Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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)
Government spin? That's the primary purpose for which we should be looking.
Where does this idea of the peaceful alien come from? There has never been mutual cooperation between civilizations or species competing for the same resources. Among civilizations, it has always resulted in destruction or subjugation of the less technologically advanced civilization. We need to be keeping our ears open and our mouths shut.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?