Europe's New ET Life Search Programme

hotsauce writes "The Guardian has a report on Europe's ambitious new programme to search for extra terrestial life. ESA has started a program called Cosmic Visions which will launch a series of satelites, starting with Gaia in 2011, and possibly culminating with the Exo-Earth Imager, a mission consisting of 10.000 3-metre mirror telescopes. The French are leading the charge with Corot in 2008."

Comments

Re:Assumptions about ETs

[Auton]

It all comes back to Fermi's paradox. If there are intelligent (I prefer the term 'sophont') alien life forms out there, why haven't they contacted us?

One solution says 'because they don't want to'. I find that solution very plausible at the current juncture. Odds are that if there is, in fact, a conglomerate of alien nations out there, they've set down a network of powerful signal-dampening sattelites around our solar system (the Oort cloud would be a good hiding place), controlled by a very strong AI which filters the transmissions reaching us, so that only natural phenomena and signals of our own making ever reach us. This could even be standard procedure for worlds below a certain level of technology. This is called the 'Prime Directive' solution, after Gene Roddenberry's Prime Directive from Star Trek.

Of course, another (more Occam-friendly) solution to the paradox is "Because there aren't any"...

Re:Different from SETI

[thesandtiger]

While I don't necessarily disagree, I don't think that we're necessarily looking in the wrong place. Imagine a civilization far in advance of our own using some sort of communications technology we can't even imagine as yet. Surely it wouldn't be too difficult for them to make a massively powerful radio transmitter to call out? In fact, I can see one very good reason to think there might be such a beacon made by an advanced civilization. Think about all the trials and tribulations we're going through right now, all this uncertainty about whether or not humanity will survive - about whether it is even possible *for* us to survive our technology. Then imagine we get a signal from space, from another civilization, one that went through what we did. "We're here, we survived, and you can too. Good luck, and welcome to the universe." Call me sappy, but I can think of no better message we could receive.