S.e.t.i.

[Bob Scott]

I don't know much about the SETI network, just that it is an orginized search for intelligent radio eminations from other planets or solar systems. I doubt if this search will be successful. Does anyone else have any thoughts on this? I considered these points:

Seeing as how the Earth has been around for millions, if not billions of years, we have only been communication by radio on carriers for less than 100 years, since the banishment of spark gap transmitters around 1925. Our own transmissions have now changed from recognizable analog signals to encrypted digital, hard to distinguish from background noise.

According to the doomsday clock, we're all doomed to nuke ourselves into extinction with only a hundred years of radio emanations in the last 6 billion or so years of universe existence. What are the chances that we can pick up signals from an alien intelligence that had their own 100 years of existence occur simultaneously with ours before they polluted their own planet to death. The timing would be a really unlikely fluke of probablility. They probably have already had their 100 years or aren't due to have it during our tenure.

Considering that we have trouble receiving our own signals due to solar interference, I doubt very much if a radio telescope from another solar system light years away could pick out intelligence from our background solar noise. I think SETI is a lost cause. You?

 

[ronsimpson]

I am trying to find intelligent life on earth.....unsuccessfully.....

If it takes 1,000,000 years for a signal to get from there to here and another 1,000,000 years for my signal to get back, who will answer?

 

[MrAl]

Hello,


Yes i agree with all of that. It would have to be from a planet that evolved just like ours and at almost the same time. And because of that restriction it acts like a constraint to the equation for the probability of success because if they evolved at the same time, then they cant ever receive our signal because of the signal traveling time which is a very very long time. So they would have to have developed 1000 years after us, but if they do reply, then we'll all be gone before we can ever receive their return signal anyway. And if we ever receive one it's the same story, they will be gone before they receive our reply.
So the only thing that works is a totally successful civilization that has succeeded in keeping it's species alive for eons of time.
But in it's defense, i think there are stars that are 4 or 5 light years away, so it would probably have to be one of those where it would only take 10 years for a round trip conversation. But there's no way to tell if they host life either.
The study of exoplanets i think could help most here so we could at least aim in a more probable direction.

I think it might have been Carl Sagan who came up with a formula for the probability of life elsewhere, but im not sure if it included self extinction or even natural extinction in the formula.

So i think it is just too hard to predict, it's like pot luck, or pot unluck might be more like it. If we do make contact, it could be the worst mistake we ever made. Interesting, i posted on a site more than 10 years ago that if we allow ourselves to be 'found' by other intelligent life, we could be in for mass extinction. I was a little sarcastic stating that they might 'eat' us (chuckle) but the post got removed by the site admin. Interestingly, Hawking now states this same thing basically except that they might come for our Earth resources. But i think Rod Stirling was the first to notice that the first encounter could be the worst for us, in one of his interesting episodes of The Twilight Zone, where the aliens brought us a cookbook but it was in their language, and when finally translated it was found to be a cookbook for how to cook man (aka a human) but it was too late as many people already boarded the spacecraft headed for their home planet.

More seriously my thoughts have been that on Earth we always see species fighting each other for survival, and one of the things that allows humans to come about in the first place was the ability of animals to be able to "hide". They dont jump out in front of a predator and yell, "Here i am, are you friendly or not?", because if they are not then it's all over.
True, there are species that co exist, but it's a gamble not a clearly defined concept that they are always friendly and willing to teach us all that they know.

I also stated that i thought that the decision to try to contact other civilizations should be decided by a vote of the people, not a decision made by a minority group of people who are only interested in contact for the pure scientific value.

 

[Pommie]

I don't think SETI will be successful simply because of the very small window in time that we transmitted recognizable signals - about 50 years. What I do wonder about is interstellar travel. When will it be possible for humans to travel to another solar system? Another 100 years? A 1000 years? etc. Considering most of our technical achievements have been in the last 300 years, where will we be in another thousand? If you assume interstellar travel will become possible for humans and there are civilizations that are millions of years older then our own (and achieved interstellar travel) then the galaxy should be teaming with life. As this doesn't appear to be the case then maybe we are alone in this galaxy.

Another thing that I always wonder about is why we assume that other life will have a similar lifespan to our own. There could be a planet around a massive sun with an orbit period of 100 years and have aliens that live 70 of their years or 7,000 of our years. To those creatures a journey of 1,000 years would be similar to some of the earlier human trips of discovery. Could we have been visited in the past?

Just saying.

Mike.

 

[jpanhalt]

I used to participate in SETI with the desktop PC's at work that had long idle times. I have not done it with my home computers.

I am much less pessimistic about the probability of intelligent life elsewhere. I suspect life itself is quite common, including on Mars in the past.* Receiving signals from a thousand light years away would be exciting, but of course, two-way communication using current radios would be difficult and unlikely.

According to this source: http://www.solstation.com/stars3/100-gs.htm , there are 512 G-spectrum stars within 100 light years and 64 within 50 light years of Earth. That number goes up enormously as one goes out further. There is no need to go out a million light years.

Of course the stellar evolution argument can't be ignored, but there is a bias that works in favor of finding nearby life. Stars form in clusters. We may be 1000's or even 100,000's of years out of sync, but there are still a lot of stars out there to search. I think passive listening is a relatively low-cost and worthwhile endeavor; although, success in any of our lifetimes seems unlikely.

John

*The Viking Mars explorers used firefly luciferin to detect ATP (polymerase chain reaction was not know in those days). My understanding is that the results from those and other experiments were not negative. They were just not clearly positive. The firefly luciferin reaction should be able to detect a few molecules of ATP, because its quantum efficiency is very high. That reaction is plagued on Earth with the inability to get a clear zero point. In the early 70's, NASA applied the same technology in an attempt to rapidly diagnose urinary tract infections. Urine should be sterile in most normal people. Unfortunately, the test gives positive results for many specimens that are not positive on culture and are from individuals who do not show signs of urinary tract infection. Thus, it is an exquisitely sensitive test for ATP, but we do not always know what the results mean.

 

[MrAl]

Hello again,

IF they are a million years ahead of us then they are either dead or they know enough to stay away from Earth

Or maybe they seeded this planet and we're just a big experiment and they check in now and then to see how it is going.

 

[tcmtech]

My take on the "why aren't they talking to us" question is this.

Given our present understandings of quantum mechanics and how fast we are learning how to use and manipulate those effects its more likely that any civilization that is even only 20 years (about when I expect we will have it nailed down and practical to use for every day communications) more advanced than our has already cracked the process's of using quantum particle entanglement for all their forms of communication.

Why use inefficient slow radio waves that take decades to go from one star to the next that anyone can listen in on when you can use quantum entanglement to communicate nearly instantly at those distances and with absolutely no one being able to eavesdrop on what you are communicating about?

BTW if they are intelligent and advanced enough to travel in outer space between star systems the odds are the also know how to collect and use the raw materials floating around out there to build and create everything they need and want.
There is not a single compound or element that is found on this planet that cant be found or created from space based debris in vast abundance in the rest of the solar system or beyond that would justify the inconvenience and overall hassle of having to deal with us for any reason.

 

[MrAl]

Hi,

Yes "one of these days" if we ever really succeed with QE we might make contact, but only if the other party is as stupid as we are

And QE communication is one of those "one of these days" things. Will we really see it or will problems come up. Not only that, i think we have to make at least one purely physical contact before we can use QE anyway.

 

[bryan1]

yea they probably have visited and saw just how big of a joke this world really is, saw how high tax's are and the monkeys who rule and decided to block ANY and ALL of the signals coming from earth as spam......

 

[Mr RB]

Yep. The "Spam Planet"... Full of idiots dominating, killing and taxing each other. Stay well clear!

And now we are DELIBERATELY sending out spam! "PLZ hlp we are on plnet Erf. Need help wif interstellar technolgees URGENT why iz no1 replying???????"

 

[MrAl]

Hi again,


Ha ha yeah, and now just within the past week or so, the universe has 'aged' a bit more (chuckle).
The Planck probe revealed better data than W map so we go from the old estimate of the age of the universe of 13.73 to 13.82 billion years. Yippee Lets celebrate, i'll buy the first round of beers.