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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...
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
...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
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?
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
ping -s -R -A inet6 -a aliencivilizations
Duh.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
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.)
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...
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.
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?
Seriously, has anyone considered the possibility that the only intelligent life-forms in the universe maybe humans in past, present and future form ?
I read a book when I was 8 that said we'd contact aliens by 2010-2015. I've been holding my breath ever since. They also wrote about the flying cars, moon bases, and solar power satellites that we've been enjoying these past 4 years or so... I just wish I didn't live in such a back-waters part of the country that's still driving around on 4 tyres.
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.
Shostak took that into account. He estimates between 10,000 and 1,000,000 radio-transmitters (planets with intelligent life). Considering the number of stars in our galaxy alone (100 billion according to the article), that only means we'll have to look everywhere in the galaxy to have a good chance of finding something. In the end, the uncertainty from the Drake equation doesn't affect his estimate at all.
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
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
Yes, you have to try to pick valid values for the variables, however, many of the variables are rapidly becoming well defined:
I /d rake_equation.html
http://www.activemind.com/Mysterious/Topics/SET
If we consider only our galaxy:
N = N* fp ne fl fi fc fL
of which we have answers for
N* = number of stars in galaxy (~100billion)
fp = fraction with planets (at least ~20%)
ne = number planets per star that can spawn life (???)
fl = fraction on which life evolves (??? but if we discover life evolved on mars and earth separately we'll have to assume this is reasonably large, so this might be settled soon)
fi = % where intelligent life evolves (???)
fc = % which communicate (???)
fL = % of planetary lifetime during which communication takes place (currently we can assume this is a small non-zero value, and the longer we use radio waves the larger we can assume this value is).
fp is rising rapidly as we discover more and more extrasolar planets.
fL is rising steadily as our radio emitting civilization persists.
ne may be more accurately guessable once we find out if mars, venus or europa harbor or ever harbored life.
The key to the drake equation is that N* is a very very big number. And now that we know fp is not small (up to a few years ago many people argued that fp would be close to 0) we know that the other fractions need to be quite tiny to avoid having radio communicating civilizations other than our own around.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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
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?
Yes, it's true that today fusion power is still 20-30 years away, but there is good reason to believe that in another 50 years, it will only be 10-15 years away.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
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.
Read "A Mote in God's Eye" by Larry Niven for an example when it really is a good idea to instantly nuke them.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
Suppose we were colonized by some brotherly (fatherly?) entity (such as via living cell deposits in the fresh ocean, which were somehow known would evolve into more complex organisms in this environment) and we are simply temporarily ignorant of our relation to "the rest of our civilization" because there is something significant about "growing up unique and without outside interference", but that at some point in the future "the news will be broken to us", along the lines of a child one day being "old enough" to learn about sex from the "elders", even though the sexual potential was actually there all along? Along those same lines, perhaps it is possible for a civilization to learn of such a relationship "prematurely".
" Is there any harm in SETI? Perhaps if our resources were limitless, and the persuit of a project like SETI didn't potentially take away from resources for more worthwhile projects, then I might not be arguing that the harm is in fact there, and very, very real."
I don't quite agree with this logic. I mean, there's a matter of priorities. However, today, those priorities still seem to allow for the existence of Seti. (It'd be stupid to run it if we were fighting an army of Terminators, for example.)
The problem with what you're saying, at least in the case of taking it to an unusual extreme, is that the result is that we only look for stuff we know we can find. We simply cannot be that efficient at allocating the resources to only the right areas. Suppose in the tower example you provided that it failed, but radical new engineering enhancements were made that made buildings more earthquake proof? Who would expect that building such a seemingly dumb project would make Earthquakes more survivable? Nobody can predict that.
Resources are limited, they'll always be limited. Investments (even gambles) need to be made that new discoveries will come about. If we stick to making decisions based strictly on what we know, then I would fear the risk of exhaustion of our resources because too much time was spent on predictable outcomes.
Hope that makes sense, and I hope you can forgive the "taken to extremes" rebuttal.
"Derp de derp."
Just a thought - is there anyone on earth working through not-so-positive first contact scenarios? I know the US government sponsors groups that work out worst-case scenarios with regard to war and terrorism. Does NASA cover this kind of stuff? What would we do if we were confronted by a hostile race with technology vastly superior to ours? If we had to, are we even able to hit an object in orbit with a cluster of nukes? I don't think that it's remotely probable, just more interesting than work on a Friday afternoon.
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
My guess is that ne and especially fi are quite small. In our system, we have ne being 11% (maybe 22%). Just judging by the time fi applies to this planet (150,000 years versus 4.5 billion years) we're looking at about 1/30,000. The assumption that intelligence is inevitable just doesn't hold water with me, either, as life does not need intelligence to survive, e.g. bacteria and insects.
Also, because most of the stars in the galaxy are in the core, where the radiation effects are so much greater that the only likely life is extremophilic, the number of stars with habitable planets (ne) is probably quite a bit smaller than you suspect.
Finally, heavy elements, like oxygen, carbon, silicon, iron, etc., are not exactly common. As I'm sure you know, they are only formed in other stars, and the only way they get back out to interstellar space is through supernovae or maybe planetary nebulas.
Dream your Star Trek dreams. The greatest probability is that we are alone, in terms of intelligent life, in this galaxy.
>Or if you have the right chemicals present on a planet, the formation of life may actually be likely. Who knows?
We know, because we know what the right chemicals are, and we know the laws governing their reactions, and we can calculate the probabilities of formation. Granted, it's senior-level college chemistry, but not impossibly difficult to figure out.
And I'm sure you can point me to the studies that show that the way life is on this planet is the only possibile way life could ever exist, right? That they've tried all other possible combinations of elements possible, or at least proven that all those other permutations cannot possibly ever in any combination lead to life? After all, claiming that life as it is here is the only possibility is an extremely huge claim, so you must have evidence supporting that claim, right?
Or are you just saying that because it throws your assumptions that life is impossible to form on it's own into chaos? That's what I have to guess, because I don't believe they've ever proven that life as it is here is the only possible way for it to be.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
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's time for my usual rant... SETI isn't a guy, SETI isn't an organization, SETI isn't a project. Saying "SETI predicts we'll find ETs by 2020" is like saying "Political Science ate tuna for lunch today"
This prediction wasn't made by "SETI," it was made by a person, Seth Shostak. Seth Shostak doesn't work for "SETI," he works for an organization called the "SETI Institute." Some people at the SETI Institute do search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but I would guess that most do not. As a corellary to that, most people in the world that search for extraterrestrial intelligence professionally are not associated with the SETI institute.
Seth is also an optimist and to some extent a salesman. He's not going to get donations for the SETI institute and the Allen Telescope by saying that it's never going to happen. Therefore he uses an optimistic Drake equation that results in 50,000 communicating civilizations in the galaxy.
I, on the other hand, am more inclined to base my predictions on what we actually know, rather than optimism. My computation of the Drake equation puts an upper limit to the number of civilizations in the galaxy at 750,000. It also puts a lower limit of one civilization per 2 million galaxies. We don't have enough information to make a more specific prediction than that!
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