Al Qaeda. i.e. wanting to destroy those who don't look/think/believe the same. Usually I hear those comments related to how bad the U.S. is; but then there's a strange silence about terrorists. I get frustrated because there seems to be little public debate on what to do about terrorism. And that's not to say there shouldn't be intelligent debate about the Iraq war too.
No offence taken, and I hope I didn't cause any.
Peace
Aliens are currently recieving transmitions from ages ago and have decided that we aren't advanced enough to worry about. By the time their reply comes humans will be long gone and the reply will be the only proof that we existed. These long distance relationships just don't seem to work out.
-Tim Louden
There are quite a few assumptions that have to be taken for granted to leap to that conclusion. For instance, in making the assertion "we are here, therefore we are the only ones", we implicitly disregard the possibility that we are being allowed to evolve [semi-] autonomously... After all, there does seem to exist some evidence that we have some anthropologists (or maybe just grad students) watching us...
All kidding aside, it seems much more likely to me that the galaxy is so teeming with life that it would evolve a complex ecology of spacefaring species. Some hostile, some not, some predatory, some not, etc... The complex pressures of such an ecology would place severe limits on the rate of expansion of any one species. Such an ecology would also evolve strong ethics of behavior, punishable in the harshest of ways - these ethics (or laws) would emerge naturally from survival pressures as species work together to fend off predatory species, handle catastrophe and whatnot. It seems quite likely that Terra is known, but the various critters around have better things to do than (and perhaps even laws against) messing with another upstart species of anthropods sitting on their heals and playing with atoms for the first time.
As for radio waves? Sure they would still be used in other civilizations. We still use the wheel and fire right? Civilizations evolve like organisms; everything that your chain of evolution made use of (up to and including the salt water that still chugs through your body in the form of plasma in your blood) is still in use in your body today.
However, it seems to me that our current utilization of EM spectrum is poor - over time I suspect two things will happen to how we use EM: (1) We will encrypt everything for a wide variety of reasons and (2) We will likely use much more complex time and frequency spanning encoding techniques to make better use of spectrum. Both of these techniques lead to the appearance of white noise (or random signals). What SETI should be looking for, besides patterned signals, is even distribution of white noise across a broad spectrum - I suspect that will be a much likelier beacon from civilizations more advanced than ours.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
... because birds didn't exist 1000 years ago in your weird little version of reality?
Comment of the year
... will it take for that first civilization to harrassed by the Nigerian scammers?
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
Hopefully the first messege the get back is not about the Church of Latter day saints.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
Re: "c", I am sure you have heard of the possibility of creating/traveling through wormholes. Again, the "c" barrier and "no way to overcome it, but the above" is all based on *current* knowledge of physics.
Wormhole shmurmhole. You do know that travelling faster than light, however you do it, is the same thing as time travel (for some observers, effects occuring before the causes), and thus has insurmountable paradoxes. That is an experimental result that has been confirmed any number of ways, and any theoretical advance would also have to account for it.
If you don't know your general relativity, go back to school, it was old physics in 1920.
I'll say it again - basing your argument on wishfull thinking is a bad idea.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Anybody read Rare Earth? It makes a conceiving argument that animal life may be extremely rare, as opposed to microbial life, which may be extraordinarily common. Perhap even so far as there may only be *one* civilization per galaxy or maybe even in the whole observable universe.
Anybody care to wager that the SETI first message we actually decode won't be an offer for cheap Viagra?
Has anyone wondered what our own world would be like without testosterone?
Amy
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you watch too much SciFi, you might get brainwashed into thinking that aliens might possibly look like humans.
But the truth is, only the evolutionary history of earth could have produced humans. Slight changes at various points in our history could have radically altered what came to be the dominant life form and if that form was even all that bright.
Some stuff I was watching on the Science channel recently explained that it was an ice age that created selective pressure in favor of hominids who were smarter, because our ancestors had to adapt to a changing environment faster than evolution could adapt. Only the hominids who could IQ their way around the problems (ie. invent clothing) were able to survive.
Now, when it comes to aliens who evolved in an environment that is completely different from ours and with little or no possibility of us having common ancestors, you really can't expect much similarity.
Now, we do live in the same universe with the same physical laws, which means they probably use some of the same chemistry. For instance carbon seems to be a much better basis for building life forms than the alternatives. Also, liquid water is a much better environment than the alternatives.
We have to ask, for instance, if life can evolve in radically different temperature ranges. Can life evolve in liquid methane? How about molten iron? We do see some rather interesting "extremopholes" here on earth, but I suspect it's easier to adapt to an extreme environment than to evolve there in the first place. (That is, there may be life still on Mars from when it had liquid water, but it's a completely inhospitable environment for abiogenesis.)
We assume that their math will be similar. I mean, if their technology is advanced enough that they could do, say, quantum computation, and they have electrons whose spin they can manipulate, well, presumably, they would have a concept that allowed them to distinguish between one electron, and then two electrons, and then three electrons. That is to say, electrons are discrete quanta, so if you're going to deal with them, you have to be able to count them. So we can assume that an alien culture will have that. But can we really assume that? What about a world 100% covered in water where live evolved in such a way that there aren't separate organisms, but really every living thing is just a part of the same continuous organism, where everything is connected in some way. If you evolved to live in a world where you perceive everything as continous and you therefore have no concept of discrete objects, then can you count? (I agree that there are some lousy assumptions here, but go with me here.)
Much too much of our world seems fundamental to us because this is the environment we evolved in. For instance, predators had an effect on our evolution. Naturally, the aliens would have different evolutionary pressures... throughout all of the billions and billions of years in their evolution, completely different from ours. So, consider a world, for example, where metalic iron is sticking out of the ground all over the place. Think about how inhabitants would evolve to make use of this ubiquitous natural resource the way humans evolved to make use of wood and animal bones. (Or more fundamentally, how our cells evolved to make use of carbon compounds as building blocks.)
Alien life could be so different that we might not even recognize it as life. No matter what you conjecture about what alien life might be like, if/when we ever do discover it, it'll be nothing like what you expect.
It was very hot and the air composition and water content was similar to what you'd find around active volcanoes. I can't say what kind of variations the "life in a test tube" experiment environment has been performed in, but I doubt there's a precise recipe for it.
these amino acids were created by an intelligent being in a strictly controlled environment
Uh, no, they weren't. Any more than I 'created' kittens by keeping two cats in my house, or 'created' mold by leaving the leftover pizza in my fridge too long.
hmmm, intelligent being created... sounds kinda like Genesis 1
Really? Genesis says, "And the Lord said, 'Let there be an environment in which ', and it was good"? Is there a detailed description of how the seas formed? Is it explained why the fossil record says there were plants and animals eons before humans, when the bible says otherwise? Sounds to me like you're just peddling your thoroughly debunked mythology.
these created amino acids lacked chirality.
This hack constantly claims that without chirality, DNA couldn't do it's job, nor the proteins and enzymes that modern organisms depend on. I've no idea if this is true, but who exactly was it that made the claim that it was DNA that formed by chance in these primordeal seas? Were you under the impression that every single protein that exists _today_ was formed in these vats of un-chiral amino acids? Are you implying that proteins of any kind, not necessarily the ones that exist today, could not form in such an environment? This article constantly works off the assumption that DNA has not itself done any evolving, and was formed entirely complete, right down to the self-repair mechanisms, all the way back at the beginning. The only people making that claim are guys like you.
The point is, when referring to how amino acids first became life forms, referring to DNA and modern proteins tells me only that you are making the usual bogus creationist argument that complex systems like eyeballs cannot occur naturally. You look at the finished product and say, "Could never happen by chance", without looking at all the useful interim steps that could have led to it.
Interestingly enough, however, scientists have the same problem with the Big Bang theory. According to theory, when energy condenses down to matter, it should do so into equal parts matter and antimatter. In fact, when we make antimatter, that's exactly what we get. This sort of process would not yield the universe of stuff we see today. And yet nobody thinks that this is proof positive that god exists and wants you to be christian. Real scientists go back and try to figure out what they missed. They don't just play the "Omnipotent Deity" wildcard to explain away all the unknowns like creationists do.
Dyolf Knip
Hey Jivan,
:-)
thanks for your response. Definitly no offense taken and didn't mean to cause any either
I'm with you on the terrorism discussion issues. I do discuss it with my american friends a lot (I live in the US but are from holland orriginally). I prefer to discuss it based on 'prevention' and 'defense'. How do we make people not hate us and how do we defend ourselves against people who choose to hate us anyway.
Peace indeed!
"I am sure you have heard of the possibility of creating/traveling through wormholes. "
yes, we have all watched Sci-Fi.
There were thing we couldn't do 1000 years ago, and we still can't do. Going faster then the speed of light, for instance.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The Drake Equation was published long before the GHZ Theory ("Galactic Habitable Zone").
The GHZ Theory starts with the Drake Equation and greatly reduces the number of planets capable of supporting life. The GHZ takes in to account that the distribution of elements and molecular combinations is not constant throughout the galaxy. We live in a small ring shaped zone that exists a fixed distance from the center of the galaxy which not only has a vast array of molecular differentiation and comparitively low radiation but (relative to the rest of the galaxy) plentiful distribution of most elements.
While it isn't known what format life on other worlds will take -- it *is* thought that certain processes like lipid/water (or ammonic or similar) interaction would be required for a semi-permeable cell membrane structure to form.
If the Drake Equation is recalculated with the GHZ being taken into account the number of potentially life sustaining worlds drops significantly.
In my opinion SETI has long used the Drake Equation as mathematical self-justification. And conversely, by openly accepting the Drake equation's overstated likelihood of ET-life SETI would endanger its own existence.
By the way I'm a big fan of SETI -- but hiding from issues isn't the way to overcome scientific setbacks.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
If you believe that human experience qualifies as evidence, then you cannot compare the comparitively meager amount of UFO "evidence" with the vast amount of "evidence" for God.
Evidence must be provable and repeatable.
UFO sightings are neither.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Maybe the signal will be from an alien communication satelite.
I eagerly await our new alien Pr0n channels.
Science is the Real TRUTH!
April 5th, 2063. we will meet ETs then.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
That estimation would still requre that inteligent alien lifeforms exists, and that the signals we get would truly be from aliens.
Spelling/grammar nazis welcome (English is not my first language and I am trying to improve my spelling/grammar)
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!
Support SETI@home
Earth will make first contact with aliens within 20 years. Eh? Aliens will make first contact with Earth within 20 years. I.E., we'll use our super-duper radio telescopes to hear a strange signal that seems like it's possibly not terrestrial in origin.
Read; Write; Execute
Just stop talking about this and take it on faith.
Wouldn't it be sad if our first received inter-galactic message was, "Oh! You're the planet that makes those shiny AOL CD's! -- stop sending them to us!"
Homer no function beer well without.
Oh yes, like NASA really needs another reason to spend $10 billion [...]
SETI isn't NASA. Take a wild guess why it's called the "Allen" array. Ever hear of Paul Allen? He funded it, not NASA. Where have you been? NASA hasn't been doing SETI for ages.
Oh, you mean like we did before NASA existed? Or like happened each of the numerous times that NASA's budget was sharply cut?
And what are you raving about, anyway, "no other benefits" if we did detect intelligent ET life? That's insane.
At any rate, I didn't say a word about spending tax dollars. And your raving would be naive even if I had. Go rant somewhere else.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
At some point we will run out of basic principles to rediscover.
You mean finding new applications for existing tech? Have you considered the basic principles themselves might evolve in new spheres?
At some point we will run out of basic principles to rediscover.
But even the pool of knowlegde of 'basic principles' is not static, let alone our ability to apply them. In my estimation it would be unwise to place unnecessary limits on thier growth. Science and human history seem to suggest that evolution is an eternal possibility.
I'm sure that after the discovery of the sail, ocean travel and its benefits increased exponentially for a time--before finally the basic innovation ran its course, and was as fully understood as it could be.
And then came the steam engine, nuclear power, etc...
Why place unnecessary limits on the scope of your consideration? The basic principle can be applied in multiple technological spheres -- solar sails for example. And who knows what new frontiers might be revealed if man is permitted to advance sufficiently?
Multiple core principles doubtless build upon each other, but eventually the rate of "invention" will decrease and slow.
Only if one places unnecessary limits on the capabilities of human imagination, and that is something that is outside of human control.
As the evidence suggests the contrary, it seems to me that the burden of proof is on you.
Only if one places unnecessary limits on the capabilities of human imagination, and that is something that is outside of human control.
The universe exists in spite of us, not because of us.
Our understanding of said universe has advanced at a phenominal rate lately--but it's been in leaps and bounds, not a constant or predictable curve.
I challenge you to name one basic principle that we HAVEN'T got a fair grasp on. In the 18th century this was easy--flight, the power of the sun, electricity, etc., etc. In the 20th and 21st centuries, however, we've got a fair understanding of everything we see--and barring a major oversight, we are going to slow our current pace of "technological advancement" in a century or two.
As the evidence suggests the contrary, it seems to me that the burden of proof is on you.
What evidence? The basic technology in use today is hardly different than what it was fifty years ago, unless you only count the bleeding-edge. Heck, the rate of "advancement" was fastest in the early part of the 20th century, when nationwide elecricity, electrical communication, and fission all rolled out in the space of a few decades.
The latter half of the 20th century is NOWHERE near as frentic a pace of advancement as the first half. My car, computer, telephone, house, etc. all were of a quite similar form and function in 1999 as they were in 1949, and totally different than what they would have been be in 1899.
I also believe in divine creation of humans,
So let me get this straight, you believe that we're the only civilisation in all the universe? Careful when you say that, it's a big place.
I'm not making a comparison like "London is a big place", I mean truly mind-bogglingly huge. Our galaxy has a hundred times more stars than we have human beings on this planet, and they're on average about 6 light years apart. Even if the chances of our being here are a billion to one, that gives us several hundred civilisations to work with here.
And considering that recent discoveries are showing that the liklihood of planets forming around a star are only about two to one, and one forming in the temperate zone where we live is probably at most about one thousand to one, rolling those dice a billion times is going to come up with a whole heck of a lot of life in the galaxy.
Nevermind the rest of the universe, but don't you think that it would be a spectacular waste of effort on God's part to create a billion billion galaxies each with a hundred billion planets just so we have something to look at at night? Is God really so frivolous as to indulge the entire universe with only one thinking race?
is helped out by the fact that we are so unique amoung all the species on earth.
99.99% of our DNA is precisely the same in humans as it is in elephants. Every mammal and most reptiles on this planet have two eyes, two ears, four limbs, five fingers and five toes. We all have bones made out of exactly the same material, and nervous systems that work the same way. Human beings aren't totally unique, we're just a minor variation that worked out really well. About the only animal on earth we're unique in comparison to are insects and shellfish.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Here is the article I had in mind while I was writing this. It is an interesting read even if you do not agree with it.e s/heeren.html
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0203/articl
SIGFAULT
you must be the first to diagnose 'The Lord' with genocidal tendencies. I like it. Maybe instead of building the tower of bables to reach him we should build the great chouch and wait for him to make an appointment ;)
Not a christian
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
never looked up at the sky have we? Never heard of witness accounts? the name travis walton not sound familiar? they've already been here with us, we just have been too ignorant to realize it.
My Gawd WTF...