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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.
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.
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.)
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