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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
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
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.
50 years out of 13.75 ±0.17 billion years? People need to study orders of magnitude before they get on SETI's case about not finding anything exciting. As with most scientific institutions of our day, the general populace/government's don't seem to care unless they see whizbangpops REAL-SOON-NOW.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Looks like ET's spam filter is working just fine ;)
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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.
I just knew you would say that, you dick.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
They're using subspace communications, or ansible, or ultrawave.
or semaphore...
"I'm an old-fashioned type of guy. I worship the Sun and Moon as gods. And fear them."
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.
We generally view the Stone Age tribes still lingering in the world as worthy of monitoring from a distance. Perhaps we occasionally intervening with some sort of sustenance or relief if it won't really mess them up, but all in all, we leave them alone rather than turn their world upside down.
With that in mind, how would a civilization sufficiently advanced to travel here from Alpha Centauri view our civilization?
"Mostly harmless."
"We'll give them a little longer. When they manage to visit the rest of the neighborhood - maybe when they're able to travel to another planet in their little solar system - we'll say hello. As long as we use short words and simple sentences, we might be able to help them understand speed-of-light travel."
"Okay. But if they start shooting those cute little firecrackers at us, I'm throwing a marble [read: black hole] into the middle of their little planet."
I'm too lazy to look up the links, or the names of the projects, but I understand within the next few years focus is being placed on locating earth like planets (close to our same size, orbiting a similar star at roughly the same distance we are ours, etc.). I just assumed when I read about this the first time that SETI would be very interested and excited to be given locations of planets that actually have a decent chance of supporting life (as we know it) rather than just randomly focusing on a particular area. This should be exciting times for SETI and their followers but I'm surprised there isn't any mention of it in the interview.
I hope SETI is going to be all over this as locations of earth like planets are announced and that that is what Paul Davies means by "time to re-think and expand the search for ET"!
The Search
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The problem's basically one of time. Think about this: the first radio transmission on Earth was in 1866. That's 144 years ago. That means that any alien civilization more than 144 light-years away from Earth can't see us in the radio bands. They'd have to be inside the bubble formed by our first radio transmissions to even have a chance of spotting us using the methods SETI does. And that bubble isn't a sphere either, it'll eventually have an inside surface as well as an outer one. We're getting more and more efficient, wasting less and less power beaming radio waves off in all directions. Eventually we'll be broadcasting so little that we won't be detectable at any reasonable distance. Anybody inside that inner surface won't be able to see us either. That'll leave probably a 250-300 light-year thick zone moving steadily outwards that any race looking for us will have to be in to see us by looking for radio transmissions. They won't have to just be looking for us, they'll have to be looking for us during the 3-century period when they're in that zone. Look too early or too late and we're invisible to them.
And the same applies to us: we can look all we want, but if we're not in the radio-transmission zone for another species they'll be invisible to us.
A significant number of the population doesn't even believe we landed on the moon. Should SETI ever detect artificial radio transmissions then the arguing, debates, and conspiracy theories that would abound are unfathomable!
We can't even agree that we landed on the moon. How are we going to convince the world when we discover an ET version of 'Star Trek'? ;)
In other news, the Untied Ants of the Cupboard have checked the entire kitchen for the most common types of pheromone trails for the last 50 seconds and found nothing. Clearly, reports of mutilation and abduction by "Humans" is just wild fantasy.
Unless the ETs blew the shit out of each other.
The closest star, Alpha Centauri is about four light years. It is likely that the nearest technological civilization is quite a lot farther than that.
He said that we were counting on detectable civilizations being lot more advanced than us, and so radiating a lot more power than we do. But I'm not so sure that that would help - possibly when a society gets more advanced, they develop more efficient communications technology and so radiate even less. An example is our own technology in which we now use undersea optical fiber rather than beaming so much power out at satellites.,P>
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Might have been Charles Pellegrino who said that intelligent life would not long stay on a planet if they had a better option such as living on space constructs. Space constructs might most likely be found near proto star systems where a true star never formed and never blew away all the clouds of organics and heavy elements. Nanotech harvesters, fusion power, communication by point to point laser. Or communication by something we have not even the power to conceive of yet. Only real signature would be heat and we do not have the space borne technology to do a significant survey for something as subtle as that. Fred Hoyle and Arthur C. Clarke also provided alternatives that would make intelligent alien life almost impossible to detect, even if they were actually here! The odds we are facing with our present technology resemble finding a needle in a haystack, where it could be hid in any one of all the haystacks on earth during harvest season but no way to tell which it might be.
> We are the First Ones.
No, actually, we're the Last Ones Standing.
See, humanity was the first race to develop time travel, in the late thirty-seventh century by your calendar, during the Third Great Intergalactic War. We knew that if we didn't act it was only a matter of time before one of the other races would develop or get ahold of the technology and use it against us. So we went ahead and sterilized the other races' homeworlds in the distant past, before they developed any significant technology. War over. We win.
Once the word of what we'd done started getting out to the civilians, there was hell to pay, of course. But as far as I'm concerned there's no question. I don't have to worry that my grandkids will be wiped out because a Xenthasi Accelerator generates a supernova and wipes out their home star system, or that some Rtulmrachan Overlord will drop a galaxy-sized black hole in their immediate neighborhood, or that the Uiola will tear down our whole local group and re-use the matter to build the Largest Entertainment Mall in the Universe. We won.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Our technology is too primitive, our cultures are backward. Our population is xenophobic and militaristic in varying degrees. One would have to be insane
to give cultures like that faster than light travel or even travel at near light speed. On its face it would seem we have nothing to offer these aliens, youd be wrong.
At first the idea of slaves but robots can do the job cheaper and faster.
Then the idea hit me...soldiers. If youre a wealthy interstellar civilization with enemies or just really bad pest problems...why not use humans,
they breed themselves, cheap to feed and lets humans see the galaxy. The aliens would not have to enslave humans, theyd just offer ultra
tech toys and cool ray guns and youd have plenty of volunteers.
Did anyone think that, maybe, most hypothetical alien signals might encrypted? I'm referring here not to signals deliberately sent, but to leakage, that sort of thing. There may be a relatively short window in which any civilization uses unencrypted radio. Then they move on to digital radio, encryption, etc., at much lower power, and the chance of finding them (in the speed of light window) is lost. The thing is that an encrypted data stream will look pretty close to random. So, your odds of picking it out of the noise are low.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Life produces things that other things don't produce. Oxygen in an atmosphere for instance.
Animals don't produce oxygen. Atmospheric composition is also not a good indicator; we can have 100 million people living on the Moon, under the surface, but it has no atmosphere. This is particularly relevant to intelligent life, which can create its own biosphere where necessary.
If you want to start talking about the life we don't know about and thus can't detect, go ahead. It's going to be either a very short conversation, or a very useless and made up one though.
It is most reasonable to expect an alien life to be alien to us. We will probably have machine intelligence (and life) within a century or two. Searching for lost keys only under the streetlight may be convenient but not very productive.
Have you even seen what octopuses have done to Japanese schoolgirls?
Yeah. 'Nuff said.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
outside our world means we have given up on our world. Just enjoy your life, as technology is accelerating and soon we will move too fast and become a Black Hole which, by the way, are other civilizations enjoying the orgasm of technology and ending. The universe does not allow systems so knowledgeable that they can traverse space. A society powerful enough to travel would know all answers to everything instantly and that is its death knell. Its the Fermi paradox sorta. So looking for life is a belief system that is irrelevant like trying to beat our own lives. Might as well enjoy life, try to save the coral reefs.......
> Of course if FTL is really impossible then the whole idea is pretty
> pointless, and remote civilizations will never contact each other.
You assume they are short lived and impatient.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
Our weapon of war is undoubtedly a beacon of intelligence. Sounds ironic, I know. But when you think about it, detonating vast amounts of plutonium releases a tremendous amount of energy all over the EM spectrum. It also gives off a unique signature of the kind that doesn't, or could *never* happen naturally. It really takes a civilization to make and concentrate plutonium into a bomb.
Forget TV or radio transmissions. The true universe of intelligent language is THE BOMB! It all started with Trinity on July 16, 1945.
Life is not for the lazy.
Look how difficult it was to get here in the first place. We are the First Ones.
I realize Slashdot loves the ET thing, but who modding the parent as a troll? Really? For suggesting we're alone and tosssing in a sci-fi cliche?
Beyond that, I don't even think it's a ridiculous suggestion on the merits. Life itself seems to have risen quickly, but it did take life a long time for any intelligence to appear on Earth--billions of years with life, but no technology and no intelligence. That certainly suggests it's not inevitable. It might really be a one in a billion fluke--we don't know.
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!
So on one hand you have a civilisation with scientists trying to find out about their world by smashing things and watching closely. They use their discoveries to invent lots of things: electricity, medicine, computers, space ships etc, and eventually colonise the galaxy and become the intelligent life that we're looking for.
On the other hand you have a civilisation that didn't experiment because they might break something. They never invented space-faring rockets because they were scared they would crash into the dome of the sky and break it. They did invent electricity but it was never widely popular because people knew it would only be a matter of time before everyone got electrocuted. And they never invented computers because they weren't bloody stupid and they had better things to do with their time. And they never tried building an LHC which was a shame because it meant they never discovered how to make the faster-than-light anti-gravity propulsatron drive they needed to to escape the planet when the asteroid hit.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
Perhaps their technology is so advanced, they we can't see them. Perhaps they have figured out all the physics mysteries we haven't figured out yet, and those physics allow mechanisms for communication that we cannot comprehend yet. Perhaps aliens were here in the past and left.
There are so many possibilities...ruling out the existence of alien intelligent life because we only have searched for 50 years and found nothing it's shortsighted at best.