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SETI Founder Outlines Ambitious Future Plans
Lanxon writes "'In the universe there is intelligent life, I'm confident about that,' SETI founder Dr Frank Drake (of the Drake Equation) affirmed earlier today during a talk at the Royal Society in London, 50 years after SETI was founded. One of his visions to prove this, and to show that the last five decades were not a waste of time, is to station a radio observatory not in near-Earth orbit, but on the far side of the moon. He also suggests that another craft could later be stationed 500 times further away from the Sun than the Earth, using the Sun itself as a giant magnifying lens to resolve alien worlds."
I personally think SETI is misguided, even though its aims are commendable. There probably is intelligent life out there, but it is a possibility that earth could have been the first planet on which it developed.
But I see two very great problems with SETI.
First is the limited range; nobody more than around 150 light years away would be able to detect intelligent life on earth.
If we do find them they're likely to be more intelligent than us, they may turn out to be hostile, and they may discover that we are tasty, or good speceship fuel, etc. They may be intelligent enough that we don't even appear sentient to them. I'm not sure I want us to find intelligent extraterrestrials.
Free Martian Whores!
...or alien for "First Post". Or, most likely second or third.
The CB App. What's your 20?
I'm no expert on this, but it seems to me that radio waves may likely be obsolete to advanced civilizations. They are quite possibly using something like lasers, x-rays, gravity waves, etc. True, if they are in the same stage we are, they may be using lots of the radio spectrum, but that greatly limits the kind and number of civilizations we may detect. Looking for something like a Dyson Sphere (star-orbiting solar arrays) may be a more productive approach, or at least a good supplement.
Table-ized A.I.
Cause I am SO sure there life out there that makes no point to dedicate vast amounts of computing power to just know where it is... cause anyway, it is not like you're going to have a conversation with someone 100 million years light away. So I would recommend projects like malaria@home or docking@home and the like...
Dear
The fundamental failing of SETI is that they assume other civilizations will needlessly emit EM radiation in the same fashion we do. It's as naive as assuming that life will only exist on planets that are nearly earth-like.
I have mixed feelings about that 500AU telescope. Using our own sun as a gravitational lens is very clever... but 500AU... even getting a telescope out that far (within a reasonable amount of time) would be an enormous challenge. By the time we have the technology to build such a thing, and be able to aim it arbitrarily, I'm confident we'll already have sent probes to nearby stars.
I never thought I'd be one of the people who'd say this, but the vast resources we'd need to put a radio telescope on the far side of the moon would probably better be devoted to making sure that the Earth remains habitable. Later, when we're not at risk of drowning in our own pollutants, then let's go back to looking for aliens.
Besides, it'll be a lot less embarrassing if, when we find alien intelligence, we don't have to explain to them why we're committing collective suicide.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
"Then there’s the ongoing shift from broadcast (which necessarily uses a small number of very powerful transmitters) to unicast media like cellphones; there isn’t the slightest chance you could even tell there was a cellphone network on the ground from space, since the frequencies are reused on a radius of less than 25 km; from a lightyear away picking out a single base station would require an unfeasibly large aperture (which would be no good for a sky search unless you had a ridiculously long time to perform it)."
Copied verbatim from Electron Pusher, Fermi's Non-Paradox
He's certainly not lacking in ambition. But I'm wondering where he thinks he's going to get the money to finance some of these ambitious ideas. Somehow, I doubt the private sector is going to be interested in a project that will never show a profit, and the government isn't really in a position to be funding frivolous projects with marginal chances of success. Maybe he can talk the Chinese into footing the bill?
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
Is there any intelligent life in the universe? Maybe we'll find some on the planet that the radio observatory will be orbiting...
Wouldn't that be like crossing the street?
Actually, wouldn't that be like staying on one 6 inch stretch of asphalt on a small block on a small street in a tiny neighborhood in a small city in a huge state in a huge country on a huge planet?
Sent from your iPad.
Just think, the variety of alien porn could be shocking and amazing. Legislators would have a field day banning all that.
Table-ized A.I.
Part of the ambitious plan is to TRIPLE the number of sentient life forms discovered by SETI with five years.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
What if we're alone, and we really can't travel faster than the speed of light eh? Ever thought of that.
Just because one grain of sand on the beach has your signature on it, doesn't mean there must be another just like it.
Believing in extra terrestrials before we have the proof seems very much like believing in God before... oh hold on.
The problem with intelligent civilizations is that a few decades after they achieve a technological level where they can make powerful radios to talk to galactic neighbors, they also invariably build particle accelerators. These accelerators soon make micro black holes that eat up the planet and the not-so-intelligent civilization with it. Only 0.1% of intelligent civilizations survive by colonizing a nearby planet before the particle accelerator is turned on.
So instead of finding a strong community of star systems in a 50 lightyear radius, we will probably have to look 500 l.y. away and wait 1000 years with the hadron collider turned off.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
I was going to say "Of course there is intelligent life in the universe, it's right here on Earth!" but I couldn't do it with a straight face.
'In the universe there is intelligent life, I'm confident about that,' i am not so sure when i turn on the tv
IMO, we shouldn't be trying to prove life exists anywhere else, we should be trying to prove it doesn't exist everywhere else.
If it turns out there is no possible way that we can move faster than light would there be any purpose to contact alien worlds?
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
"The surest sign that intelligent life exists is that none of it has tried to contact us."
--Calvin and Hobbes
Let's see here:
Believing in other power/advanced being - check
Lack of observable scientific evidence supporting it - check
Only evidence we have = legends and word-of-mouth stories about strange encounters - check
See? Religion and science can co-exist!
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
Even if they exist somewhere, a very probable hypothesis if one considers the billions of galaxies with billions of stars,
how are we sure that the timing will be proper, so that we'll make a contact?
I'm afraid that even if they are somewhere, we might never learn for each others existence, if the distance which seperates us is
bigger than the time we can afford to wait without destroying our race. A similar case stands for "them".
So maybe this answers the "Fermi question", namely the simple question posed by E.Fermi :
"If they exist, where are they?" (why haven't they showed themselves?)
Maybe we'll receive a broadcast of their life,long after their extinction, but I find it improbable to get a direct contact..
deltaS>=0 (c.s.)
Just the result of seeing too many movies with UFOs.
And what's the reason to find that anyway? If someone is so hellbent on discovering alien life, it has to be more than discovery.
An alien fetishist? Someone who desires enslavement of Earth like in movies? What's the use of alien life?
I hope this person doesn't think that aliens are really going to help us. So selfish.
Mankind can not even get along with itself, do you expect space opera styled interplanetary relationships? Universal federations? Hah.
There are way, way more useful things in our planet that are awaiting for discovery, yet we use the power of A LOT OF PEOPLE to discover alien life, that might be useless as even if they exist, we might be unable to even communicate with them.
Those who collaborate with SETI are just neckbeards with too many scifi movies on their mind. Aliens might exist but if they do, they are too far away, because we make a lot of noise and no one noticed yet. Your best alien might be a bacteria from Mars and not a Predator.
Oh yes now someone will reply about the power of beliefs, I don't care, if I said I believed in faeries you'd say the same so shut up before saying anything about respecting other's beliefs. SETI is useless for mankind, we need to focus on something that is tangible and has a potentially useful result, not finding E.T. calling home.
Nerds. SETI should have died years ago, but people keeps that childish hope and defends it like a religion.
Would lasers work for interstellar communication?
I rather imagine it would be something like sending semaphore signals from one merry go round to someone on a different merry go round who can't read semaphore signals.
crazy dynamite monkey
Any amateur rocket scientists want to help me launch a solar powered radio into space that simply repeats, "I am Rosie O'Donnell from the planet 61752-percion. I have come for your Cheetos. Surrender now or I'll wear sweatpants in public!"
Jason-Palmer.com
the Internet?
SETI is no more than having a lighthouse built along the coast to find other civilizations across the ocean.
On the plus side, SETI's record for filtering extraterrestrial spam has been flawless.
"...the question of contact with extraterrestrials is a kind of red herring premised upon a number of assumptions that a moment's reflection will show are completely false. To search expectantly for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture bound a presumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant. And yet, this has been chosen as the avenue by which it is assumed contact is likely to occur. Meanwhile, there are people all over the world - psychics, shamans, mystics, schizophrenics - whose heads are filled with information, but it has been ruled a priori irrelevant, incoherent, or mad. Only that which is validated through consensus via certain sanctioned instrumentalities will be accepted as a signal. The problem is that we are so inundated by these signals - these other dimensions - that there is a great deal of noise in the circuit." - Terence McKenna.
http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/
you don't know its a waste of time until you go for it. but then again, how much time is enough before we consider it wasted...
An observatory at 500 AU? Really? Considering the two farthest man-made objects, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, are only at 94 and 84 AU, this seems overambitious to the point of completely unrealistic.
What if all of these supposed intelligent extra-terrestrial lifeforms ARE communicating with with the ordinary EM Spectrum but they're encrypting their communications such that it would all appear, even to the avid observer, as little more than mere background noise?
What then???
cookbook
in reality there are FOUR simultaneous 24-hour days.
On earth, there are twenty-four simultaneous 24-hour days.
There was a benevolent entity with a million IQ piloting Earth-sized ships around the sun as recently as two days ago, see this paranoid forum for more
I came in there a bunch of times just to remind them we should try to trade, not beg, and that these things haven't given any indication of intending to do harm, since the trolls there said all kinds of dark and creepy shit. Maybe these are just amputated from current SOHO photos but I think they've gone away til the 2012 uplift because we're still warlike and crazy :3
Now Obama says Space is Good and SETI is excited about the sun, WTF I say
If you want to find a needle in a haystack you need a needle finder (metal detector). Almost all of the existing radio telescopes have too narrow a field of view and/or too long a integration time. What we need is "An L-Band All-Sky Astronomical Surveillance System" as per the Ohio Argus (http://argus.naapo.org/). 5(?) of them would cover the whole sky. Each sees ~100 degree's of sky. They would need to be located in space to cut down the large amount ground thermal noise and perhaps use superconducting antennas.. e.g. http://www.esa.int/esaLP/ESAQGA2VMOC_LPsmos_0.html but pointing out into space (it is at this very moment as apart of its calibration). It needs to be able to spot 10 millisecond transients and have a real-time bandwidth of ~20 MHz (i.e. a real time 20 MHz of spectrum display with 0.1 hz of resolution for each image pixel in the sky). It initially would have a low sensitivity and would be upgraded over time with more antennas and more advanced digital processing (needed to cross correlate all the antennas for all angles) The technology to attempt this type of device has only recently come available (40nm and under FPGAs/GPUs). What if "Argus sees a brief, narrowband pulse at 1420.8807 MHz near NGC 752" (http://argus.naapo.org/~rchilders/) was actually coming from the sky. The chances of any radio telescope being pointed at exactly the right spot an being able to see 1400Jy). What if that pulse is only sent once every 5 months? What if there where other pulses outside of the Argus's 60khz bandwidth? I believe that any SETI beacon ("look here with a bigger telescope") would be a large phased array cycling though a large target list and sending a short burst of pulses on a number of special frequencies.
(Other than the Calvin&Hobbes explanation that they've been smart enough not to bother talking to us, of course ;-)
If aliens are less intelligent than humans, it's highly unlikely that they'll have the technology to talk to us. So if we can talk to them at all, they're likely to be at least human-level intelligent, possibly more. That doesn't mean that they'll be weakly godlike entities, just that they're not going to be dumber than us. Doesn't really matter if we're talking to the original biologically evolved aliens or their post-singularity successor machines, if they have any of those around.
By the way, Homo sapiens don't appear to have been the brightest hominids ever to walk the planet; there are some older fossils that have been found in southern Africa with larger skulls than we have, in shapes that mean they probably had average IQs around 150-200. But they're fossilized, i.e. long dead, and don't seem to have developed advanced enough technology to survive whatever climate changes happened or avoid getting eaten by less intelligent animals that had big nasty pointy teeth.
I agree all civilisations have a lited detection window. Not because of mutual destruction. But the move from high power long range analogue signals to low power localised digital signals.
We ourselses aremidway through thisprocess now and as you get further awa from a digital source it's coherence diminishes with distance due to quantum effects resulting in it been seen as a background of noise which may appear natural.
The detectable lifetime of our civilisation is coming to an end to the extend that certain scientist maintain we should create space based analogue radio beacons purely to maintain our visability.
I was part of SETI at tje outset but their denial of the digital evolution leading to a limited detectable civilisation window led me to resign.
Flying pasta monsters aside, how is SETI different from ID? ID does not assert any preconception regarding the nature of the designer, so you can't pull the natural, super-natural distinction. In fact, ID has the advantage of a signal to inspect, that of DNA. SETI has no signal to apply "intelligence" detection algorithms to.
Any other intelligent civilization that is even 100 years further than us in the evolution of A.I. would have already became so dense with supermatter that it had created a black hole and swallowed them. This will happen to us too, if we don't destroy ourselves sooner.
for people who got in trouble using SETI@home?
New Economic Perspectives
And you get a signal from them chances are their civilization is over and you need no defense anymore.
SETI success would only mean that long long long ago in a far far far away galaxy there was someone, big deal.
Dear
I think intelligent life most certainly exists out there, but it is highly improbable that we are looking back exactly at the time that they discovered radio. There is a small window of time in which there is exponential growth in technological discoveries, after that total annihilation. Look at us, it's been a hundred-something years since the discovery of radio and if somebody would've been pointing their radio telescopes at our solar system for millions of years there would have been total silence and they would eventually give up.
"Look at what has happened in the past, when two cultures of the same species met on our planet. Group A sails over the ocean, and discovers a strange culture B on another continent. Despite the fact that this was a meeting between members of the same species, group A doesn't recognize that group B is even human. Group A proceeds to enslave, kidnap, kill, and steal the land and resources of group B.
This pattern has been repeated a bunch of times in our own history. So, when humans meet aliens, the inferior group will be lunch."
When you're ancestors are viruses and bacteria, what do you expect? It's in your design to do such things. To think anything else proves at lack of understanding.
..as long as we're hobbled by the speed of light, we're not going anywhere or receiving any ET signals. What we know of exoplanets is due to mass spectroscopy. We can figure out the gaseous composition at best, not more than that.
The fastest manmade object currently is Voyager 1, traveling at 17km/s, or about 0.000056c. Either we break the speed of light or invent warp drive, without that we're just going to be stuck within our system, at best with trips to Mars and Europa (whenever that happens)
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
Sing along if you want to :)
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
-Monty Python's galaxy song.
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."