Study: Earthlings Not Ready For Alien Encounters, Yet 453
astroengine (1577233) writes "The people of planet Earth would be wise to raise their cosmic consciousness prior to contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, a new study shows. 'The scientific community now accepts to some degree that this contact may occur in the next 50 to 100 years,' said Gabriel De la Torre, a clinical neuropsychologist and human factors specialist at the University of Cádiz in Spain. 'Consequently, we are becoming more concerned about this possibility and its aftermath Certainly the topic of contact with extraterrestrial civilizations raises a number of questions that are not easy to answer. We estimate that this type of event will have not only a social effect, but also on both consciousness and biology as well.' Although we may not have the necessary social skill set to deal with an encounter of the third kind, scientists or astronauts might make the best candidates for the first alien conversation."
Re:next 50 to 100 years? (Score:4, Informative)
The main problem is we know other lifeforms evolved on this planet before us, and we're not the oldest planetary system out there. Unless there is an absurd statistical imbalance in the formation of actual Earth-like planets - which survey data suggests is very unlikely - then the conditions were ripe for complex multi-cellular life to arise for billions of years prior to humans coming on the scene.
Re:What SETI can pick up (Score:3, Informative)
SETI would not be able to pick up our communication from 1ly. so..
http://www.satsig.net/seticalc... [satsig.net]
http://stason.org/TULARC/scien... [stason.org]
It should be apparent then from these results that the detection of AM
radio, FM radio, or TV pictures much beyond the orbit of Pluto will be
extremely difficult even for an Arecibo-like 305 meter diameter radio
telescope! Even a 3000 meter diameter radio telescope could not
detect the "I Love Lucy" TV show (re-runs) at a distance of 0.01
Light-Years!
It is only the narrowband high intensity emissions from Earth
(narrowband radar generally) that will be detectable at significant
ranges (greater than 1 LY). Perhaps they'll show up very much like
the narrowband, short duration, and non-repeating, signals observed by
our SETI telescopes. Perhaps we should document all these
"non-repeating" detections very carefully to see if any long term
spatial detection patterns show up.
but who knows, maybe others are trying to send signals through their big horns too,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... [wikipedia.org]
Re:next 50 to 100 years? (Score:3, Informative)
The Universe is NOT infinite. It is unimaginably, astronomically ginormous, but decidedly finite. If it was infinite, the Big Bang theory couldn't work.
That is not correct. The preponderance of data are consistent with an infinite flat universe and there is nothing about an infinite flat universe that is inconsistent with big bang cosmology.
See, for example:
http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/unive... [nasa.gov]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U... [wikipedia.org]