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."

Comments

Laudable, but misguided

[mcgrew]

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.

Re:Laudable, but misguided

[CrimsonAvenger]

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.

You seem to share Hawking's delusion that more intelligence is an inevitable part of the progression of an intelligent species.

Alas, there really doesn't seem to be much evidence for that. Once you're intelligent enough, in general, to use the machines that your tiny fraction of geniuses comes up with, the impetus towards more intelligence pretty much evaporates. After all, how much intelligence does it really take to do 95+% of all the things required to make a technological civilization work?

That said, there's no particularly good reason that ET should be friendly, even if they're no more intelligent than we are. Or that they'd not find us just another tasty piece of livestock.

Note, of course, that the reverse is also true. I've heard reliable rumours that your average ET tastes like chicken....;)

Re:Laudable, but misguided

[MichaelSmith]

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.

You seem to share Hawking's delusion that more intelligence is an inevitable part of the progression of an intelligent species.

Which is clearly wrong. Crocodiles, for example are as smart as they need to be. I think early humans were trapped into a (say) software intensive architecture. They had these tools (fingers, eyes, etc) which could only be used for survival by a powerful brain. So there was selection pressure for intelligence, but only because our peripherals (so to speak) had previously developed into general purpose tools.

Re:Laudable, but misguided

[Kjella]

So there was selection pressure for intelligence, but only because our peripherals (so to speak) had previously developed into general purpose tools.

Why would there be selection pressure for general purpose tools in a creature too dumb to use it? I find it more plausible that a specialized creature initially developed intelligence because it'd make it a better specialist but slowly evolved into being more flexible than specialized.

Re:Laudable, but misguided

[Anonymous Coward]

An even better comparison may be social insects or bacteria. They live in communities and they have rather elaborate ways of communicating. They sometimes build structures that are much bigger than themselves. However, neither insects nor bacteria appear sentient to most of us.

For example, we consider wasps stupid because they often end up banging their heads against our window panes. I bet there is super alien stuff where human:stuff::wasp:glass.

Re:Laudable, but misguided

[vlm]

First is the limited range; nobody more than around 150 light years away would be able to detect intelligent life on earth.

I assume you're basing that on the venerable Kraus and his graphs showing how far away we could detect analog TV AM video carriers, etc.

Three problems:

1) Kraus never got into exotic modulation techniques that work at lower SNR. We can probably get a better range if we try.

2) Kraus assumed we'd continue transmitting those nice constant television AM carrier signals. We stopped some years ago. Ooops. Appears the lifetime of AM carrier transmission is vaguely around one century, not "forever".

3) Per Kraus's calculations NTSC TV AM video carriers were the strongest and most continuous transmissions. It would be VERY unreasonable to call TV "intelligent life".

In Kraus's defense, he was correct when he wrote it, his classic radio astronomy text was first published in the 60s, and hes been dead for half a decade.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Kraus

Re:Laudable, but misguided

[thesandtiger]

I think largely the possibility of humans being the hostile ones would be about the elimination of competition instead of the scarcity of resources. Frankly, if we have FTL and the attendant technology, we'd be much better off just ripping up stars where there's nobody around to try and stop us from gathering resources.

By the time we'd run out of stars to use, I'm reasonably sure that "humanity" would have changed to something that we can't even imagine now.

We may be war mongering assholes, but I think we're economic minded warmongering assholes, and so the question would become: "If I can go fly off to another star system and rip it apart and get all the resources I could possibly need for my lifetime and the lifetimes of 15 generations of my offspring, without conflict, is it better to do that, or should I go be a warmongering asshole and fight a battle I might lose with some other warmongering asshole over pretty much those exact same resources?"

Or, if we really do have easy FTL, it might be "Whelp, I need to eradicate everyone with a belief system that differs even a tiny bit from my own because they'll kill me if I don't kill them" and then we all die.

So since the choices are "we all die in massive genocidal conflicts" or "we realize we can satisfy our greed for the farthest we can reasonably imagine, safely and without needing to risk death" I'll go with the one that gives us a future :)

Though I do want Galactica, so maybe warmongering assholes aren't all bad.

True fact: I used the word "asshole" more than 3 times in 2 posts on /. today, and in entirely different stories, and not once was it directed at another person.

Re:Laudable, but misguided

[mcgrew]

Sadly we have a history of not playing well with others

True, but we keep getting better. Most countries have abolished capital punishment, for instance. Governments used to torture people to death. Our history is bloody indeed, but most of us are not the barbarians our anscestors were. Hell, in my own lifetime I've seen improvements in how people treat each other.

By the time FTL is developed I expect us to be even more civilized.

Re:Laudable, but misguided

[mcgrew]

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.

Most of mankinds greatest technological advances have come from warfare. Even the computer, originally developed to compute ballistics. We'd never have gone to the moon had it not been for the "cold war".

I find that idea rather ridiculous. We are sentient. Do you think there is something such as being "supersentient"?

Were the protohumans a million years ago sentient? What will we be like in ten million years? Do you think your descendants ten million years in the future would consider us sentient?

Re:Laudable, but misguided

[mcgrew]

I assume you're basing that on the venerable Kraus and his graphs showing how far away we could detect analog TV AM video carriers, etc.

No, I'm referring to the speed of light. We've only been transmitting for a century or two, so there is no way anyone farther than two hundred light years out could get a signal from us.

If the sun exploded you wouldn't know it for eight minutes. If Alpha Centari exploded you wouldn't know it for four years.

Lasers, Xrays, etc.

[Tablizer]

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.

Re:Lasers, Xrays, etc.

[pz]

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.

I'm not an expert at long-range radio transmission, but I have worked in signal detection. One of the basic tenets of SETI is the observation that the Earth has been a huge transmitting station for some decades now, thanks to Radio and Television, and that goldarnit, if we're inadvertently transmitting to outer space, then we ought to be able to listen to some other planet doing the same thing.

Except that if you can't focus an antenna to one very very small part of the earth, radio and television stations have a nasty tendency to interfere with each other since television stations in New York will be operating on the same frequencies as ones in Los Angeles, and although the combination of widely skewed proximity patterns and terrestrial curvature blocking line-of-sight interference allows through-the-air reception just fine on the surface of our planet, a receiver situated outside of the Solar system will get transmitters on one entire side of the Earth at a time. Those signals will tend to interfere, with the result being nothing more than a little extra noise over background, at distance. Structure in the signal is not going to be discernible.

The only way (and, to be fair, you do hear some SETI folk talking about this) we're going to be able to listen to an alien race is if they're beaming something straight at us. That presumes they have some suspicion we're here. And that means they're definitely more advanced than us, 'cause we can't even detect the presence of small, rocky planets around other star systems, yet, forget eavesdropping through the blinding radio background of their star.

We're more likely to hear nowt...

[Omnipotent_Radish]

"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

Re:What if there is no FTL?

[Vohar]

I'd say simply answering the question "Are we alone in the universe?" would be noteworthy enough for both civilizations to make the whole thing worthwhile. It's not often you get an answer to one of the fundamental mystery questions like that.

It's up there with "What happens to us after we die?" and "Is there a God?" Sure, people have their beliefs and opinions, but to actually KNOW...