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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!
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.
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.
"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!
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
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.
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
"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.
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...
On the plus side, SETI's record for filtering extraterrestrial spam has been flawless.
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.