Slashdot Mirror
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.
This calculation doesn't include the number of people turned off from the SETI@Home project by the new BOINC software.
2020, just in time to send my first and brightest to Battle School.
The green alien babes don't want you, either...
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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
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
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
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