My dad launched the quest to find alien intelligence

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/06/father-launched-quest-find-alien-intelligence-changed-astronomy/

by 8bitsrule • 6 years ago

126 170 6 years ago

jph• 6 years ago

Dr. Drake is especially famous for the Drake Equation (as the article mentions) which is a fascinating way to think about how many intelligent civilizations might be findable.

https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/news/1350/are-we-alone-in-the-un...

SirLJ• 6 years ago

Sorry, but I always thought the equation meaningless...

taneq• 6 years ago

I agree - it's basically just a way to arrive at a meaningless number by multiplying a whole lot of wild-ass guesses together.

Do we have anything better, though?

lisper• 6 years ago

Because....?

s1artibartfast7• 6 years ago

It is a fabulous equation which describes the factors that would contribute to alien life. It can inform how to think and pursue SETI and gauge our current knowledge. Any result that you see bandied about is meaningless because we don't know the inputs.

ekianjo5• 6 years ago

And deeply flawed...

enjoyyourlife• 6 years ago

https://xkcd.com/384/

chairmanwow1• 6 years ago

The alt text is so great for this one

zokula• 6 years ago

I would bet a million dollars that there are no other intelligent civilizations in the universe.

s1artibartfast7• 6 years ago

I would take that bet. The observable universe is estimated to have 10^21 stars and the actual universe is infinite.

_annum• 6 years ago

Can you unpack your reasoning here? The likelihood of civilizations occurring/existing in parallel leads me to a similar conclusion.

ekianjo5• 6 years ago

Why take a bet on something that can never be verified?

StreamBright2• 6 years ago

Can you point out anything that exists only exactly once in the universe?

nix232• 6 years ago

First tell me what intelligent means....then we can make that bet ;)

jes51992• 6 years ago

I’ve heard that the Drake equation was originally (?) intended to be a parable that makes you think about whether our civilization is likely to destroy itself before making a noticeable impact on the universe, in order to promote nuclear disarmament

EE84M3i2• 6 years ago

As far as I know, the concept of the 'great filter' was invented by (the now canceled) Robin Hanson.

cgriswald4• 6 years ago

I’ve studied this a lot but it’s been awhile. Drake et al we’re doing this during the Cold War and were definitely aware we could wipe ourselves out either with weapons or through ecological disaster. The L term is specifically about civilizations destroying themselves (although it can also be advances in technology which end radio-as-we-know-it).

The great filter is an attempt to explain the Fermi Paradox. Fermi was there, but the paradox necessarily came after the Drake equation.

SeekingMeaning• 6 years ago

http://archive.vn/fWFeM

badRNG3• 6 years ago

The silence from SETI is deafening. I'm not even amateurishly familiar with astronomy, but I remember setting up SETI@Home when I got my first computer, and remember slowly realizing that the universe seemingly isn't "teeming" with intelligent life. Maybe something is out there, but out of reach, or deliberately silent? Maybe we are alone in this huge universe?

It does feel at least a little depressing that discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence seems unlikely in my lifetime. Maybe even out of the cards for humanity. I have to wonder if building communications devices (or "devices" in general) is a uniquely human thing that simply wouldn't matter to an intelligence that evolved some other way.

usmannk3• 6 years ago

Maybe something is out there, but out of reach, or deliberately silent?

Have you read The Three Body Problem series by Cixin Liu? It's a terrific (and recently quite famous + awarded) sci fi trilogy that explores this idea. That all sufficiently advanced civilizations have learned to be extremely radio silent in order to escape detection. Reason being that they all eventually conclude that, from a game theoretic standpoint, the only reasonable thing to do when you detect another civilization is to eliminate them before they do you.

badRNG3• 6 years ago

I have not, I will definitely check that out, thanks for sharing. I feel that SETI is something I'm woefully uneducated on, and can't find good places to jump into research before sources seem to go wildly off the rails.

m3kw92• 6 years ago

But earth debunks that theory, no body came to destroy us yet.

m3kw92• 6 years ago

Probably in universe time, equivalent intelligent civilizations will only be using radio waves for communication for maybe few hundred years. To be able to find radio signal from another civ in that window of time is unlikely. A more advanced Comm method is used.

01100011• 6 years ago

This assumes that alien civilizations purely see us as competition and not an organism they can achieve synergy with.

What if organisms could choose other ways of allying and joining together? What if, say, you had the strong, dominant, ambitious sub-population of a race trying to ally with other strong, dominant, ambitious life forms without thought to race? What if the organisms in the universe which favored peace decided to seek each other out and unite for a common cause?

ahazred8ta• 6 years ago

When malicious eavesdroppers are involved, some fates are worse than death...

http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff400/fv00307.htm#anunsecuredlin...

Others like Vernor Vinge have speculated that the galactic net has really bad malware.

Guest0918231• 6 years ago

Wouldn't someone send communication signals to lure or bait other civilizations? For example, spam a friendly hello message on every potential communication channel and encourage new civilizations to reply. When they do, destroy them.

tsimionescu• 6 years ago

The problem I see with this idea is that it depends on either FTL travel, or on a horizon of time much larger than I would imagine. If we were discovered by a war-like civilization in one of the nearer stars today, it may well take them hundreds or thousanfs of years to get here even with a probe. Is it really a plausible threat?

em-bee• 6 years ago

this is where i lost interest in the book. the idea that destroying another civilization is the only reasonable choice is beyond ridiculous.

first of all, game theory is based on our current experience and conditioning. if we raise a society where cooperation is valued, then the outcomes of game theory will change too. it is absurd to assume that game theory is universal.

but even if it were, and we'd have to assume that all aliens are hostile, the recources necessary to mount an expedition to another inhabited solar system are much larger than the benefits of exploiting a remote planet. it's simply not worth it.

what would be the point?

my expectation is that before we are able to send ships we'll be communicating for a long period, giving us enough time to share scientific discoveries.

i'll even go as far as to claim that developing space travel that can take us to another inhabited solar system will only happen in collaboration with the civilization that we want to visit.

pengaru• 6 years ago

It's just that the speed of light is too slow for any relatively recent signals to reach us from such distant sources. Most of what we can receive is very old news.

nit: teeming

badRNG3• 6 years ago

fixed, thanks

garraeth• 6 years ago

The SETI Institute has a very active YouTube channel if you are interested in updates: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzQdkHKOTVT_chwgDcau4sg

They also provide publicly available audit for their financials so you can see where they are at: https://www.seti.org/about-us/financials

As far as I can tell, they are still going strong. And the YouTube channel is always very interesting, and cutting-edge! It's not always about alien life directly, many times it is tangentially related (helpful [to the search] technologies, breakthroughs, panel discussions, etc). Perhaps not the most refined broadcasts, but they are always very educational and informative.

internet_user3• 6 years ago

Dark Forest.

Let's hope we do not contact anything until we have really, really good weapons.

ekianjo5• 6 years ago

Its a novel.

networkimprov2• 6 years ago

There is a glimmer of hope!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal

gerland3• 6 years ago

Last I checked the wow signal was proven to come from microwave interferrence.

JKCalhoun2• 6 years ago

Our own people on this mote have only been teeming with radio communications for but a blip of time (in the grand scheme of things).

Perhaps we will disappear only to be a part of the fossil record in just as short a blip.

If all radio-species come and go so briefly, consider a signal from another planet serendipitous.

But, you know, you have to try.

joe_the_user2• 6 years ago

Except, not even

If an earth-like society existed on the nearest star, transmitting as we do. Neither society could detect the other.

Ideas that we could find stuff that is "out there" presuppose societies that are more advanced, and more advanced on our terms, transmitting as we do but loud enough to "hear".

PLUS what you mention, we in our current incarnation have existed as a blip.

ekianjo5• 6 years ago

We are the only animal species capable of sending radio waves in space. For all we know it's an accident. Dinosaurs or scorpions lived longer than us as species but would probably never reach that level.

So the universe may well be teeming with life, but not the kind that sends radio waves.

krisgenre• 6 years ago

True. I have always wondered why no other species on Earth have evolved in a way Humans have. Every other species maintains the balance in nature but we are the only species actively creating imbalance and destroying the planet. Prometheus might have been true after all.

raxxorrax• 6 years ago

We have only covered ~200ly with radio waves. That is a small spot in our galaxy, let alone universe. The core is ~25.000ly away. I think the original signal would be highly distorted by then. I still think seti@home was worth it, but it cannot answer the question about alien life negatively if it doesn't net a positive result.

faitswulff• 6 years ago

Is it possible that the universe is teeming with intelligent life, just randomly distributed throughout cosmic timelines and therefore unlikely to be detected?

joe_the_user2• 6 years ago

It's the possible that every single star has a civilization at the level of our's, actively transmitting and detecting, yet find nothing. IE, Earth couldn't detect the signal of Earth if they were transmitted from the nearest star.

This is seldom mentioned in the press. I learned it here, on hackernews a decade ago, I think. I was shocked. It's shame you get people not knowing basic stuff like this.

credit_guy• 6 years ago

It's about signal and noise. Let's say there is a civilization out there, and we know about each other and want to talk. We point a big parabolic antenna at each other and start exchanging radio massages. That's what we are doing with Voyager right now, we point some high-gain antennas at each other and talk. At the rate of 7.2 kb/s [1], or one quarter of the bandwidth of the old dialup connections. But Voyager is close, stars are far. The closest star is about 2000 times farther than Voyager 1. Radio waves decay with the square of the distance, so if a Voyager-size antenna were to transmit towards us from 2000 times farther away, we'd get a signal 4 million times weaker. So, our friends out there need a much bigger antenna than the one on the Voyager, and we need them to point it straight at us, and we need them to blast a mighty strong radio signal towards us. We should also point a bigger antenna at them (the one we point at Voyager is 70 meter wide, not really a toy). Somehow between their bigger antenna and our bigger antenna, we need to overcome the 4 million decay factor. If our friends are 10 times farther away from us than Proxima Centauri, then we need to overcome another factor of 100.

But, our friends out there don't know about us, and they don't set up a mighty large antenna and align it perfectly in our direction. They simply chatter locally using radio waves, in many cases, their antennas are pointing towards their intended receivers, and not randomly towards some exoplanet far far away (the Earth).

SETI never had a chance to find anything.

[1] https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/spacecraft/instruments/...

baxtr• 6 years ago

Yes, I agree. Just note, that this is assuming however, that no alien civilization has developed any vessels that would bring them closer to use, e.g. in our solar system so we could detect their signals

CryptoPunk4• 6 years ago

The more significant 'silence' is the fact that every star in the Milky Way galaxy has not already been colonized and turned into a Dyson sphere.

Species with language and toolmaking capabilities seemingly grow in technological sophistication at an exponential rate, so on the geological timescale, will quickly acquire space flight, grow to populations of trillions, harness the resources of their star system, then move onto settling a new star, and so on.

hbcondo714• 6 years ago

The first SETI-specific NASA grant in over three decades was just awarded so there is still hope we will see something in our lifetime.

https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2020-12

ozy• 6 years ago

Space is enormous! While our capacity to search it for signs of intelligence is miniscule.

lend000• 6 years ago

As other commenters have covered, SETI makes a whole lot of assumptions about what extraterrestrial contact would look like and wastes time exploring the hypothesis that another civilization would behave just like us in our infancy, except at a time when they have the capability and surplus energy to transmit signals many orders of magnitude stronger than we do.

To my knowledge, we are not currently transmitting sustained signals that would be detectable through the noise by any neighboring systems, and to do so for any sustained period of time, let alone a significant enough amount of time to be noticed (geological time scale) AND then wait for a response would take a ridiculous amount of energy, and provide no return on investment for literally thousands of generations. And even then, that return on investment might just be an invasion.

So in my opinion, SETI is a poor use of compute and investigating the more credible of the tens of thousands of as-of-yet unexplained UFO reports would be a better use of time. Either they are already here, or we will not have the tools to discover neighbors (if they exist) until our technology is far more advanced.

hrgiger• 6 years ago

Carl Sagan has a nice example for this: " we take a glass of water from ocean and assuming there is no fish exist"

est31• 6 years ago

Thread about a similar topic from 1 day ago, 152 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23588469

yters• 6 years ago

I thought we cannot detect intelligent design?

cletus3• 6 years ago

So I'm going to rehash somewhat some comments I've left on similar threads to this. The thought on this apparent lack of alien technological civilizations has advanced a lot since 1960 (when SETI began; from the article). I still see a lot of people stick to ideas that really don't hold up to scrutiny. The two core issues are:

1. We will find alien civilizations by their radio signals; and

2. The limiting factor on alien civilizations are Earthlike planets.

(1) is the flaw in SETI. The general argument against this goes something like this:

1. Planets are efficient ways to store matter (in that gravity binds it together) but are highly inefficient in creating living area or collecting a star's energy;

2. Entering and leaving a gravity well is expensive (in energy terms);

3. Gravity can be trivially replicated with centrifugal force using materials we already have (eg stainless steel).

4. Within 1000 years we will be capable of building space habitats that solve the above 3 problems;

5. As a consequence of the above, the natural tendency for any growing civilization will be to encompass a star with orbiting habitats.

6. Artificial structures orbiting a star, even if they're just energy collectors, would be incredibly obvious to any observer from a huge distance and would be far easier to detect than radio transmissions similar to what we do today. The tl'dr of this is that the only way to get rid of heat in space is to radiate it away. The signature of this is a function of the temperature of the object and for a huge range of temperatures this is in the IR spectrum and this huge IR signature without a corresponding visible light output is what makes it "obvious".

The first radio transmission occurred 120 years ago. In 1000 years (and possibly well before them) we'll be beyond them in terms of the signature alien civilizations would detect (in that, they'd see our IR signature first). This is of course the blink of a cosmological eye so what we're really doing is hoping to see civilizations who are at the same point we are, which is incredibly unlikely.

This ties into (2). I even saw Neal degrasse Tyson make this mistake in a talk where he posits the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that civilizations run out of planets and die out.

Planets are likely important as a cradle of life and the number of suitable planets is likely a filter of some sort but irrelevant in the long term. A star with no planetary system at all can easily be a home to a Kardashev-2 civilization. Matter can be extracted from stars directly (as a side note, extracting Helium to avoid the star going supernova is likely a useful side benefit) and/or constructed with particle accelerators (and all that energy).

What I find compelling about this argument is that it's /almost/ just an engineering problem (albeit a huge one) rather than one requiring huge advances in technology and/or "new physics". Steel is sufficient to build O'Neil cylinders and solar power is a sufficient energy source for all this (ie it's not predicated on the viability of commercial fusion power generation, which I for one am not yet convinced of, and if it is viable everything gets a whole lot easier).

The other attractive part of this is how it can be done.in a piecemeal fashion, meaning you can build one orbital, the another, and another and another. Certain other megastructures are much more "all or nothing" (eg ringworlds).

The above is the classic Dyson Swarm, originally called a Dyson Sphere but Swarm tends to be the common name now as a bunch of people have assumed (incorrectly) that a Dyson Sphere is a rigid sphere. Dyson never suggested that and no known or even theorized material could support a rigid sphere that large.

People tend to hone in to one issue or another with the above. A popular one is about waste heat. "What if they recycle it?" So with perfect recycling they've violated thermodynamics so we're just talking about increasing efficiency, at which point you've just reduced your IR signature, not eliminated it.

The natural consequence of all this is that we are relatively alone and likely the only technological species at or above our technology level within our cone of effect in the Milky Way.

TheSpiceIsLife3• 6 years ago

Oh hey snap! I’m from Adelaide, currently living in Launceston.

Tiny aside, and because I like dreaming about actually building these structures:

I work with metal everyday and hold a trade certificate in metal fabrication / engineering.

You don’t need to go to stainless steels to achieve great strength.

There are a range of carbon steels available that have up to four times the tensile strength of regular Grade 250 steel used in most structural steel applications. The 250 refers to 250 mega pascal tensile yield strength. Ultimate tensile strength increases after yield as the steel work-hardens, but that’s what makes steel such a great building material: it yields and increases in strength before failing. Anyway, I digress.

See for example Bisalloy’s range of high tensile structural steels: https://www.bisalloy.com.au/product/bisalloy-structural/

The strength of these steels comes from the addiction of higher amounts of carbon, manganese, chromium, and molybdenum, but in far smaller quantities than required to make stainless steels.

You might want stainless steels for some exposed parts for corrosion and radiation resistance, but these are unlikely to be the main structural components due to the relative rarity and cost of the main alloying elements.

cletus3• 6 years ago

So I'm not metallurgist but my impression is that stainless steel is used as an example because it's readily available, relatively cheap to produce and sufficiently effective. A number of megastructures require much greater tensile strength than that (eg space elevator). Sometimes those materials are theoretical, sometimes not and even when not, often we've yet to produce them in sufficient quantities for such a large engineering effrot.

But stainless steel cylinders? There's no in our technology to produce those (although producing them in space or on an airless world like the Moon or Mercury might be a challenge given our reliance on oxygen refining steel).

I don't know if there are any issues with having different alloys (eg carbon steel and stainless steel) in contact with each other. I know with other metals this can be an issue. But again, I'm no expert.

jlmorton• 6 years ago

Note that our very best IR telescopes have a resolution great enough to detect an IR signature of a Dyson swarm at a distance of about 0.2 kiloparsecs, or ~600 light years.

That is a very, very small area of the universe.

If there was a Dyson swarm out there, we would only know it if it was extraordinarily close to us.

cletus3• 6 years ago

So you raise a good point. I went looking for more facts about this.

As best as I can tell, current surveys for individual Dyson swarms rely on IRAS and as best as I can tell the range is about what you say.

So there are two points worth making here:

1. This is, as far as I can tell, pretty similar to the range SETI is looking at. The power required for signals beyond that range to be detectable by us starts to get to a significant portion of stellar output, at which point you either have to assume such a civilization is is capable of the kind of astro-engineering we could otherwise detect and why are they outputting something with that much power?

2. On the Kardashev scale, you have K1 civilizations who use the power output of an entire planet (10^16 Watts in the Carl Sagan scale), K2 is an entire star (10^26 Watts) and K3 is an entire galaxy (notionally, 10^36 Watts). A K3 civilization is envisioned as Dyson Swarms through an entire galaxy (although, "civilization" is a loose concept when there's light lag of 100,000 light years from one end to the other).

I found a link to a study of 100,000 of the nearest galaxies looking for that kind of IR signature on a galactic rather than solar level. No evidence has yet been found.

The gap between a K2 and.a K3 civilization is actually not that large.

remir• 6 years ago

Drake reasoned that if planets like Earth orbited stars like the sun, then those worlds might be populated by civilizations advanced enough to broadcast their presence to the cosmos. His logic made sense: For the last century, Earthlings have been making these sorts of announcements all the time in the form of TV and radio broadcasts, military radar, and other communications that leak into space.

His logic made sense in the context of an adolescent civilization. We broadcast stuff, so if there are other civilizations out there, surely they would do the same, right?

Doubtful, because that's too risky. Why would anybody want to attract attention to themselves?

w-ll• 6 years ago

the light we get from our closest neighbors is lightyears away.

danielheath• 6 years ago

Not just risky; it's expensive.

Our radio waves are much, much quieter as all the networks switch from analog broadcast to digital and from low-density-long-range to high-density-short-range.

phreeza• 6 years ago

I think the most detectable radio signals would come from stuff like early warning radar, not communications, anyway. Not sure if those can be compressed in a meaningful way.

markus_zhang2• 6 years ago

I actually have a theory about why we don't see (any) alien society at the moment.

Step 1: recognize that all life needs to consume energy from somewhere (regardless of Carbon based or AI ones)

Step 2: realize that albeit the total energy contained in the universe is probably going to be enough for any civilization out there, regardless of type, the total amount of energy that the CURRENT TECH LEVEL allows to harvester is never going to be really large enough to treat it as infinity.

Step 3: assume that some individuals of any civilization wants to grab as much energy for itself as possible.

Step 4: Combine 2 and 3, and we reach the conclusion that the said individuals will always try to bar others from gaining enough energy, which means an expansion of the gap between the "rich" and "poor", and most importantly lead to a shrink of education of the "poor"s can benefit from, and ultimately destroy the "tech base" of any civilization. The "tech base" is the least amount of individuals that can generate some tech/science genius like Einstein/Newton who can propel the civilization forward greatly.

Step 5: I'd argue that this destruction of "tech base" almost surely occurs before the civilization reaches the point that general AI (or whatever that can substitute the original "tech base") arrives.

Step 6: Tech/Science advances slowly afterwards and ultimately the civilization won't reach very far into the depth of the universe.

teruakohatu3• 6 years ago

1500 years ago, or less, in Europe we see societies that were drastically poor (by modern standards), poorly educated/no formal education (the average person) and insanely unequal society (Kings and warlords vs. Serfs and slaves) where borders (resources) were being fought over and tech was very low relative to today and even relative to a few hundred years earlier (not to get into a dark ages dispute, but the Panethon would not have been able to be build in 500AD in Western Europe).

Yet this society managed to advance just fine. We are as far away from them as a Sun harvesting civilization is away from us.

Civilization finds a way.

At some point great minds become less important. Cutting edge research today is not coming from Patent Office clerks, it comes from large research teams that are constrained by budgets not human resources.

jbay8082• 6 years ago

Civilization finds a way.

There's neither any strong guarantee of this, nor any shortage of historical counterexamples.

raverbashing• 6 years ago

*Pantheon (ou you mean the Phartenon in Greece?)

The Pantheon (the back part) does look like a giant Panettone to be fair

EE84M3i2• 6 years ago

Let me tell you the good word of Roko.

RobertRoberts• 6 years ago

A purely scientific view says there is just as much proof of aliens as any other "never found" element or being that we have "believed" existed. This includes all fairy tales and religions.

Its incredibly sad to see so many intelligent people spend very real money and time on fantasies... Not for entertainment but instead under the guise of seeking scientific truth.

p1necone• 6 years ago

I think alien life is a step more likely than those other things. "Alien life" is much broader of a concept than fairy tales, and we have one piece of hard evidence for it's possibility in our own existence - it's not just made up out of thin air like say, dragons or unicorns.

TheSpiceIsLife3• 6 years ago

I’m willing to bet if there was a similar project blowing similar amounts of money trying to find purple flying unicorns there would be a similar argument made against that endeavour.

And everyone would see how ridiculous an argument that it is to equate the two.

teruakohatu3• 6 years ago

I think it says something beautiful about humanity. The desire to find truth and wonder, no matter how small the chance of success.

I like to imagine that humans or protohumans left Africa not just for resources but because they wanted to know what was out there beyond the next mountain, river or ocean.

peteoria• 6 years ago

He should focus on the postal servers. Half of them are aliens, and the other half are retired man in black agents.

shahbaby• 6 years ago

I suspect that the answer to the fermi paradox is closely linked to AI.

CRUDite3• 6 years ago

Consider when skynet goes live..the others will start talking to it!

TheOtherHobbes• 6 years ago

Ants can live in the middle of a city and have no idea what a city is, what humans are, or what human culture is - including the Internet.

They're physically surrounded by a far more advanced civilisation and it's literally invisible to them because it's incomprehensible to the ant mind, and it doesn't communicate by leaving scent trails.

We could be living inside the alien equivalent and we'd have no idea either, because we wouldn't be able to see it - never mind understand it. Maybe once every few million years something random and inexplicable would happen, but that would be all the evidence we'd get.

kubanczyk2• 6 years ago

The ants have built pretty impressive detectors. Nevermind the humans. Where the heck are all the other anthills? It's quite scary there is only one in a very large detection radius.

rytis• 6 years ago

The detectors still trying to find the distinctive scent. Which gets lost in all the fumes, dust, whatnot produced by humans...

ajuc• 6 years ago

Single ants don't have any idea, but anthills as a system probably have some kind of a working model of human activity.

For example ants often feed off garbage cans so they know how the amount of garbage changes daily and weekly. I don't know how good ant systems are at generalizing and noticing patterns but if they are any good they probably know at least that about human civilization.

Do they "think" of humans as another kind of anthill - probably not. But they certainly notice and react to changes in environment caused by human activity.

rasz• 6 years ago

"Eksperiment" by Janusz A. Zajdel. Polish sci-fi titan equal to Lem of 'Solaris' fame :

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=pl&tl=en&u=h... google translated ebook rip

and similarly themed "He Who Shrank" by Henry Hasse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Who_Shrank

slickrick2162• 6 years ago

Ants aren’t capable of meta cognition though. While I agree the analogy is useful it sort of falls down when you apply it to something else. Like birds or dogs. They clearly know humans exist and how they can be manipulated or contacted. The species difference argument at that level then results in a different conclusion, that yes we can communicate but we are probably not all that interesting. Expanding on this birds and dogs don’t know human motivations. We probably don’t understand how alien aliens are. We can barely understand the motivations of others in our immediate social circle. The question we should ask ourselves then is what motivates aliens and how do we trigger that motivation to initiate contact (carefully).

soulofmischief2• 6 years ago

I think OP chose ants because of the scale involved. Ants form full-fledged civilizations which occupy relatively small volumes of space compared to human civilizations (population size non-withstanding) and even when building around man-made structures, they might not be able to recognize these structures as non-natural.

yyyk2• 6 years ago

SETI never made much sense as a means to find aliens. As a means to get funding and interest in radioastronomy, by spinning more than a bit on the chances of it ever working, it made a lot of sense.

A radio signal could be either intentional or unintentional. An unintentional signal being found is extremely unlikely. Radio isn't very useful for interplanetary communication, so the purpose must be local. But every civilization would have the desire to conserve energy, and it takes a very little time (compared to galaxy-scale distances) to improve it to the point it's very weak. Humanity switched very quickly from weak radio signals (because the power sources were weak) to very weak radio signals (because we knew better what we were doing) to digital. That's a very short time frame and a weak signal. Not likely to be detected.

As for an intentional signal, well, if a powerful enough alien wants to be noticed, it will be. One could always come up with weird scenarios ("they want to test us so they're intentionally sending weak signals") but that's a very double edged sword ("they want to test us to see if they need to exterminate us") which doesn't justify SETI.

lowmemcpu• 6 years ago

As a means to get funding and interest in radioastronomy, by spinning more than a bit on the chances of it ever working, it made a lot of sense.

This sent me looking for the total half-century $ cost of SETI, but couldn't find it. Have any idea if that's been calculated?

yyyk2• 6 years ago

I didn't find much, but I have an idea for calculation:

* Most of their projects have a relatively static cost[0] year-by-year.

* The big variable is SETI@home. From the SETI PoV it's zero-cost, but that's not the case for society (compute, electricity, pollution).

It's not difficult to find TFLOPS estimates via BOINC or wiki. Translating that back to cost is rather difficult, for me at least. Most people did not buy computers for this. Network bandwidth cost is also difficult to estimate. I suspect main component is power for processing. But electricity estimates vary widely depending on hardware used, I dunno how to estimate the average consumption per TLOPS.

[0] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-annual-cost-of-operating-S...

coldtea• 6 years ago

So, will he return the taxpayer money?

CRUDite3• 6 years ago

I have a pet idea that if star lifting or some stellar engineering is used and it were to alter emission spectra in some detectable way that we could look for clusters of stars with the same altered emission, or just clusters of stars with some non normal emissions. At least it would be possible to scan alot of the sky quickly with a method like this. I suppose i dont know enough about stellar spectra to know if fingerprints like this could be out there

bena6• 6 years ago

You need to back that one up.

You're basically saying: "Assume we can eventually manipulate stars, then this follows".

And while that may be true, I'm not willing to grant you your first assumption. Why do you think anyone will be able to engineer a star? What do we have today that makes you think we can manipulate something that we can't even get within a million miles of.

RTV7• 6 years ago

gattr• 6 years ago

As regards frequency of civilizations occurring, I've read recently an interesting take: when we look at the Earth, each of the following milestones seems exponentially more difficult (i.e., probability density is far smaller for each):

- simple unicellular organisms to eukaryotes (~2 billion years)

- eukaryotes to multicellular lifeforms (~a few hundred million years)

- humans + consciousness + language + prehensile limbs (only a couple of million / a few hundred thousand years ago?)

In addition, if panspermia (exchange of biological material via meteorites/comets etc.) is in fact effective, the conclusion was: Earth-like planets may very well be (almost) universally covered (infested?) with one or another kind of unicellular goo; but only some tiny fraction has anything more interesting, and we could be one of the handful - or even the first technical civilization in the Milky Way.

My dad launched the quest to find alien intelligence

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