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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."
NPR did a story on the most efficient way to search for extra-terrestrial life, where it would be more efficient (energy/economic) to send craft out to distant solar systems rather than beam signals there. Apparantly the loss in signal strength is so severe (inverse square law) that signals get lost in the cosmic background.
Are these efforts being coordinated with other such programs, such as SETI?
Many scifi enthusiasts often assume that our outlook on life is primitive, and that alien races advanced enough to be space-faring races would "clearly" be more civilized than us. I have never seen the logic in that. What if our brutality is the norm for how most races behave? Do we really want to contact potentially many races that would regard us with at least the contempt, as a species, that we regard "lower life forms?" At least without making serious moves toward a more advanced state of technological advancement.
I remember an article on TechCentralStation discussed how absurd it was for anyone to assume that there couldn't be a race like the predators from the predator series. Who says that civilizations evolve the same way? A tribal warrior culture might actually thrive better in space than ours...
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This is about looking for planets, then analysing them to see if they have the conditions to support life (oxygen, co2, methane). SETI is about trying to recieve radio signals created by intelligent beings out there.
In short, this is looking for any sort of possible life, SETI is looking for "ET phone home".
SETI is fundamentally flawed, since even now we on Earth are broadcasting less and less out into space. We're using microwave and lasers to talk to our satellites, and everything on the ground is getting wired, or fed from satellites.
The days of gigawatt broadcasting over radio bands is winding to an end, so we only will have made "noise" for a century or so.
One could assume an intelligent race would outgrow the technology just as we have, or never use it in the first place.
SETI is like trying to find modern Native Americans by looking for smoke signals, when they communicate using the phone or internet these days.
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Why is it controvertial? Do you have any links with that story? (I'm not being and ass, I'm just curious.)
..Europe's ambitious new programme to search for extra terrestial life. ESA has started a program...
Does anyone else find the mixed British / American spellings a little odd? I feel a little like a dork but this oddity was the most striking feature of the submission to me.
Ahh the wonders of American / British Spelling Differences
We have all these programs for trying to find patterns in signals from space but are we doing anything to make life easier for anyone that is trying to find us? Sure, we are emitting a bunch of electromagnetic radiation from our broadcasts but how far would it actually reach to be detectable? Wouldn't it be more efficient to send powerful laser pulses that are specifically targeted at "promising" nearby star systems?
Is anybody in the world doing something like this?
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