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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."
The Fermi Paradox is woefully shortsighted. How long did it take modern human to actually explore other continents and find out that other intelligent human life was inhabiting a large patch of land on the same planet? Decades? Centuries? Whatever the plural of millennium is? It took ages for humans to even begin to explore our own planet. Every single day we find new species, new small islands, new pockets of underwater ocean life.
If we can't even complete a species list on our own planet how can you expect us to even begin to understand how to contact (theoretical) alien life that exists far outside of our immediate grasp? For all we know a planet just like our earth, or earth in its infancy, or like our earth but at its end cycle, may exist somewhere out there. We have no way of being able to immediately confirm that though. And we might not ever.
Carl Sagan even wrote that we should be open to the idea that an intelligent life form could have visited earth in the past.
url:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts#Scientific_consideration
SETI is a detector, not an emitter.
If you're worried about any possible aliens' intentions, then SETI is precisely the right approach. You'd want to know if something is coming our way, and get at least some idea of what it might be like.
It also seems unlikely we can affect our visibility much. On one hand, we're absolutely tiny compared to other things happening in the universe. Any amount of energy we could send into space for instance is a drop in the bucket compared to what the Sun outputs. Anything we emit is unlikely to be received unless somebody is already looking in our direction for some other, more visible reason. But, on the other hand, if somebody is really looking, and capable of getting here, they almost certainly can figure out there's something here, and there's no way we can become quiet enough to pretend there isn't.
At this point we can barely get off this rock. If anything shows up, they almost certainly vastly surpass us just from the fact that they can travel all the way here. So if there's anything to do about that the best plan would seem to be to try to figure out if anybody is coming, and if they are use that information to come up with a plan.
Why don't start trying to find signs of intelligent life on Earth? Intelligence don't have to mean technology, and some species right here (dolphins? whales?) could be as intelligent or more than us, but while we see intelligence as use of tools we will keep ignoring them.
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.
or perhaps; they are intelligent, out there, have sufficient grasp of the huge distances/difficulties involved and decided not to waste their energies on 'travel' to focus on their own planets and civilizations...
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
Is it possible that we're one of the first planets to evolve advanced technology? Maybe someone can better explain the math to me. Universe is apx 14 billion years old. The sun, approximately at mid-life is 4 billion years old. Creation of heavy (including organic) elements requires supernova of massive stars at the end of their life. It seems like there can't have been that many generations of suns before the formation of our planet. Is my math crazy?
Language allows humans to communicate effectively, the Neanderthals had larger brains and more advanced tools than the Homo Sapiens at the time, but the Homo Sapiens had a more advanced ability to vocalize made possible by a more complex Larynx. Humans out-competed these smarter hominid species in no small part due to communication, so I do accept your premise that intelligence is more than technology. Intelligence is a purely human concept, because of this the human notion of intelligence ought to be what humans value (ya know, because where all human and such). Just having a large capacity for cognitive processing is not enough to constitute the intelligence that humans value. Our intelligence is all about intellectual evolution made possible by infrastructure. Writing allows people to solidify their ideas for the next generation so that knowledge is not lost when the brain dies. Farming allows for humans to have a small minority provide food for an entire society to survive and have surplus, thus allowing other members of society to focus on improving other parts of society for themselves and the next generation. You can sit in the comfort of your home with plentiful food and a controlled temperature at your computer tying out asinine comments on the good ol' global communications network because of the infrastructure of knowledge and technology built by countless human lives before you. All while the dolphins that people are so irrationally fond for (don't get me wrong dolphins are cute and there is no reason that we need to be killing them) spend every day of their lives searching for their next meal in a harsh environment . Do you think that dolphins ponder their existence? Or even have cognitive processes which extend beyond survival and mating? They don't have time to because they need to search for their next meal or die. This is because no matter how intelligent dolphins get their body lacks the ability to build anything significant. Even if Dolphins had more advanced brains than we do (which they do not) it would not matter because humans can write and build. In the realm of humans biological evolution is irrelevant because our intellectual evolution moves at a much quicker pace and has enabled fantastic progress in a short time life expectancy has more than tripled from 20 in the Neolithic to about 67 today. Dolphins on the other hand have been doing pretty much the same things for a very long time and they will most likely keep doing that for a while.
I recently heard an interesting theory about pachyderm intelligence. They're the largest survivors of the early phase of the Holocene extinction event. Before this event, there were impressive megafauna on every major land mass outside Antarctica. There are various theories as to what happened to this megacritters, the most popular being that they their long reproduction cycles made it impossible for them to keep up with hunting by humans..
So why did elephants survive when their cousins the woolly mammoths and various superbirds (I particularly like giant grazing ducks) did not? The theory is that elephants co-evolved with humans. As our ancestors got smarter and better at hunting, elephants got smarter and better and not being hunted. It wasn't until humans left Africa and started hunting megafauna that had no experience with them that the extinctions began. All these other animals simply didn't have time to evolve the way elephants did.
Which is too bad, really. Think of all the friends we could have had. Once they forgave us for eating them, of course.
A friend of mine who is much smarter than me (I know, I know, that doesn't mean much) INSISTS that they are here now. However since he works at a very high level in a field which requires him to tell the state department 3 months in advance before he is allowed to leave the country, I pay attention to what he says in technical matters at least.
Like the dog in "Men In Black" said: "Silly Humans, why do you always think something powerful has to be big?" (or something like that, no thanks to you Mr. Google!); perhaps Aliens or rather their NANO sized machine emissaries reached Earth a long long time ago (in keeping with the Fermi Paradox) and have basically infested the entire solar system, waiting...
Now as we start dabbling with nano-technologies and begin to have the capability of actually seeing them with our new atomic-force microscopes, they have to make a decision. Do they allow themselves to be discovered? I assume they could either do this passively like letting us see some of their machinery scuttle about amongst the atoms or they might as well come out and say "We're Here!". (Kinda like "Horton hears a Who")
Or, will they 1) leave the planet and keep withdrawing just beyond the range of our increasingly sophisticated probes? 2) maybe they will actively try to remain hidden, should be easy (for awhile) to cause subtle "problems" in our equipment from finding them. Experiments will mysteriously (or not depending on how clever they are) not work and our own attempts to create nano-machines will forever be thwarted.
Or maybe they'll decide, time's up, this species is not worth keeping; let's clean the planet and start over with another (bears?).
One way or another maybe we'll find out soon!
I'm sure that's what the Spanish thought in 1492 too.
Are you kidding me? They were looking for a better trade route to India, to avoid sailing all around Africa.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso