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Explaining SETI 100

Posted by Hemos from the book-promos-are-ok dept.
Lisa wrote to us about an interview with Brian McConnell, the author of a new SETI book, who talks about how the search has touched many different scientific disciplines, and has spawned improvements in astronomy, computing, and wireless communications.
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Explaing SETI More

Explaing SETI

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  • Famous Calvin and Hobbes quote: (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The best evidence for extraterrestial intelligence is that none of it has tried to contact us.
  • :If aliens wanted to talk, I think they would have done. Obviously they still consider us to be too primitive

    We aliens from fr5xg27hYarrhtzzz.
    We send messages by post account anonymous coward on slashdot interspace message port.
    Nobody replys to us.
    Perhaps humans think we be inferior life form.

    Our friends from 31337 system have same problem.

  • Re:"Ancient Astronauts" (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Surely the question should be the other way around - the ancient Egyptians had scads of spare labour and piling up a big heap o' stones is about the easiest way to do monumental architecture. So why did it take them hundreds of years to develop the techniques and organisation that resulted in the Gizan pyramids? My theory is that Evil Extraterrestrial Oppressors (ETOs) were kidnapping anyone showing signs of inventiveness and independant thought. Only after the ETOs were defeated by the Benign Extraterrestrial Resistance (BET) were humans able to emerge from the shadows of their oppressors and demonstrate their true rock piling capabilities. The reason there is absolutly no evidence in the archaeological record for the existance of either the ETOs or BETs is because both sides used their Advanced Alien Technology (AAT) to build Stealthed Black Chariots (SBC) for their war. I found a fragment of one of these SBCs during a recent visit to Egypt, but I put it down in my bedroom and its stealth technology is so advanced (even now after thousands of years) that I can't find it again. Can I have my royalty cheque now please? Luke
  • Heh, if it eats, procreates, and maybe eventually dies, it counts as life in my book. I think people set their sights too high on what constitutes "life." Even a bacteria is the result of millions of years of change.

    Also, about the changing of the conditions: you have to remember that we are talking about an entire planet here, over millions of years. As long as the conditions aren't overly esoteric, it is a good bet they existed somewhere on the planet sometime in the past. If it's too hot in an area, let the continent move farther north, or let an earthquake expose some minerals not normally found on the Earth's surface, or have the area form on the top of a mountain with lower pressure, or the bottom of the ocean under great pressure.

    From what I can tell, the sience was there all along, everybody just failed to notice it.

    Of course this is all IMHO.

    Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
  • Great point. So what if it takes 100 years to answer them. A lot of the research that hubble is doing is looking at light that left galaxies man more years ago than that. Look at a hubble deep field shot - most of that light left before the Earth was even here. Yet we still learn things.

    What if someone 100 light years was to pick up a transmission that left earth 100 years ago? What would it be...not "First Post", but probably some very weak radio program - if even that (though I feel bad for them when Erkel gets there).

    Besides if we do find a signal, it gives us a target to go visit when we do get to interstellar travel.
  • You might like to read my review of McConnell's book Beyond Contact [dannyreviews.com].

    Danny.

  • Re:The aliens have left the phones off the hook (Score:5)

    by paul.dunne ( 5922 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2001 @03:32AM (#286623)
    It's Erich von Däniken here on /.! Cool! Come on, tell me you're joking. I find it hard to believe that anyone still takes this stuff seriously. This "chariot of the Gods" stuff has been debunked time and time again. Do-it-yourself debunking is easy (hint: apply logic); but if you can't be bothered, here are some links:

  • You can't justify SETI by its technological spinoffs; it's like justifying the entire US space programme by Teflon(r) or the whole of Particle Physics by the WWW.

    In all these cases it is likely that the same amount of money invested in more directed research would have produced more and better tangible results (in the short term, anyway..).

    In my opinion, pure scientific research should be justified only on its own merits. (And, incidentally, I think that SETI is a complete waste of money and clock cycles - spend the money on building warp drives, and your CPU time on "curing cancer". :-) )

  • Of course, that $50-an-hour valuation is only valid if you *do* work during the time that Teflon saves you - if you're anything like me, that's unlikely... :-)
  • Yup, that's the kind of poor justifaction for SETI that I'm talking about. :-)
  • I liked Sagan's (only intentional) sci-fi novel on SETI called "Contact". The book is better than the Jodi Foster movie based on it.. The first part of the book gives a reasonable scenario of how SETI happens. The latter part of the book drifts into scientific and philosphical speculation, tan may turn some people off.
  • This may sound like a unusual idea, but came up at a UC Boulder session(*) on science funding last Friday. A prominent SETI researcher was on the discussion panel and contrasting how his field was funded compared to more traditional hot fields like genomics and computer science. But then the half-joking question came up as to why doesn't a SETI organization float stock to fund research? However, the SETI researcher replied that people have seriously considered that. He said "imagine the financial worth of a discovery, especially if some advanced alien technology was communicated". Though the chance of success is very speculative, a SETI break-through stock play could make the InterNet stock bubble seem mild.

    (*)The University of Colorado holds the week-long World Affairs Symposium each spring in Boulder. It assembles a couple hundred scientists, artists, policy makers and philosophers into 200 publicly open dicussion panels and workshops over the week.

  • SETI as "open source" science (Score:3)

    by peter303 ( 12292 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2001 @04:36AM (#286629)
    Astronomy has a long, rich history of important contributions by amateurs (i.e. people who aren't paid salaries for this work). And SETI may be the most distinctive and grand project in this line.
    SETI has been an orphan of official goverment research funding. Investigators would cop a few hours here and there on radio telescopes. It finally garnered a few tenths of a percent of the NASA budget at one time, but was perodically the butt of "mad-science" jokes in Congress and finally terminated. However, it is as strong as ever from private individual funding, typically from computer entrepenuers such as Hewlitt and Paul Allen. University chip R&D project prototype new chip designs for SETI's insatiable signal processing needs.
    SETI has also spawned the worlds largest hyper-computer and public-donated computing resource. At last count there about 2.4 million SETI@home screen savers out there, diligently searching for spectral peaks in small chunks of radio recordings.
  • There is a lot of evidence in The Bible that suggest that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by beings with advanced technology.

    No, what's in the bible is stories which were handed down as oral tradition for centuries before being written down. That's hardly evidence. Now the discovery of a layer of radioactive dust under the present-day location of Sodom and Gomorrah, or a crater at the center of the site might be evidence, but just being in the Bible doesn't make it evidence.

  • The difference is that the blank tape could have been easily caused by aliens, but any hidden message in the digits of pi could only have been placed there by God or at least something with very powerful control over our universe. This really was the whole point of the book, although I admit it would be a little harder to get across to the average movie-goer. Sometimes the big thoughts are hard to explain, I guess.

  • motto: "Gne's Not English"

  • An excellent book is "Captured by Aliens" by Joel Achenbach. He covers both the scientific search for extraterrestrial life, and also a rational approach to the phenomenon of alleged alien encounters. He has excellent informative and funny style. Its a great read !!!

  • My favorite bit of the interview: (Score:3)

    by Shoeboy ( 16224 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2001 @03:08AM (#286634) Homepage
    oreilly.com: What could we learn from another civilization?

    McConnell: One of the things I discuss in my book is how it is easier to undress and petrify hot young actresses than most people imagine. All that is required is a scientifically proven magical petrification ray and a giant aibo. But what we cannot do is undress and petrify hot young daughters of famous open source programmers. If there is another technological civilization nearby, it will be possible to communicate using equations, images, and algorithms. And one of the things we'd like them to communicate is a method for creating a naked and petrified Heidi Wall. I discuss this at length in my book.

    I don't know about any of you, but that's a book I'm going to have to purchase. Also, I'm going to start donating my cycles to SETI today.

    --Shoeboy

  • Re:Help me understand... (Score:5)

    by SnowDog_2112 ( 23900 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2001 @03:37AM (#286635) Homepage
    There isn't an easy answer here. In a society where the taxpayer decides what the taxes pay for, you have no guarantee that the taxes are going to fund things like "feed the hungry."

    As a society, we must spend our money on many different issues, trying to address many different problems. You rely on the taxpayers to bicker it out amongst each other (directly or through their representatives) how to spend the money, and how much they're willing to pay.

    Personally, I think the "feed the hungry" banner is flown a little too often (yikes, here come the flames). Many countries are hit by famine not because they don't have enough food, but because of wars, because of corrupt politicians, whatever. It doesn't do any good to send a barge of food to a third-world country if the dictator siezes it upon arrival and shares it with his supporters.

    Yes, even the so-called wealthy nations have hungry people living in poverty. But at some level, that's not my fault, and I shouldn't have money taken away from me to fund their food. Before you talk to me about being out of touch, I lived off state-provided money for about 7 years of my childhood. I know what it's like to get foodstamps and government cheese. I also know what it's like to pull yourself out of that gutter, and I know plenty of people who never did. We need a system that feeds those that really need it, without making it so easy for people to milk the system that they stop trying to get off of it. That's a delicate balance, and a problem that won't go away just by throwing money at it.

    Why dedicate any money to funding the arts? Why dedicate any money to researching cures for AIDS (after all, it's fairly easy to avoid catching the disease, isn't it [tongue in cheek here, folks])? Why go to the moon?

    Millions of reasons. Here's one for you. Because if we hadn't gone to the moon, if we weren't building rockets and space stations, what would I have had to dream about as a kid? What would have inspired me to learn enough math and get good enough at it to get scholarships to college?

    We need money to keep people alive, yes. But we also need to keep their dreams alive. IF (and this is a huge IF)...IF we ever find anything out there, it will be the biggest thing to happen to our society EVER. Considering how cheap it is to continue this research, we would be terribly remiss in stopping it.

  • There is something I never understood about SETI. Suppose there were the same anthenaes and systems used by SETI in Alpha Centauri, used by another civilization.

    Would they be able to receive our own signals (TV, Radio and such) and interpret them as an inteligent signal comming from our solar system? Would they think this could be some sort of interference instead? What do our waves have that makes them an "inteligent" form of transmission?

    Thanks and no flames, please.
  • Unfortunately SETI@home and SETI-like searches in general are typically very tight-lipped about their actual capabilities. Somewhere on SETI@home's pages I recall reading that with their latest "science additions" (More complex calculations in the client) they're now able to distinquish the equivalent of a cellular phone used on the surface of Mars. Whether this would actually be noticed and flagged as an intelligent signal is anybodys guess, though: By now SETI@home has "distinquished" over three hundred million events of interest.

    SETI@home offers some other statistics asked after here. Their FAQ [berkeley.edu] circles the issue a bit, but finally admits in essence that SETI@home is unable to detect Earth-level technology even on the closest stars. (And there's no guarantee beyond-Earth civilizations still use radio-frequencies - in fact odds are against it). Their latest "Science Newsletter" [berkeley.edu] just happens to discuss the separation of intelligent signals from noise as well, but leaves pretty hazy impression.

    Other wisdom gleamed from the SETI@home web-site includes the notion that the projects budget so-far has been $500.000, and they're capable of detecting signals tenth of the strength of best other SETI projects - which scan wider frequencies and typically concentrate on the likely locations, though.

  • SETI odds (Score:2)

    by JJ ( 29711 )
    There are two sets of odds which must be considered when calculating the probability of SETI working. First, the chance of life developing elsewhere. Second, the chance of elsewhere developed life becoming intelligent. The first can be relatively common (or more specifically, only rare, not extremely rare) but the second be extremely rare and SETI still won't work. And this looks like the case.
    Personally, I'm all for SETI. As long as it's zero success rate proscribes it's receiving massive funding. I know that when scientists have to scrounge, have to be imaginitive, they are often doing their best work. Should Aricebo be used for SETI? Occasionaly, but there is plenty of other science to do as well.
  • While Sagan's book is really good about the SETI side of things, I thought it really, really came up short on other issues. Sagan helped me get into his alma mater, but we squared off on the roles of both capitalism and religion. He basically thought they had little or none in the modern world (or at least the modern mind.) These deep beliefs pervaded both his book and the movie. Then again, I think he would have regarded the movie as a decent adaption of the better book.
  • Now, I have to disagree with you on the pi issue, or lack thereof. I thought the dialog between the bureaucrats about how long the blank tape lasts was a suitable replacement and a lot less technical for the average movie-goer.
    Sagan's normal arguements on faith were two pronged a) disprove an interventionist god, b) apply the Principle of Parsimony (Occam's Razor) to refute the need for God. I thought the movie paralleled this M.O.
  • This factor would hold if the distribution of the elements in the galaxy were uniform. With different molecular weights, gravity and centripetal force will guarentee that any circular, rotating galaxy will have a band, a certain distance from the center where the concentration of the heavier elements is appropriate for life. Most of the rest of the galaxy is a lifeless void.
  • I guarantee that in the next 1000-5000 years, we will launch multi-generational space ships to colonize other planets.

    The main gap in the argument is the assumption that the travelers do, in fact, colonize other planets. Given the technology to maintain a self-contained habitat for generations, building a few more out of a few stray asteroids is more efficient, and closer to the lifestyle to which the travelers have become accustomed, than colonizing a planet.
    /.

  • The knowledge of the star Sirius does not predate the 20th century (for the Dogon). They incorporated some things Western visitors told them into their beliefs. The source of the Dogon knowledge is perfectly prosaic.
  • Gaaah! The instrument has not been invented that can measure how much I disagree with that. The movie failed *miserably* in the final few moments, where the book championed and drove home the exact philosophical conclusion. (spoiler alert if you have not read the book)


    The underlying theme of the whole book is Faith (with a capital F), particularly faith in religion. How do you prove the existence of God to a scientist? Ellie is unable to accept the existence of God since she is a scientist and there is no "proof" (remember the pendulum experiment where she challenges her friend to step a bit closer to the huge swinging pendulum to see if his God would protect him?). Then she returns from her voyage and is ironically unable to provide any proof of their existence and everyone will just have to accept her testimony on "faith". Ellie continued to search for "signals" and ultimately found "proof" in the immutable fabric of the universe...in the digits of pi she ultimately finds another signal to decode, but this is a signal from God, not from other beings.

    The signal in Pi was left out of the movie completely and totally ruined it for me. YMMV of course.


    SuperID
    Free Database Hosting [freesql.org]

  • There is another factor which consistently is overlooked when talking about the famous "Drake Equation" (the equation first proposed to define the total possible number of civilizations in the galaxy), and that is space-time.

    Our galaxy is 100,000 light years (l.y.) across. Even if there are several million potential civilizations in this galaxy (according to Drake), once you randomly distribute them across 100,000 l.y. of space and some ten to fifteen billion years of time, you end up with a few dozen existing "at the same time" but separated by hideously immense distances. The chances of any two being close enough to communicate via radio are utterly slim.

    And that about wraps it up. All your UFOs are belong to Hollywood.

  • The jumpstart idea is definitely attractive. Sometimes I wonder-- how we got up off our knuckles so quick and started building the Pyramids?
  • Don't stop with just 2 sets of odds! As if that's all there were... How about this: the alien race is so different from us that it does not consider the electromagnetic spectrum worth messing with. Perhaps their sense of time is so different that that we live and die in between their bites of breakfast. Perhaps they communicate with chemicals and send up a different shroud in their atmosphere to announce the daily news. Our search is limited by the imagination that we have to put toward the task. Let's give our aliens the benefit of truly being alien, as in "strange to us." We don't do ourselves any favors by thinking they will be anything like us. As humans, we suffer the disadvantage of always thinking like humans. Most of our aliens in our fiction have a had convenient arrangement that somehow allowed us to communicate. Either that or they just try to destroy us. If I were an alien, I would avoid this planet like the plague. And keep checking that electro-magnetic dampener that surrounds this solar system. Heh. "maybe they'll give up, the silly asses..."
  • What you say here is so true-- shortages in the world-- food, fuel, medecine, water, information-- are politically organized. Access to resources, particularly those that are vital to life have been used to manipulate the populace time and again by just about every political unit out there. Control of the flow of resources is the outward sign of some group flexing their political muscle. It is an effective tool to uproot populace and move them to new area, destroying their identity in the process. Buckminister Fuller claimed that we have the technology to provide for all the world to live in comfort. Why don't we utilize it? Because exercise of power is the most hoarded resource of all.
    But that's not why SETI is a futile waste of time. SETI is futile because we are deliberately ignorant beings. Hell, my president can't even communicate with me. If I can't figure out what he has to say, how can I communicate with someone who probably has a completely different sense array? Even if searching for ETs is futile, the process is probably good for us. As the guy who sent himself up 16,000 feet in a lawnchair with 42 weather balloons said, "A man can't just sit around."
  • Dogs flew Spaceships!

    The Aztecs invented the vacation!

    Our forefathers took drugs!

    Men and women are the same sex!

    Your brain is not the boss!

    Yes, Everything You Know Is Wrong!

    -Firesign Theater, "Everything You Know Is Wrong!"
  • Well, perhaps we're looking in the right place, but we just don't know what we've found. Take the sugar [spacescience.com] that was found in a cloud of gas near the center of our Milky Way. If that isn't a calling card for carbon-based life, I don't know what is. Since we search for electro-magnetic signals we make assumptions that other life will be of a similar tech than us. We are really a fledgling race in our capacity to study the heavens constantly being startled by the phenomena we find in space. It is still too early for us to identify when something is not standard out there. That supernova might just be a distress beacon.

    An excellent novel (if a wee bit cycical) dealing with some of the problems of our search for sentient life is His Master's Voice [std.com] by Stanislaw Lem. He proposes the problem of how to interpret a purposeful signal once we find it. The scientists in the book are attempting to decipher a neutrino stream that they accidently detect coming to us in a repeating pattern for a fixed amount of time. The answers are not entirely satisfying. Do we really have the capacity to think outside our little box?
  • Firesign Theatre rules! My family has actually long been friends with the quartet, and I'm always glad to see references to them and their work :)

    http://matt.waggoner.com/ (see how many Firesign references you can find)
  • Don't let's forget The Skeptic's Dictionary [skepdic.com], which contains hundreds of entries on everything from the Bermuda Triangle to Amway, Zombies, Ghosts, UFOs, pyramid power, etc. One of the best skeptical sites on the web.

  • I believe the big thing thats standing in SETIs way is that the signal to noise ratio of transmissions from other planets (or even those we are sending out) is so low that their signals can't be separated from normal stellar noise at the interstellar distances we are talking about.

    This is not an original thought though, does anyone have a good link?

  • The only use for long straight lines is for runways? I'm driven on some really long straight roads before, and something tels me i wasn't on an airport runway.
    =\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\= \=\=\=\=\

  • The whole SETI project thus far has had to assume two things.

    1. There are some ETs out there putting out a powerful "Hey we are here!" beacon or message, more powerful than anything Earth has ever broadcasted.
    2. This signal is pointed directly at earth at least occasionally.

    We have not looked for a signal less powerful or direct than this, because it would be expensive and difficult. SETI is having to travel the cheap and easy path.

    I think SETI should be looking at the nearer stars, picking up stuff that sounds like white noise, and crunching real hard, looking for sync patterns and redundancy.

    Its all white noise... Spread-spectrum is great for communication between two parties who already know each other is there, and know what form the communcation will be in, but it is not useful for signalling.

    The real quandry in SETI is this:

    On Earth, we have decided that it is cheaper and easier to look for signals from alien civilizations that it is to send out our own beacon. What if everyone else makes the same decision? The sky may be full of ears, but no mouths!

  • you might want to check out "rare earth" which is excellent book on topic of possibility of intelligent and non-intelligent extraterrestrial life.
  • (disclaimer, I'm athiest/agnostict) I agree!! Felt disapointed that the "Pi part" wasn't in the movie. This is the one book that I've read that really pointed out to me how powerful God is/would be.

    The builder of the universe, space and time... wow :)

    This is why organised religions piss me off; peace, love and joy, happy singing and dancing? bah, more like Master Engineer :)

  • Much SETI effort has been aimed at looking for "carriers", signals that contain narrowband sine waves. Carriers are obsolete technology. They're basically the dumbest way to sync up the transmitter and receiver. AM radio and broadcast TV are both about 80% carrier, which is horribly inefficient. You couldn't get an FCC license today for a new transmission system that had most of its energy in a carrier. And both of those systems are being replaced by digital systems that don't use a dominant carrier. It's unreasonable to expect a civilization that does interstellar transmission to be stilll using carriers. But the SETI crowd is still mostly looking for carriers, unsuccessfully.

    More modern systems with weak or no carriers, like spread-spectrum systems, devote only a few percent of their signal energy to synchronization information. So they're far more energy-efficient. But they look like noise unless you know what you're looking for. (This is why modern modems sound like a white-noise hiss. Early modems, up to 300 baud, had audible audio tones. The same thing is true of radio modulation.) That's a problem. Finding a spread-spectrum signal when you know nothing about the transmission system is very tough.

    But it's not impossible. Any transmission system must have some fraction of its energy, even if it is quite small, devoted to synchronization. And to get through noise, there has to be some redundancy. That's what to look for.

    I think SETI should be looking at the nearer stars, picking up stuff that sounds like white noise, and crunching real hard, looking for sync patterns and redundancy.

  • We have not looked for a signal less powerful or direct than this, because it would be expensive and difficult.

    The drunk was looking at the ground near a street light. "What are you looking for?", a passerby asked. "I dropped my wallet down the street from here"? "So why aren't you looking down there?" "The light's better here."

    What's wrong with this picture?

    SETI has already eliminated the possibility that anybody anywhere near (tens of light years) is aiming a continuous carrier at us. We have to start looking for the hard stuff.

    Supposedly, Earth's own RF output could be detected for a few light years. We need to be looking for similar situations.

  • Two possibilities

    1) We're the first form of life an alien race has ever found, and they are interested in studying us; alien antropologists. And want to remain hidden away perhaps for centuries.

    2) They know more about the universe than us and are able to travel at near or greater than the speed of light. Warp drive, subspace, jumpgates, instant transmission, transporters, something undiscovered by us as of today.
  • ExplainG is the gnu version of explain.

    Didn't you know we're working towards opensourcing the English language?

    -f

  • Re:Help me understand... (Score:3)

    by friscolr ( 124774 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2001 @03:39AM (#286662) Homepage
    Read the article. SETI doesn't get government funding.

    Also, Teflon saves me about 15 minutes a day in ease of cleaning my dishes. Figure, my time is worth $50/hour, so that's $4562.5/year, or (considering 40 working years) $182500/lifetime. If I worked during the time that Teflon saves me, and i invested all the money when i make it, and then at the end of my life i donated that money to charity, then i would be donating a few million dollars. Multiply that by the percent of people who use teflon dishes, and you have a good donation.

    -f

  • The '70's Asimov book was Extraterrestrial Civilizations.

    I wore that copy out in my elementary school library.
  • I totally agree. I read Daniken when I was a little kid. Entertaining hogwash.

    However...

    The one thing that still intrigues me is the Dogon people of Cameroon (?) Gabon (?) Totally Other Place In Africa who Know Too Much about Sirius. Ever heard of them? I am just curious if any of these sites have a cultuaral explanation for Dogon astronomy: observation...or simple coincidence? Not arguing...just curious. Gracias.
  • Hey thanks, asshole.
    God forbid anyone render any form of constructive encouragement or critcism.
  • You might say "UFOs" but then were is their base?

    Don't you mean where are there base?
  • Noticed the article had a pic of the VLA [nrao.edu] up at the top. It looks cool and all, but it's not used for SETI projects, is it? I was there a couple of weeks ago, did the full tour, and there was nothing about SETI, just traditional radio astronomy... so what gives?

    It's very cool place to visit, BTW. I would say something like "visit it if you're in the area", but it's the ONLY thing the area - if you're actually in the area, chances are you're already going there. :-)

    --

  • The SETI project has made some big assumptions. A mistake in any of these assumptions may result in failure of the entire project. To summarize:

    1. SETI has searched almost exclusively in the frequency channel around 1.42 gigahertz, which corresponds to the emission line of hydrogen, the most common element in the universe. The idea is that if extraterrestrials had to pick some frequency to attract our attention, this would be a natural choice.
    ISSUE: Although this may be a reasonable assumption it is not necessarily true. Perhaps the extraterrestrials would chose another frequency for reasons not know to us. In addition, the shift in frequency caused by the expansion of the Universe rules out the possibility of receiving signals from other Galaxies.

    2. SETI assumes that intelligent civilizations would have the power to send wide-beam signals into space.
    ISSUE: The further a message has to travel, the more power it requires. In addition the wider the beam is, the more energy is required to send it at the same relative power. These power requirements are orders of magnitude greater than we are capable of and it does not necessarily follow that other civilizations would be capable of producing such power.

    3. SETI assumes that other civilizations would send continuous messages into space.
    ISSUE: To date, Earth has only sent out a limited number of messages. These were tightly beamed messages to specific stars in the Galaxy. Earth lacks the power to send wide-beam messages. It is a big assumption to think that other intelligent life would behave differently than we do. Perhaps they spend most of their time listening as well.

    4. SETI assumes that intelligent civilizations are long lived.
    ISSUE: The reason the night skies are not completely filled with stars is that stars have limited lifetimes. During the 5 billion years since the formation of earth, we've had the capability of sending narrow beam signals to other stars for perhaps 50 or so years. Based on our consumption of natural resources, it remains to be seen if we will continue to have this capability for thousands of years.

    My main issue is that these assumptions are glossed over. SETI needs to be forthcoming about its assumptions and how they may effect the probability of success. They need to do this so that in 10 years if donations start drying up, they'll have some credibility and be able to explain the lack of results in terms of their assumptions.

  • we haven't filled the Galaxy yet and there's no reason to assume that other life forms like us would necessarily be significantly more advanced than we are.

    You're thinking on too small a time scale. Remember, the galaxy is about 12 billion years old. We are about 2-300,000 years old. We've only had technology for about 4-10,000 years, advanced technology only a few hundred, and space travel for 40 years. That's nothing! The odds of two species evolving at precisely the same time is vanishingly small, given the time scale.

    I guarantee that in the next 1000-5000 years, we will launch multi-generational space ships to colonize other planets. Then those people will colonize others, and so on, geometrically. In only a few million years, humans will populate the entire galaxy, even if we only have sublight travel!

    Let's say it take an average of 2 million years for a species like us to fill the galaxy. The galaxy is 6000 times older than that! If species like us are relatively common, it should have happened by now. Keep in mind that once a planet is filled with a particular species, it's unlikely than any other species would ever evolve on that planet. Once the galaxy is full, that's it.

    The reason I specified a galaxy rather than the universe is that the distances between galaxies are so immense, that it's unlikely that we would ever populate other galaxes at sub-light speeds. It's just too long of a trip, even for the most intrepid explorers.


    --

  • That's a reasonable point, but it still only holds off the inevitable. What would make people want to colonize another world, other than adventure? Probably for more room, because of overpopulation. How long will it take for the solar system to become crowded enough for people to want a whole new world.

    Also, colonizing an asteroid is not the same as living on a whole new world. It's possible we might get the technology to create whole new planets out of stray matter (or blasting off a chunk of jupiter or something), but I have a feeling it will be a lot easier to move to other planets.

    I think there are always going to be those people who just want to just create a whole new world. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them are religious cults wanting to start a whole new civilization. That's how the pilgrims got started!

    But still the point remains: if intelligent life were common, then it seems likely that one would have arisin in 12 billion years that had a trait that they like to travel and populate other places.


    --

  • Ultimately I think there are just so many scenarios that allow for intelligent life to exist in our galaxy without our having discovered them as of yet.

    True, but the point is that it only takes 1 space travelling civilization with an expansion desire to dominate the galaxy. If self-aware intelligent life is relatively common, then it would be likely that we would see at least 1 in multiple billion years that meets that simple requirement. It seems unlikely that if the galaxy were teeming with intelligence that every single one of them would be "homebodies" or would have some show-stopping problem.


    --

  • What happens of only 1 in a billion ships survives radiation storms or from being coated in dark-matter dust or whatever para-scientific jibber jabber stuff may or may not be out there.

    Well, you can play "what if" games all day long. Given our current state of knowledge, we don't know of any reason why a species wouldn't propagate through interstellar space. Given the amount of time it takes to populate a galaxy, and the amount of time that we've had for it to happen, then you have to conclude that we've never had aliens able to do it.

    To tell you the truth, this just sort of backs up my gut feeling that self-aware life is hugely, insanely improbable. It just doesn't seem like it to us, because we obviously didn't sense the passage of time before we came along to think about the fact that we're here. I think there is probably quite a bit of "life" in the galaxy, but self-aware life is most-likely improbable.

    But who knows? Maybe the very first alien race populated the galaxy, decided to move to the black hole in the core, and then blasts any ships that try and move between solar systems so that overpopulation doesn't happen again.


    --

  • It's actually pretty easy to prove. The galaxy is what, 12 billion years old? Once a civilization creates space travel, it doesn't take that long (relatively speaking) to fill up the galaxy with life, even at sub-light speeds. I forget the exact amount of time, but the fill rate is geometric. X time to travel to the next star, X time to establish industry, and then send 10 more "seeds" to the next one. It only takes a few million years to fill the Galaxy.

    Since we're alone on Earth, we're alone in the galaxy.

    And is it all that surprising? I would imagine that lower forms of life might be relatively common, but I think it's probably likely that self-aware life is unbelievably unlikely. It only seems likely to us because it happened to us.


    --

  • Humans have the ability to fill our solar system with life, but we don't bother.

    Humans do not currently have that ability, but in any case, I'm talking galaxy, not solar system. There's not much all the expansion capability in the solar system, but there are (probably) going to be planets in other solar systems that are habitable. There is no question that humans will eventually (1000 years? 10,000 years?) will build multi-generational ships to colonize other solar systems, assuming we don't discover some way to go super-lightspeed.

    Why do you feel it must be that a race that can expand will expand?

    It doesn't matter what one particular race does or doesn't do. If intelligent life is common, then there should exist one that likes expansion. It only takes one.


    --

  • What if they don't WANT to be noticed.

    Who is "they"? Either self-aware life is common, or it isn't. Human's have existed for a very, very, very short period of time. If self-aware life is common, they we would have had one a long time ago that colonized the whole galaxy. Like I said before, it doesn't take that long compared to 12 billion years of history. Do the math, don't give me this fuzzy "I just know" stuff.

    and even we are on the verge of faster than light travel through gravity warping,

    We're not on the "verge" of jack. We don't even have any decent theories that say it's possible, much less practical, much less on the "verge".

    We are NOT alone, don't want to go into details, but we are definitely NOT alone, and haven't been for a very long time.

    You're thinking emotionally, not rationally. Again, do the math. Figure out how long it takes to fill the galaxy if you have a race that wants to travel, even at sub-light speeds. It's a blip in the history of the galaxy. It only takes one race.


    --

  • They could exist on planes or as forms of matter that we don't even imagine.

    So what? Sure it's possible, but the only form of life that we know is possible is our own. The point is that it only takes one race developing intelligence and space travel to fill the galaxy in a relatively short time. Since that hasn't happened, it must be the fact that life like ours is extremely unlikely.

    Sure, it might be the case that there are other forms of intelligence that are occur much more frequently, but don't tend to fill up the galaxy. Possible, but it doesn't seem very likely.


    --

  • how do you "Explaing" missing a typo like that?

    *shrug*

    YMMV
    E.

  • Seti Search issues (Score:3)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2001 @03:20AM (#286678) Journal
    What get's me is that there are so many possibilities to expalin why we haven't heard anything yet.

    heck, if they have anything like a trek subspace transmitter, radio would be obsolete. Obsolete as Napoleon's Semaphore system. A good place to look is the Dead Media Project, as discussed and linked in this slash article [slashdot.org]. Technologies go obsolete all of the time, so why not radio, tv, etc.

    Then there is the matter of interstellar politics. Let's face it, if the local area just had the equivalent of Attila the Hun go rampaging through, it might be a good idea if no body visited. and it would be understandable if no body was transmitting.

    And then again, maybe we *are* the first ones, at least for practical purposes, in our section of galaxy

    And so on. There are many possible scenarios.

    Check out the Vinny the Vampire [eplugz.com] comic strip

  • Your argument says nothing about the existance of aliens who aren't capable of interstellar travel. You have no proof that interstellar travel is viable. What happens of only 1 in a billion ships survives radiation storms or from being coated in dark-matter dust or whatever para-scientific jibber jabber stuff may or may not be out there.

    What's the selection ratio for sperm to reach egg?
    What makes spaceships more likely to reach their targets.

    I've got to admit I agree with your conclusion (no aliens), but I don't agree with how you got there.
    And I'm a mathematician, before you ask, so don't tell me to do the maths. I have plenty of other maths that I would use to dismiss the hypothesis.

    FP.
    --
  • Oh no! Someone else who's letting facts get in the way of fun.
    Let's hope a moderator graces you with something positive to cheer you up. How can you bear to live without the hope of speaking to little green men?

    FP.
    --

  • I never knew what SETI was, this book is a must read for everyone, even for the non-space inclined. My kudos to the author.
  • The chances of aliens showing up *just* when humans are starting to write things down is therefore pretty low.

    Different aliens could have been turning up every 5000 years or so without us realizing. Nobody would have written it down

    Or perhaps they werethe ones who kickstarted modern society. Alternatively, if aliens have been here all along, where are they now?

    Budget cuts? Change in scientific emphasis? Extinct? Cultural change caused them to adopt the Prime Directive? Lots of potential reasons.

    You might say "UFOs" but then were is their base? There are no anomalous items in nearby space and certainly nothing on Earth.

    They might have set up shop under the sea, oron some unremarkable asteroids. Admittedly they would have to be sure to keep radio noise very low to stop snooping. I think they just left.

  • There is a lot of evidence that aliens could already have visited the Earth. Just look at ancient culture's religious documents.

    All of them describe meetings with some sort of angel, or flying being. All of them talk about the chariots of the gods. The Nazca plains in Peru have long straight lines that could only have been used as a runway.

    If aliens wanted to talk, I think they would have done. Obviously they still consider us to be too primitive

  • While I agree that Von Daniken is a fanatic, Its wrong to consider everything he said to be false simply because he became a little over-enthusistic and made some mistakes. I agree that the pyramids could have been built without alien assistance, and although I have to question how the heads on Easter Island were created - especially because many of them have hats made from a totally different type of stone - I will speculate that it could have been acheived with the help of the entire island's population.

    But even if you can disprove most of the examples in the book, nobody has disproved all of them. There is a lot of evidence in The Bible that suggest that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by beings with advanced technology. South American religions also tell similar stories about their prophets being taken up into the air in their chariots, and being carried in the belly of a giant bird.

  • All the while, millions more of starving people will die while governments spend millions on everything but what's going on here on earth. I'm not a bleeding-heart-tree-hugger... but surely there's more merit to improving the living standards of those not in the western world - than to be sending another explorer to Mars?

    I hate this argument when it is used to counter any funding on any pure science. It is naive to beleive that spending any more money on the starving people is going to make much difference since most of the problem with the starving people of the world is POLITICAL and not a matter of funding. If the governments of the world cutinue to war with their people burn fields and bomb rail lines then their people will starve

    Of course science funding could help people more than spending directly on foods by coming up with things that help distribution of food like refrigiration did. Or maybe enhance the quality of the food they can grow like golden rice. Or we could just spend the millions of dollars to ship food that will be hijacked by some guerilla army and get no real benifit from it.

  • "if there are so many aliens out there, where are they?"

    That's an easy one. Assuming for the moment that there are aliens out there, they're posting to /. while their computers are frantically searching the universe for life...
  • Is SETI hogging all the best channels or wha ?
    Yoo hoo. Psst. Over here.
    'course they are.
    You aren't allowed on those channels, only the aliens are.
    No, no, no. I'm not trying to start an
    intergalactic war, but you biobags stole
    Itchy and Scratchy from us !

    That's right, we aliens content homesteaded the
    Lascaux caves that wonderful summer of 8000 B.C.
    All those wonderful bloody drawings are under
    galactic copyright protection.
    Were also looking for one of our runaway
    children, Lvis, have you seen him ?
    You earthings owe us alot of back royalties
    and our lawyers are converging on your
    position at the is very moment.
    And another thing kids, will you turn it down !
    You can here it half way across the galaxy

  • I found it interesting that this article is posted at O'Reilly & Associates web site. O'Reilly is making a big noise about peer-to-peer applications, of which SETI@Home is one of their primary examples (even though it seems more like client/server than P2P to me.) As far as spending money on SETI rather than feeding the hungry, etc., my take on it is that SETI research, like NASA, is notable not for what it is itself but for what spins off from it.
  • As in every SETI discussion, we already have several 'But it takes 100 years to get the reply, so this is waste of time' posts.

    I think the really big thing is not what the possibly existing ET have to say, but the mere knowledge that they do exist. Propably their reply is something like:

    'First Post!'

    'All your planet is belong to us'

    'Goat secx'

  • For the last 60 years we have been broadcasting TV signals. It's pretty obvious what they are. A bunch of scan lines side by side makes a picture. A picture is worth a thousand words. That's what I'd look for. Not equations or binary arithmetic.

  • Guess what - the [odds] are stacked against [life]

    Certainly against complex and intelligent life sending out radio signals in the correct time frame for us to receive them. We have an extraordinarily gentle planet that's given us a long time to get our cortexen convoluted, but we're never getting off of it. We'll always be the dominant species, but within the next couple of thousand years (tops) we'll be back to living a low tech sustainable agrarian lifestyle, not through tree hugger lobbying, but through bare necessity.

    The good news is that we won't even have to wait for the next planet killer rock. The next ice age or supervolcano will knock us back far enough that we'll never recover, what with having already raped all the easily accessible fossil and mineral resources.

    Of course, we could get off Earth and colonise other planets right now. It would take a New World Order and a diversion of all spare resources to building a fleet of colony ships and just punting them out there. OK, that's stupid and pointless and not economically justifiable, and the colonists would almost certainly be doomed. But there's a small, a tiny chance, and really, what's our alternative? The ISS? Don't make me laugh. I keep hearing that described as a "first step". I'm still waiting to hear what the second step is.

  • Signal to noise is the first thing that SETI people think about. Actually there are some pretty good ways of getting sufficient SNR, if you are looking for a beacon and not just trying to peek at local comm traffic. SETI comes in two flavors:


    1. Beacons

    Some search projects are set up to look for deliberately transmitted beacons, i.e. signals designed to be received by faraway alien SETI systems. The signals can be constructed to be different enough from the noise that even a modestly powered transmitter can be seen across interstellar distances. One such designed signal is a pure sinusoid. There are good reasons to believe that nature cannot make a very pure sinusoidal signal, while it is easy to do with a radio transmitter. One nice thing about looking for beacons is that you can assume that the aliens have done the right things to make the signal easy to receive, and they may very well be sending it with "primitive" technology like radio instead of their own advanced "Q-rays".

    2. Leakage radiation

    Some SETI projects are more geared to eavesdropping on the aliens' local communication. This is a much harder prospect since the local stuff is not beamed in our direction or designed for us to understand. Personally, I think that intelligent alien civilizations will send their own traffic efficiently and not waste power. The upshot of this is that efficiently encoded information looks just like noise and we would not be able to distinguish these signals from the natural background. I'm not a big fan of leakage radiatiion searches, but others disagree with me.

    The more technically minded out there might be able to get a little more insight from the reading the first chapter or so of my dissertation: http://seti.harvard.edu/grad/d-thes.html [harvard.edu].

    Darren

  • I knew I'd screw up the link. Here's the right one:

    http://seti.harvard.edu/grad/d_thes.html [harvard.edu]
  • We have just barely become a technological civilization; we are arguably the youngest one in the galaxy. Sending out signals and waiting for a reply would take millenia. We need to start out by listening first, which is what we're doing.

    Besides, do we really want to get a bad interstellar reputation by shooting our mouths off before we've even checked to see who's already talking? Darren
  • Start looking for terrestrial intelligence first...

    The original:
    http://totl.net/STI/

    An immiator (wizzier graphics!):
    http://www.wymsey.co.uk/sti/sti.htm

    THL.
    --
  • For example, from the interview (and this one is real, and not about young Miss Wall!)
    "
    Because the number of potential sites is so large (20 to 40 billion sun-like stars in our galaxy), this means the odds have to be stacked against the formation of life in a pretty big way for it not to develop elsewhere.
    "

    And?
    Guess what - they are stacked against it.

    When it comes to creating complex organic molecules by trying to recreate early atmospheric conditions, the scientists have done a fairly good job - and created dead stuff.
    By focussing on creating more living stuff they've done a fairly good job of creating self-sustaining complex-molecule-building reactions, but nothing that matches even the simplest virus for complexity (Tobacco Mosaic, for example).

    And that's from scientist that have had the ability to _direct_ their experiments ("let's increase the partial presure of Oxygen by 5%, and provide a transition metal surfaces for molecules to bind to catalytically." each new day. The dear suns and planets don't get that option. The planets can't slow down of they're too hot and need a farther orbit. They can't decide to melt their ice caps or condense their atmospheres to provide surface water.

    Sheesh - where has the _science_ gone?

    THL.


    --
  • "This argument always annoys me when it pops up, and unfortunately it tends to do so all too often. I find it fairly safe to assume that any alien civilization with technology advanced enough to cross light-years and keep our planet under continuous observation for thousands of years could reasonably also be expected to have stealth technology as far beyond ours as their propulsion and communications systems. Most likely, their technology would for all intents and purposes appear as "magic", according to Clarke's Law."

    Crossing light-years and keeping a planet under observation doesn't require any new science. Just a lot of time and energy. A "cloaking device" requires new science. If we are going to posit the existence of a "cloaking device" why not just have them watching us through wormholes in the comfort of their own homes? Or maybe just sensing our "thought energy" across the light years? Or some other equally scientifically unsupported and unfalsifiable means? The question here isn't "could aliens logically be ancient gods." After all, we could be brains in vats owned by the aliens. The question here is "do we have any evidence of or reason to believe that aliens beings were ancient gods." Answer: No.
    --

  • "Ancient Astronauts" (Score:3)

    by BillyGoatThree ( 324006 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2001 @03:18AM (#286698)
    That second book that I read (mentioned in another post) specifically addressed UFOs and ancient astronaut ideas. It took them seriously, but then showed how it unlikely they were.

    For instance, ancient astronauts: The Earth is 4 billion years old. Recorded history is only 1 millionth that long. The chances of aliens showing up *just* when humans are starting to write things down is therefore pretty low. Alternatively, if aliens have been here all along, where are they now? You might say "UFOs" but then were is their base? There are no anomalous items in nearby space and certainly nothing on Earth.
    --

  • SETI books (Score:4)

    by BillyGoatThree ( 324006 ) on Tuesday April 17, 2001 @03:02AM (#286699)
    Incredible. Last week I checked two books out of the library about SETI. One was by Asimov, published in 1979. It was a little short on hard science, but did a very good job of showing calculations indicating the number of habitable planets in the Galaxy. Another was by "some guy", written in 1989 (ten years later). The writing style was chaotic, but the upshot seemed to be "if there are so many aliens out there, where are they?" The most interesting thing about this book is that it mentions much the same stuff that Asimov did--but then shows how it doesn't apply or has been changed, or whatever.

    Now this thing is out. Up or down?
    --
  • The more important result of actually finding an extra-terrestrial intelligence is probably the effect it would have on humans. 5,000 years of religious dogma would be thrown on its ear. Think of what happens to Christianity if its discovered that we are NOT alone in the universe?

    The social ramifications of such a discovery would change the world; even if no actual contact was made for generations.

    That said, I think the SETI project has very little hope of actually identifying an alien intelligence. It is either arrogant or optimistic to think that an alien intelligence would be broadcasting on a wavelength we can detect with a signal we could comprehend.

    To paraphrase Billy Bob Thornton from Armageddon "We can only watch about 1% of the sky and, begging your pardon sir, but it's a big-ass sky."

    I should add that I *do* participate in the SETI@Home project, but that's mostly because I find their peer to peer computing model interesting and a group of my friends participate so the comarderie and "racing" aspect of it is entertaining. Maybe we'll identify an extraterrestrial intelligence with it, but I doubt it.

    -Coach-

  • It's also possible that an extra terrestrial intelligence is aware of us, but not interested in meeting us. Perhaps they've seen what we've done to every other species we've encountered and would rather not get involved.

    Also possible that, as others have suggested, the alien intelligence finds us too primitive and not worth bothering with. Perhaps they've seen Pauly Shore and David Hasselhoff and decided that they'd go see what was happening on Mars instead.

    Or, we could be as mysterious to them as they are to us. Perhaps we pass through the same space on a regular basis but neither party is capable of reliably detecting and identifying the other.

    I suspect that the alien intelligence being bipedal and oxygen breathing is more a matter of Hollywood than reality.

    -Coach-

  • The problem with this argument is that it makes the assumption that we could identify (or even comprehend) an extraterrestrial being if we saw one. They could exist on planes or as forms of matter that we don't even imagine.

    Humans tend to assume that intelligent life is going to have spaceships and clothes. Maybe Earth is just a marble in some alien kid's collection?

    If the universe truly began "all at once" and the conditions that created us are relatively new, its also possible that the same conditions created more beings of a similar type elsewhere in the universe - and at roughly the same time. Perhaps they're right now trying to find a replacement for their space shuttle and listening hard to see if anybody else is out there.

    Just because only a few humans (of undetermined mental state) claim to have perceived alien life doesn't mean they aren't out there. David Spade has a succesful TV show -- that's as much evidence of alien intelligence as anything!

    Chances are good that your dog is not really aware of fish...but that doesn't mean there aren't any fish. Maybe humans just aren't capable, currently, of perceiving and identifying extra-terrestrial intelligences?

    -Coach-

  • O.K., but my point is that even if there is life EXACTLY like us...we haven't filled the Galaxy yet and there's no reason to assume that other life forms like us would necessarily be significantly more advanced than we are.

    Life forms not as advanced as we are, no matter how old, may not have the capability of controlled space travel.

    Life forms more advanced than we are might already be travelling and either they avoid us or we're not sufficiently advanced to reliably perceive them.

    In order for your argument to be true there would have to be sufficient numbers of aliens who were sufficiently advanced to travel to and colonize other worlds, but not so advanced that they would evade our observation. Since that seems to be a much narrower band of probability it seems unfair to base the argument that we're alone on the evidence that nothing we can perceive has already colonized the rest of the galaxy.

    I realize you only specified the galaxy, but it still seems shortsighted to assume that there aren't more simple, yet still sentient, beings out there somewhere. There might also be infinitely more complex beings out there somewhere. There might also be other "humans" out there somewhere who are simply not significantly more advanced than we are. There are dozens of scenarios where there is other intelligence in the world but assuming that any other intelligence would naturally expand, would have already done so sufficiently to reach us and would be perceptible to us puny humans seems like a reach to me.

    Outside the galaxy it's a very big universe (Understatement alert!) and apparently expanding. Statistically speaking it seems practically guaranteed that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, even if it is relatively scarce in our galaxy.

    -Coach-

  • You're thinking on too small a time scale. Remember, the galaxy is about 12 billion years old. We are about 2-300,000 years old. We've only had technology for about 4-10,000 years, advanced technology only a few hundred, and space travel for 40 years. That's nothing! The odds of two species evolving at precisely the same time is vanishingly small, given the time scale.

    True enough, however the galaxy hasn't been static for 12 billion years. It's possible that we didn't get started for the first 11 billion or so years because the conditions were not yet such to support the advancement of intelligent life up until that point.

    Of course, it's also possible that the other life in our galaxy is so much MORE advanced than we are that we aren't able to perceive it -- or it deliberately avoids us.

    Is it necessarily the case that other intelligent life would colonize worlds other than their own? Perhaps their size relative to their environment is such that their own world is many times larger than Earth and they are still exploring and colonizing other parts of their own world. Perhaps they don't reproduce at rates equivalent to humans or perhaps their lifespans are such that it isn't an issue.

    Would we consider dogs to be intelligent life? I think if we discovered a race of wild poodles on Mars we'd consider that as intelligent life; but I don't think we could expect a race of poodles to be travelling in space. I suppose it's always possible that Earth poodles have just been so domesticated that their natural astrophysics skills have atrophied beyond discern.

    Also we know nothing, obviously, of the use and availability of resources. In a world that is resource rich, or where the occupants sufficiently conserve/produce their own, there may not be as much motivation to colonize away from the home planet. There's also the possibility that an alien intelligence doesn't have the natural resources to create space travel machines.

    Ultimately I think there are just so many scenarios that allow for intelligent life to exist in our galaxy without our having discovered them as of yet. We shouldn't assume that any intelligent life is going to be anything like us in biology, psychology or environment.

    -Coach-

  • Well, o.k., but I don't know that "teeming" is necessarily the case or even that intelligent life is particuarly common. I do think it likely exists out there, however. It just seems a little premature to dismiss the idea just because we haven't identified them yet.

    Let me restate that I'm skeptical that SETI will ever locate any extraterrestrial intelligence, by the way.

    -Coach-

  • one letter (i) missing is an abduction - two letters both missing (explainINg) is a conspiracy!

    just like the conspiracy theorists who think that SETI@home is using your cycles for more than just the search for ET ;)

    i was angry:1 with:2 my:4 friend - i told:3 4 wrath:5, 4 5 did end.
  • It would be the fact that it isn't like anything else out there. Patterns that wouldn't be seen unless intelligently produced. They may not be able to plug in a "TV" (they may not even know what one is), but if they were "looking" as we are, they would be looking for exactly what we are. Patterns that could not originate elswhere in nature. That's how they differentiate.
  • How do you know that we aren't being visited? Because YOU haven't experienced anything yourself. What if they don't WANT to be noticed. Given the fact that the Earth is relatively very young in the Universe, and even we are on the verge of faster than light travel through gravity warping, to say that no other intelligent life has also followed that path of discovery and conquered these problems eons ago, is well, silly at best. We live in a universe where the size is very hard to comprehend. We live on a non-descript planet in a non-descript solar system in a non-descript galaxy filled with billions of stars, in a universe filled with billions of galaxies, where our closest star is over 1 light year away. We are finding life building carbon rings in empty space, protiens and bacteria on asteroids, a new solar system is found almost weekly now...so to say we are alone in this vast universe, when you know the full scope, is just plain silly in my view. I mean, how egomaniacal are we to think this? First we were the center of the universe, then we were the center of the solar system, then we find that not only are we STILL fighting our own ego's, but that it is still prevelant. Open your mind man. We are NOT alone, don't want to go into details, but we are definitely NOT alone, and haven't been for a very long time. The fact that this notion is perfectly in the realm of being possible should be enough for you to not say that we ARE alone, unless you know something that no one else is privy to, which you are not, of course. Thanks.
  • Because, intelligent life uses discovery to evolve it's intelligence. This drives intelligent beings to pursue further into the unknown, and what is more vast than the universe?
  • Then why would they be looking? To just denounce their findings? That would be like SETI finding a curious repeating signal, and just saying "It can't be" and discarding. That would be stupid to say the least...
  • The question is actually very simple. It's about the meaning of life. Not the meaning of life of an individual but the meaning of existence of all mankind.
    Do we want to be like a guy who lives his entire life in small village, works on his farm (or nowadays, watches TV), sees nothing, meets nobody and eventually dies after a boring life? Or de want to actually accomplish something in the Universe and be like Marco Polo or Christopher Columbus even if it will be hard and many of our crew will die during the voyage? Do we want to discover something new, do we want to create something extraordinary?
    For me, the answer is clear. I'd much rather be like Marco Polo than this guy in his little village even if it means a high chance that I will fail and/or die.

  • The whole islands population!?!?!?!
    Wrongo! In the 70's a group of twenty men escavated a nearly complete statue on Easter Island, moved it to a 4 foot high platform and lifted it onto that platform using nothing but rollers and levers. Lifting the multi-ton statue onto the platform only took a few hours.

    ALL of the artifacts mentioned in the "Chariot's of the God's" have been easily explained using reasonable amounts of manpower, simple tools (ramps, levers, rollers, string, plumb-bobs, and rope), and a bit of common-sense.

    People all over the world are fond of telling tall tales that make thier leaders, country, or whatever, more powerful and interesting.

  • Here, this is to help you understand. THEY'RE STARVING BECAUSE THEY BREED LIKE RATS IN ECONOMIES THAT ARE AT (OR BELOW) HUMAN SUBSISTENCE LEVEL. Hope this helped.
  • Spinoffs? How about the SETI@Home Project [berkeley.edu] popularizing distributed computing? Sure the idea was around for a long time, but SETI@Home brought it to the masses.
  • Or too dangerous. I mean given the delay time for radio signals to reach distant star sectors, if there's an alien civilization out there picking this stuff up, depending on the distance, they could just be finding out right now about our use of the atomic bomb. Or if they're really advanced, they already know about our use of the atomic bomb. The latter is more likely, and they're simply not directing anything our way until we can prove ourselves to be less dangerous than we already are.

    Besides, in the current state of world affairs, if aliens visited us, they'd probably be the catalyst for a third world war.
  • McConnell seems to be attempting to simultaneously embrace the alien abduction crowd and hard scienctists, a very difficult task.

    Most astronomers don't appreciate Stonehenge conspiracy theories, and most Roswell believers don't appreciate the real science behind SETI.

    In the end, you would have to educate the masses as to the unlikelihood of intergalactic travel, the slim chance of intelligent/civilized life and the odds that we're essentially attempting to talk to butterflies, or even that we are the butterflies, with no way of understanding and of little significance to any aliens.

    But, alas, anal probes are so much more relatable. Call it a religion for some, but if you're attempting to win the respect of the Scientific Community, it's probably better not to cater to the fanaticism.

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