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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.
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.
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?
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.