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

[fiannaFailMan]

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?

Re:Laudable, but misguided

[Profane MuthaFucka]

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.

Re:Laudable, but misguided

[Chris Burke]

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.

Re:Laudable, but misguided

[thesandtiger]

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.

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.

Ambitious Plans

[MyLongNickName]

Part of the ambitious plan is to TRIPLE the number of sentient life forms discovered by SETI with five years.

Re:Why I left SETI...

[Bragador]

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.

Intelligence in galactic context means extinction

[viking80]

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.

Re:Oblig quote/unrelated observation

[Sponge Bath]

Richard Dawkins wrote that not being able to prove or disprove something does not prevent you from assigning probabilities. There is observable scientific evidence supporting ET life: There is a huge number of stars, some similar to ours, some with planets like ours. We can't prove (yet) there is ET life, but we can say it is possible and even probable. Floating Bearded Guys in the Sky on the other hand, don't have even that.