Seth Shostak From SETI: We WILL Find Aliens In Space

http://singularityhub.com/2012/07/23/seth-shostak-from-seti-we-will-find-aliens-in-space/

by olalonde • 14 years ago

27 22 14 years ago

retube• 14 years ago

This is _the_ definition of talking your own book!

iwwr• 14 years ago

Apparently, if an identical radio-Earth existed somewhere, current SETI hardware could detect it at about 1000 ly distance. Within 1K ly there are a few million stars, and an exhaustive search of that space could be done in a decade or two (assuming a reasonable expansion of computing power). We are far from exhausting our own neighborhood, let alone the galaxy (100K ly) or farther-away places (Andromeda is 2.5mil ly distant).

Edit: it may be reasonable to assume that a civilization's radio footprint does not expand much from our current level, since point-to-point optical (or higher) communication has vastly better bandwidth options. Even on our Earth, the vast quantity of information flows through ground-based wires rather than wirelessly.

twoodfin• 14 years ago

Apparently, if an identical radio-Earth existed somewhere, current SETI hardware could detect it at about 1000 ly distance.

What's the rationalization for this? Is our radio footprint really so powerful as to not be drowned out by 1000 ly worth of background radiation?

pavel_lishin5• 14 years ago

I think it depends on the wavelength, doesn't it? I can see a pie in the oven, despite all of the infrared background radiation surrounding it.

knowaveragejoe• 14 years ago

Well, if the identical radio-earth started transmitting 1000 years ago, they could...

dkersten• 14 years ago

Sometimes I wish all the SETI@home processing power would instead be focused on Folding@home. I think the likelihood of SETI finding alien life is pretty slim.

The satellites and other technology that SETI uses is pretty interesting though and I imagine they make enough (non-alien-life) discoveries to make it worthwhile.

ynniv• 14 years ago

"Do Americans really believe the same government that runs the postal service is covering up alien life?"

This argument irritates me every time I hear it. Let me make an equivalent substitution:

"Do Americans really believe the same government that increasingly and permanently collects everything that they say and do while bathing them in propagada without them ever realizing it is covering up alien life?"

Government is people, and people pay a lot more attention when money or power are involved. In fact, it's such a straw man argument that always have to wonder if the purveyor actually believes the opposite.

Kinda makes me want to adjust my tin foil hat and pay more attention to the night sky.

sp332• 14 years ago

On top of that, the USPS is pretty good.

jlhamilton• 14 years ago

The USPS is terrible.

jonno• 14 years ago

It's a soundbite analogy suggesting that the Government isn't generally terribly organised and covering up something as huge as aliens not only existing but already having been among us isn't likely. Considering what he does for a living Seth must get asked this question loads and this is a convenient way to get his point across without having to have a long winded discussion every time on the complexities or unlikelihood of a cover up of this magnitude.

alpine• 14 years ago

Like fusion or a cure for cancer the break through is always 'a few decades away'. Which is a promise that conveniently meets the dual criteria a) soon enough to continue to attract funding b) far enough in the future to allow the current cohort of scientists to reach retirement.

pavel_lishin5• 14 years ago

> But all jokes aside, the reason we haven’t met any aliens yet could just be because they don’t care about us – maybe we’re not an advanced-enough civilization to interest them for a visit.

> Whatever the case may be, Shostak is on guard and ready for any signal should/when it comes in. In the meantime, we’ve got some work to do if we’d like to prove to our cosmic-brothers that were any smarter than the dinosaurs. Aside from a few stints on the moon, mankind has barely left the rock we arose from.

Why is the assumption that travel through space is the litmus test of intelligence? That's making a pretty broad assumption about an alien intelligence whose motivations, as they say in the previous paragraph, may well be literally inconceivable.

Maybe they'd be more impressed with us figuring out how to co-exist without warfare, or how to understand our own minds, or how to master our physical bodies so that disease isn't a problem, or some other criteria.

antidoh• 14 years ago

My same reaction.

I would be more impressed by us if we treated each other well, and all were fed, clothed, sheltered, healthy, and free of existential anxiety.

"Look, I can see the wars from up here."

danielweber2• 14 years ago

There are people on Earth who try to communicate with dolphins and apes. Unless there were some kind of, er, directive against attempting communication, some enterprising individuals in the advanced civilization would try to contact us.

pavel_lishin5• 14 years ago

Unless the desire to communicate with other intelligences is a uniquely human/mammalian trait.

vlucas• 14 years ago

How did this get on Hacker News? This is one man's opinion of what MIGHT happen within some vaguely specified time in the future, and it's quite a bold assertion. There is overwhelming evidence that the chances of us detecting alien life with our current radio telescopes (or even ones 10x as powerful) is slim to none. We're just beginning to scratch the surface of our own galaxy, but there are countless billions more. I suspect that if we ever do detect alien life (if it exists at all), it will be many, many generations from now when we might possibly (hopefully) have a collaborative effort towards a global space program with a lot more focus than current space programs are getting today.

wkearney99• 14 years ago

Size isn't the only problem. Time is the bigger issue. The likelihood of there being something else out there is one thing. The chance that they've been active enough during a time in which we're looking for them is vanishingly small. Look at it this way, what if they died out just before the first telescopes were created here on earth? Or what if they're active right now? We won't see any signs of them for hundreds of years.

Space is big, sure, but time is even more vast.

Whoops, missed them by that much...

Seth Shostak From SETI: We WILL Find Aliens In Space

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