Slashdot Mirror
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."
They can't be so smart that we don't appear sentient - we've put men ( briefly ) on the moon.
We might be grossly inferior, but certainly sentient and, I hope, unappetizing.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
If they are not using Linux they'll probably be modded to oblivion and never heard from again.
Table-ized A.I.
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 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.
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!
It's not because you have faith that something exists that it does exist.
Also, the SETI institute and seti@home are two different things even though they have the same goal.
There's no reasonable explanation for why they would want to enslave us, or eat us, or otherwise exploit us.
It's conceivable that they might want to wipe us out and repurpose Earth, as it does have some useful minerals, but especially given our nuclear arsenal and the (minor) headaches that would cause, I don't see why they'd go for Earth over the many uninhabited rocks in the universe. Direct harvesting of solar energy would be far more effective than exploiting us, whatever their goals are. We're far less useful than robots.
Of course we'll appear sentient. So does a dog. Any argument a human could make against canine intelligence could be made a thousand fold by some theoretical more intelligent beings than us against us (whew read that 3 times fast). That's especially the case given how completely unlike us they might appear, while dogs are extremely similar to us. To some hyper intelligence we might appear to be an interesting chemical reaction as they load our planet into their fusion plant. Given any possible FTL technique and their presence might not be noticed until their gravity well wrecks our planet.
I agree misguided, but not for your second point.
The biggest problem with SETI is that it's based on the belieg that any intelligent civilization would use the exact same tecnhology we use, and would use that technology to contact other civilizations.
It seems the height of hubris to believe that if there are intelligent aliens, they must be exactly like us (this is the same problem with the Drake equation.) "We are the most intelligent beings we know about, therefore we must be the most intelligent beings that exist."
There's no reasonable explanation for why they would want to enslave us, or eat us, or otherwise exploit us.
It's conceivable that they might want to wipe us out and repurpose Earth, as it does have some useful minerals, but especially given our nuclear arsenal and the (minor) headaches that would cause, I don't see why they'd go for Earth over the many uninhabited rocks in the universe. Direct harvesting of solar energy would be far more effective than exploiting us, whatever their goals are. We're far less useful than robots.
I'm sure the people of South America, with all the environmental problems they were having, probably thought the same. But the Spaniards saw value in stuff that the Incas and Aztecs took for granted. Who's to say that ET won't come here and take a liking to our stocks of salt water for reasons unbeknownst to us?
Drill baby drill - on Mars
"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.
>> First is the limited range; nobody more than around 150 light years away would be able to detect intelligent life on earth.
I have to agree with that one. It seems somewhat futile given the extremely low odds of detection. Furthermore, it seems hard to imagine we could really have meaningful exchanges with a civilization hundreds of lightyears away. That being said, if we ever did discover evidence of alien intelligence elsewhere in the universe, it would change alot of things here on earth. It would give a huge morale boost to many science fields, for one.
>> they may turn out to be hostile
Someone else said that "there is no reason to assume they wouldn't be hostile. I would say there is. Whenever I see the Klingon on Star Trek act in violent and barbaric ways, I wonder if it really is realistic to assume such a society could ever compete with a more "peaceful" one like the federation, on the technological level. If your society is full of violent individuals, places "being a strong warrior" above everything else, and you can get randomly killed at any time, I think that slows down scientific progress alot. In my opinion, individuals need to be "peaceful" enough for society to be rather stable in order for science to progress. Furthermore, a scientifically advanced society would probably realize that there is not much point in simply eradicating other life forms "for fun".
>> and they may discover that we are tasty, or good speceship fuel, etc.
I wouldn't worry too much about that either. If they actually are capable of getting here, it means they can get to any other nearby star. They probably have already mastered things like nuclear fusion, in which case, you know, hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. Energy itself, in this universe, is abundant. THE resource we have that is worth something is the earth itself, but it's only worth something to aliens, in my opinion, if they are biologically similar to us (breathe oxygen, similar temperature tolerances, etc.). Again, however, I would argue that if they have the capability of getting here, they are probably not "starved" in terms of energy. They would probably be capable of building themselves a new planet next to ours.
>> 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.
I find that idea rather ridiculous. We are sentient. Do you think there is something such as being "supersentient"?
SETI is no more than having a lighthouse built along the coast to find other civilizations across the ocean.
Runaway feedback. Specialists are frequently dumb as posts, but a dumb generalist will be outcompeted by a dumb specialist in its element. A smart specialist may be able to move when its environment changes, but it will likely be less effective than a generalist anywhere else.
A more general bodytype requires a more flexible mind to overcome a specialist. A more flexible mind is more effective with a more general bodytype than a specialist bodytype.
Iterate.
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...
Earth may have resources that are "useful," however all the stuff we have on earth is found further out of the Sun's gravity well. Main belt asteroids have more heavy metals than earth, and you don't need to crawl out of a deep well to remove them from the solar system. And if you are only after water and gases, the oort cloud has more than enough that the cost to weight of getting the minuscule amount we have here on earth just isn't worth the energy. The ONLY reasons I can see for a hostile race to worry about humans is our technology (not likely if they are interstellar race), genetic mapping for bio war, to remove a possible future threat (the most probable reason I can think of) or, finally to colonize a planet in the "Goldie Locks zone." That last one has a lot of issues that may make it more beneficial to sterilize the planet due to biological contamination, and in that case mars would seem to be the better planet to transform IMHO.
In any other case I can think of, they would contact us and see what they could learn or teach us, or place a probe in the outer solar system to watch us. Not a lot of reason to worry about it all.
We get observed, first contact or death and there is nothing we can do to change it.
Math is like sex. People who get it are popular in class, people who don't are not.
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.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
The approach our ancestors developed for climbing trees involved using opposable thumbs for grasping various sizes of branches (as opposed to the claws of a sloth, squirrel, cat, etc.). That particular approach is effective even with limited intelligence (i.e smaller monkeys with much reduced brain capacity), so it's reasonable to expect that the manipulation capability needed for tool use predates the intelligence necessary to develop and use tools. That's because the manipulation capability has other uses besides tool use, even if those other uses are now obsolete (our feet are no longer prehensile).
If you've got what appears to be a chicken and egg problem, you haven't really looked closely or far back enough (reptile eggs long predate chickens).
I think that I can take it for granted that humans are much smarter than dogs. Even so, dogs have some rudimentary intelligence. They learn that by listening to some human language or by standing next to the box of dog treats, they can get food. They can also figure out things like opening refrigerators, etc.
The point that the earlier post was making is that it is possible that any aliens we meet might be smarter than we are by the same factor that humans are smarter than dogs.
In fact, we have absolutely no idea how smart it is *possible* to get. It is very possible that they aliens will be so much more advanced than us that they will be indistinguishable from gods.
Of course, I have no evidence to support this claim, but personally speaking, I think it is very likely, given the relative youth of our species, that there are beings out in the universe whose intelligence makes ours look like that of rodents.
The difference here is that we have nukes, which function well as a sort of universal trump card. It's likely that our arsenal would at least inconvenience them, but it could do much more. Of course, it could also do much less.
Our arsenal as it stands now would be pretty useless for repelling aggressive space invaders. They could just lob chunks of rock at us from high orbit or the moon while being essentially immune to retaliation. Hypothetically we could design rockets designed to carry nuclear warheads that far, but we'd still be at a crazy disadvantage versus the opponent who could just drop things down our gravity well.
But it wouldn't do much less to our planet. If we saw an unstoppable alien aggressor, we could threaten to nuke ourselves. Sure, we may all die, but it'd still be a major bargaining chip.
Only if what they wanted was us, or some other aspect of life on earth rather than other resources. But yeah, in some cases threatening suicide can be a useful gambit.
Scientific discovery generally does much better in an open, cooperative society. I'm not saying that it's impossible without one, just that it proceeds much slower. Space-faring species would very likely have nearly species-wide cooperation in their past.
Possibly, but that doesn't mean they automatically think of any other species as equals that should be cooperated with, rather than exploited. The scientific advancement and open sharing that characterized The Enlightenment was not extended to the people of places the empires of Enlightenment Europe went and colonized. They could just as easily see us as a bunch of hairless primates who don't deserve to take part in their glorious undertakings.
Also, the universe doesn't quite seem to be teeming with life, or we'd have seen it by now.
Way premature to say that. Our solar system isn't teeming with obvious life, but we've only just begun to be able to find exoplanets, and spectroscopy of such planets to find basic aspects of their chemical makeups is in its infancy. We're quite a way from being able to say these planets aren't teeming with life.
The intellegence needed for space travel almost has to imply a sense of the beauty of the universe, and from there, life.
Or, the sheer determination and practicality required for space travel -- especially if it's multi-generational sub-light-speed interstellar travel -- could imply a complete dedication to their goals and disregard for any of our silly philosophical objections like "but life is precious!"
Look at it this way -- sea travel requires quite a bit of intelligence, yet after months of travel people landed on the other shore and their first thought wasn't "wow, look at the beauty of life!", it was "wow, these savages have lots of gold, let's take it!"
I'd like to think the Golden Rule applies. Maybe that's naive, but interstellar travel is one of the milestones of scientific acheivement. I hope that that implies some moral strength.
Societal advancement gave the Spaniards a sense of moral strength too.
I don't think it's at all the case that achieving some milestone in science implies any measure of morality. So in that sense I do think you're being extremely naive. However I may be naive too in that I hope that we can develop moral strength alongside our technological strength, and that we will see beauty in the the universe and in life ourselves. But I don't think it's a given for us, and certainly not for any alien race.
The enemies of Democracy are
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.
Microbes may well have managed to get from Mars to Earth (or vice versa) without even needing spacecraft to do it. By the "we've gotten to another celestial body" metric, microbes are sentient. Before you say "but human beings did it purposely" - yes, to us we did, but other species might not see it that way, especially if they have no way of really examining what we do and sensing the motive.
We do this kind of thing all the time on Earth - either anthropomorphizing animals ("My cat knocked my laptop on the ground because it is jealous that I use it so much") too much, or not enough ("It's okay to beat an animal to train it because they don't feel pain like we do"). It is possible that a species that things in vastly different ways than we do might just see the development of simple tools (and to them our spacecraft might be very simple) as something that lower animals do in order to look for new food sources. Or that technology is simply an instinctive thing we do, much like bees make hives and beavers make dams.
Probably any race that we'd be able to contact - even a one way contact like just listening in on signals they send us - would be enough like us to see us as vastly inferior and sentient, but I'm not totally convinced, and hell, to be honest, I'm not really even sure humanity *is* 100% sentient. We do shit all the time that makes no sense, we're not clear on our motives, our cognitive processes are often completely out of our control - what we think of as the bright spark of self-awareness may not even be a candle to a species that is completely aware of every aspect of their consciousness and able to handle that massive amount of input. Just the way we might look at a dog and think it possesses some extremely limited sentience, and I'd say any species much more advanced than we are could very well look at us in that same way.
But yes, hopefully unappetizing, or, at the least, not worth the shipping cost to get us on the dinner table while still fresh.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Often, but not always. And it is possible that some of that may be attributable to our genetic legacy and one of the primary drives for evolution on Earth.
But, what if life on another planet started off with a different scenario, and rather than massive competition for resources, cooperation was the overriding measure of fitness? Any species there that attempted to consume another might quickly go extinct, while species that were cooperative might thrive.
I'm not saying aliens couldn't be hostile, just that there may be other paradigms out there than the "red in tooth and claw" one that is *usually* the case with species interactions and evolution on Earth.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Most likely any race that can develop FTL drives will be able to harvest fuel from any planet/asteroid/cloud they please, and will just take one look at us and go "EEEEEWWWW!" and run as far away from our messy asses as possible. Unless they decide to do a little Jane Goodall "Gorillas in the mist" style study of primitive cultures.
What will be more interesting is what will happen if/when we develop FTL drives and "boldy go where no man has gone before" because I'm afraid old Roddenberry might have wrote fun sci-fi, but when it came to the way we humans are he was full of shit. Sure they'll probably be some science vessels pisslefarting around, but more likely the military WILL be building some BSG style Dreadnoughts first and foremost. And if the first race we encounter is not at least equal to, if not more advanced than us? Well I have a feeling the "bug hunt" in Starship Troopers the movie will probably be closer to how we act.
Sadly we have a history of not playing well with others, which is why any race we encounter would have to be nuts to share tech with us. While we monkeys may one day reach for the stars, I don't ever see us ever giving up our naturally greedy and aggressive ways. Just give us some nice slogans and patriotic music and we will be "itching to whoop ET's ass sir!" at any moment. We are just wired that way.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Ahhhh...but you are forgetting one thing friend, and that is Rules of Acquisition #34 "War is good for business". In war more ships get built, bigger and better weapons are needed, it is good for the economy!
Never underestimate man's greed, nor his lust for power. Sure we could go somewhere else and get it, but at what cost? Will going somewhere else lower profits by 3%? If so then hell no! It will screw up the quarterly earnings report! Sadly I think Alien 1 & 2 & 3 had it right, with large mega corps eventually ruling space as they rule the planet now, and any and all decisions will ultimately be based on how it effects profits. If it kills 1 million soldiers but saves the corp several hundred billion in profits? Well we can always breed more soldiers, now can't we?
Sorry if I sound a little cynical, but all I have seen from the human race is more and more clever ways to kill each other. Hell look at the Middle East, where if they don't have Jews or Christians to fight they fight each other! How many centuries have the Sunni and Shia been killing each other again? Sadly I just don't ever see our natural bloodlust ever being erased, it will just be used by the mega corps in pursuit of ever larger profits. Imagine if you mixed the Ferengi with the Klingon, and that would be the real way we would behave in space.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.