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SETI Is 50 Years Old; No Sign of ET
EagleHasLanded writes "The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is 50 years old next month, and still no sign of intelligent alien life. Paul Davies of the Beyond Center (also Chairman of the SETI Post-Detection Taskgroup) says it's time to re-think and expand the search for ET."
We are trying to find signs of intelligent life off the Earth. Give it some time, people. And try to become civilized yourselves.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
As we ourselves transition to all digital-communications and the associated low-transmission-power-levels we will fall off the radar for other civilizations detecting us too. That little blip of 100 years of analog full-blast will not been seen by anyone else either. This is in addition to the numbers associated with space: it is big, fricken' big and long in time. The last civilization anywhere near enough to us to be detected probably went extinct around 100 million years ago and in another 2 million years until humanity goes extinct the next civilization close enough to pick us up probably won't develop technology for another 60 million years... Missed in the night. But imagine in your mind an alien on an alien world because those same numbers say that it is a logical certainty that they exist.
Shh.
People need to study orders of magnitude [youtube.com] before they get on SETI's case about not finding anything exciting.
Better not: they'd know that SETI is useless and a waste of money.
I see lots of posts that seem to miss the point. The mere _finding_ of an ET would be _dramatic_ for our civilization. Think of all the things that would change (not all religious).
If we can ever _prove_ we're not alone out here, I honestly believe it could sway the attitudes and priorities of many governments. I mean, honestly, if we know there is another alien life out there, that we could potentially communicate with, how many stupid squabbles would end?
Right now, we only worry about ourselves because, well, that's all there is to worry about. The prospect of learning from another civilization, or even just being afraid and try to "defend" ourselves from them (sad, but you never know what spin governments would put on a finding like that) could be utterly revolutionary.
Then again, so many people would dis-believe due to religious and/or conspiratorial reasons would probably be mind boggling.
Why couldn't an advanced civilization try to ping us every 1000 years or so and see if anyone responds? It's not like it has to be stray TV signals. To me it seems a reasonable thing to do if we start discovering Earth-like exoplanets, sure we'll try more often at first but it's not like we're going to ask "Has intelligent life evolved now?" every five minutes. Narrow beam, high power, simple signal, the kind that should be easy for SETI to detect if there's a big enough antenna pointing in the right direction at the right time. But if they're run by people like you, I suppose nobody will be there to listen...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It's taken us this long to be here. Who's to say there's not another intelligent species out there who is just now coming into space travel, but is already depressed because the Xorblat Paradox says searching for alien life is probably a waste of time. The Fermi Paradox is still incredibly short-sighted. It's very hard to draw meaningful conclusions from negative evidence, otherwise we'd have put this whole "God" thing to rest a long time ago.
--Obyron
As it has been mentioned here a few times; the people involved with SETI have no illusions of finding ET on his cell phone. It's about the concept that maybe there are civilizations sending out a signal that is meant for no other reason than to be a beacon to others. We've already done it ourselves, we just don't do it on a regular basis.
In any case, we will more likely observe life on their planet via chemical analysis of their atmosphere long before they get a signal from us. Given the leaps and bounds that extrasolar planet discovery has happened in the last decade, I'm guessing that we will know a great deal about the possibility of Earth-like life being on any planet within a thousand light years of us before our radio signals travel a tenth of that distance. If we find a planet that displays the chemical make up of life there is a high chance someone will start beaming it with radio signals but we will probably have the ability to actively observe the life on that planet long before the signal ever gets to them.
So is SETI really going to prove anything we won't know much more about in the next couple of decades? Doubtful. But if we do detect signals from another planet using the SETI project it will probably mean that they know we're here and they're reaching out to us for better or for worse.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
It seems to me we're unlikely to find aliens and they are unlikely to find us. The distances between us and possible life are extreme and there's a whole universe of stars, black holes, radiation clouds, and other forms of interference in the way.
Are you seriously counting on those old AM/FM radio transmissions making a direct line through space-time to a planet 140 billion light years away? Let's look at what can go wrong. Assume the Earth has a bunch of weak transmitters which occasionally fire information into space - this will already be a weak version of a weak signal since it's gone through our atmosphere, clouds, etc.
1. This signal is subject to inverse-square law. By the time it's left our own solar system the signal is infinitesimal.
2. The earth itself will obscure more than 50% of all the signals as it rotates.
3. Signals will be shot straight into our sun or pass close enough to either bend into it's gravity or have it's course dramatically altered.
4. There's billions of other suns which will do the same thing as it passes by.
5. Signals will slowly approach chaos, and be in-detectable from background radiation.
6. Their receivers will be expecting more powerful signals and our will pass "under the radar".
There's likely a million other ways for a signal which is designed to bounce off our atmosphere to become lost in space as it tries to make it from here...to there, whereever there is. Don't expect contact any time soon.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
You miss the point of the Fermi Paradox entirely. Given that humans have only been in existence on earth for 200K Years, why is it that no aliens have colonised Earth *before* we got here? It would take only one expansionist alien culture to exist in the billions of years the galaxy has existed before us and the Earth and the entire galaxy would have been well and truely colonized already.
I mean some relatively straight-forward extrapolations of humans shows *us* colonizing the galaxy in a few million years.
Basically the Fermi paradox says, they are *no* other intelligent civilizations in the galaxy otherwise we would have had dramatic evidence on Earth.
Still I see no particular harm in continuing to look. If something were found it would be a monumental breakthrough.
Even more importantly, why does everyone think Fermi's paradox is well posed?
There's also a really simple explanation: The astronomical distances separating Earth from other stars require astronomical amounts of energy and/or astronomical amounts of time cross. Maybe accessing this amount of energy and time is just too improbable for any civilization. We could play some games with the Drake equation and "prove" this, but we'd be extrapolating into bullshit-land. Of course, that is where the current Drake equation parameters are anyway.
But even if this barrier could be crossed, consider advanced aliens that develop the means access such a large amount of energy and to travel such great distances. Let's say that life is so common that they are able to come across millions of other life forms. Chances are, those life forms will be much more primitive than they are. After you have "discovered" a few million primitive life forms are you really going to visit them all? Or would you rather use your time more efficiently, and ignore the life forms that are much less primitive that you and only visit the ones that are near or above your level of sophistication? When was the last time you talked to the ants in your backyard on the way to hang out with your girlfriend?
I am guessing that even advanced aliens don't have infinite time and energy at their tentacle tips. They're not going to waste their time with us. We can barely get to low earth orbit on a good day.
Technically, due to the whole speed of light thingy, often we are looking for signs that intelligent life existed thousands or hundreds of thousands of years ago. Civilisations could have blinked out of existance long before our capacities to collect their signals were up to speed. Or they exist right now, but their signals won't arrive for another century or so.
Actually, we only need to look at our own example of how well we've been advertising our existence. The switch to digital and satellite broadcasting has severely cut down on the number of signals we've been sending into the void. Things like Arecibo are mere blips, in the hopes that the other radio antenna is listening at that moment and not sweeping a different sector. By the time they look at our solar system again our signals may not be discernable against the background noise of our sun.
And yes, maybe Professor Sagan was right, but on the time scale that Lovecraft used: our planet may have been visited by intelligent life, but it could have been during one of the great die-outs, and they moved on with little more than a note to check again in a few millenia, and forgot about this rock.
If there's intelligent life out there, they'll have to be within 150 light years from us for them to find us, and the reverse would be true as well. Plus, any civilizations that use technology not based on radio will be invisible to us.
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