A link to Arecibo Observatory. Of you look around long enough, maybe you can find how they filled it with water for Goldeneye 
In addition to what MEBuckneraccurately says, something else occurs to me: in the Bible, it is said that God made Man in His image. If there are alien civilisations out there, which don’t look like us, then perhaps a lot of Christians and Jews might have reason to doubt the Bible?
jk1245
“Super-aggressive societies”? Like humans? We live in an anarchic world, by our own choosing, and war with each other constantly.
But we’re pretty tenacious, as a whole.
This doesn’t really make sense to my basic understanding of Darwinism (social or biological) either.
My personal feeling is that it is a waste of time. However, since that is just my feeling and I don’t have any facts to back it up (obviously), I have no plans on trying to convince others to agree.
Dave Stewart:
Why?
That’s what the SDMB is for.
Instead of thinking of SETI in terms of success/failure, it’s more accurate to consider it as a data gathering tool. After all, if we find no evidence of other civilizations, then that in itself is useful scientific data. The lack of easy-to-find radio transmissions will help us make more accurate assumptions about the conditions needed for life, or the likelihood of earthlike planets existing in the universe. That in turn may help cosmologists build better models.
This is already happening, BTW. The apparent radio silence of intelligent beings has stimulated other researchers to try and figure out why intelligent life may be rare. That in turn led to models of solar system formation that suggest that the existance of a Jupiter-class planet is necessary to allow life to evolve, because it acts like a cosmic vacuum cleaner and gets rid of most of the dangerous bits of junk like asteroids floating around. Without Jupiter, we probably would have been bombarded with many more extinction-level strikes like the one that took out the dinosaurs, and that might have prevented the evolution of intelligent life.
This is the grand quest of our age - to learn the nature of the universe and our place in it. It is the true, long term goal and direction of mankind. It is horribly, horribly shortsighted to focus all of our resources on short-term comforts when the big questions before us are unanswered. SETI is a valid part of that quest.
Ummmm…
…forget I said anything.
Funny, but the answer is yes. Read Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot”. In order to calibrate our life-finding technologies/techniques, NASA used the Galileo fly-by of Earth (gravitational slingshot toward Jupiter) to see if it could detect signs of life on Earth. It did. Intelligent life is given away by complex signals (which Earth is emitting buckets of).
Er, actually I took a class from Don Gurnett, the PI on the Galileo radio science experiment, and Sagan’s coauthor on that Nature paper (ting, ting-ting . . . whoops, did I drop a name?), and IIRC, the only sign of intelligent life detectable by Galileo was ELF signals from submarines. Er, and I guess the fact that Galileo recieved commands from the ground should be proof that there’s somebody down there. 
(NB: Galileo wasn’t intended to search for civilization, and didn’t have instruments geared for this purpose. Phobos is quite correct that we’re very noisy.) Unfortunately, the Nature website is being balky for me, and the ADS doesn’t have an abstract, but here’s the cite:
Sagan, C.; Thompson, W. R.; Carlson, R.; Gurnett, D.; Hord, C., A Search for Life on Earth from the Galileo Spacecraft. NATURE V.365, NO.6448/OCT21, P. 715, 1993
Regarding alien life and religious beleif, while, for some people, extraterrestrial intelligence might cause a crisis of faith, many Christians refer to the “other sheep” passage, John 10:16: “And I have other sheep, that are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will heed my voice. So there shall be one flock, one shepherd.”
Interesting points, all.
The big question in my mind is one of technology. The universe has been around what, oh 4 billion years or so?
The human race has been broadcasting in the radio spectrum for 80 (what the hell, round up, what with Tesla inventing a radio controlled boat in 1895), so call it 100 years. And radio, as an analog technology is about to go away. Replaced by all digital communications. Which will be eclipsed by quantum communications (INSTANTANEOUS!) within the next 50 years. 100 years is a VERY small window within 4,000,000,000. Given that any other race with the same or better intellect that man has been given will follow roughly the same development lifecycle. The odds are LONG against us just happening to overlap windows, and then add in the fact due to the constraint of light speed itself.
Take another race, on a planet a mere 200 light years from earth, exactly mirroring the developments here on earth.
I seriously doubt that SETI will still be operating in the radio spectrum in another 100 years. But that is what it would take to actually detect that hypothetical other race. Are we, meanwhile, going to continue broadcasting via analog radio waves into the future, just in hopes of someone else hearing us? I don’t thinkg that the resources would be used in that manner.
Quantum communications, on the other hand, have NO time or distance limitations, so far as we can tell with current research. As long as SETI can keep up technologically until we reach that point, we may find the universe teaming with life, talking to others across this galaxy and the billions of others in real time. This seems much more likely, to my way of thinking.
O
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Just Rambling On.
Preview. Preview is my friend.
Ouic812, I won’t comment on the feasiblity of “quantuum communication” . . . but it’s obvious that there are better ways to communicate than with radio signals, and we will eventually stumble upon then. A couple of points:
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If they’re trying to reach us, ET could dumb it down.
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What makes you think that the next step in communication technology will be the end-all-be-all? It could be just another baby step. “Quantum communication? Pffft That went out with bell-bottoms! Nope, we communicate only by zorfimberts these days. You don’t know about zorfimberts? Ah, what a touchingly quaint species you are! Good thing we we had those radio beacons, or you’d have never clawed your way into the interstellar age!”
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I think that the point I was trying to make is best explained this way. Imagine the human race 5,000 years from now. On the univsersal time scale, that is just a blink of an eye. But we will have technologies that have advanced by orders of magnitude. Are WE as a race going to continue broadcasting on not only radio throughout that period, but in every other type of medium we come across, continually? I doubt it.
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Instantaneous communication IS the end-all-be-all! You speak into a microphone here on earth, and the person you are talking to in the Andromeda Galaxy hears you the same instant that you speak. No time lag due to the speed of light. Anything faster would have to travel back in time. Which could be possible as well.
O
LOL! I’ll bet anything some groups will want to convert the heathen aliens! I don’t know why, but that just strikes me as funny. I wonder if there’s a Chick tract about this.
However, it might not be too funny if the aliens aggressively push their own religion. Imagine them sending missionaries backed up by their technology to change our lifestyles. Nah, too irrational to contemplate.
Somehow I think Katar Hol from the planet Thanagar orbiting Polaris might have trouble thinking Jesus died for his sins in Palestine 2000 years ago…
Podkayne - do you really think ET would dumb it down or otherwise take sensible steps to establish contact? The absurdity surrounding the plaque on the Voyager (?) mission (which wouldn’t have been understood by most of our planet, let alone a species which didn’t visually read things) makes me think that if we can’t work out what to tell aliens where we are effectively, they might not be able to either.
Have you never been to Serendip?
Distributed computing (as mentioned) has already taken its first major steps as a direct outgrowth of SETI. Does it take forever for people to learn that learning itself is reason enough to study? As time passes and the mass of data grows, enthusiasts will develop algorithms to reassess the data, and recorrelate the variations. A huge wave of digital information looms ahead in our world. It is quite probable we will find in this program a model for systems that will be needed to break up this logjam. Long before it finds BEMs the search itself will provide information that will guide others to new discoveries about the universe itself.
Sometimes the journey itself is the destination.
Tris
“No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris … [because] no known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping.” ~ Orville Wright ~
Mangetout,
I’m not sure exactly what your point is. If you are trying to maintain that this project pioneered the concept, you couldn’t be more wrong. If you’re point is that it brought it more into the mainstream by choosing an application that was able to suck in millions of willing participants, you’re right, but I’m not convinced that this is really a ‘win’.
MEBuckner,
I don’t think we need SETI to complete this philosophical puzzle (particularly since the odds are not in favor of SETI ever finding that other civilazation).
In the grand scheme of things, SETI is not required. There are plenty of people in the scientific community that already buy in to the assumption that there are other forms of intelligent life out there, so whether there’s proof or not will not likely change the course of scientific endevor.
Nope. You can never prove the contrary. No evidence is simply that - no evidence.
Detecting evidence of another civilization is not contact and it is not communication. Just because we can hear them doesn’t mean that they can hear us. However, even if you suppose that there is a mutual discovery, the distances involved are likely to be prohibitive for communication. And even if you make a leap of faith that we will be able to send signals back and forth in some reasonable time frame, that’s still not communication. Scientist believe that we will be able to bridge the communication gap by starting with the “universal” language of mathematics, but that may be incredibly naive.
Oicu812,
Reset. The universe has been around for between 13 and 18 billion years. The Earth formed about 4 billion years ago, perhaps that’s what you were thinking.
Just a point of clarity. Current research, while showing that entangled particles can have superluminal interactions, also shows that no communication can be derived from these interactions. Also, there’s the minor detail of getting entangled particle pairs on both worlds…
However, your fundamental point is valid. There will likely be many advancements in communication technology that will render radio frequency obsolete. Moreover, who’s to say that the ETI’s might skip over RF entirely - we could be looking in the wrong spectrum…
Triskadecamus,
Ummm… distributed computing has been around for ten years or more. The only thing SETI did is give Joe User an REASON to participate with his home computer. I can guarantee you that if Intel could have figured out how to get home users excited about helping them design the Itanium, we would all have fragments of full-chip simulations running on our personal computers.
Yes, but there’s productive learning and there’s non productive learning. I could spend the rest of my life learning all manner of useless trivia and, unless I happen to land a slot on a game show, that learning will not produce anything. If that same energy were applied in another domain, think of what could be accomplished. What if, instead of SETI running on personal computers all over the world, we had DeHuGe - Decoding the Human Genome? (I just made that up, BTW - I claim copyrights!!!) We might be a lot further along to curing certain genetic maladies or have new cures for cancer.
I’m not against SETI, by the way, I’ve just got more productive things to do with my idle computer time… like generate pretty fractal images… yeah, that’s the ticket… pretty fractal images for my wife mmm… Morgan Fairchild.
We all know the aliens are at area 51, its just a cover project.
Don’t you watch tv ?
Hey, missionaries have been convinced people of stranger things.
Well, the point is we don’t know. It is certainly conceivable that aliens do want to talk to us, that the are willing to broadcast in radio to reach budding technological civilizations, and that the are smart enough to figure out a way to make the signal intelligible to us. The signal wouldn’t have to carry much information for it to have a profound impact, after all. At minimum, it must simply be obviously artificial. And who knows what data a clever alien could bury in it?
Or maybe they already know all about us, and they buzz the planet for fun and watch Who Wants to be a Millioniare? while carefully hiding their presence from us. shrug
If a signal is out there, it’d be a real shame to miss it, even if it’s just a primitive interstellar, “Konroy was here.”
The Voyager and Pioneer plaques were little more than empty gestures, PR stunts. No ET is going to even find that tiny piece of junk in interstellar space, much less decipher the plaque–but even knowing that, the thought of the image of a man and a woman out there in the dark vacuum gives me shivers. (Eh, I’m a space geek, and I’m not afraid to admit it.) The plaque isn’t for the aliens, it’s for us.
Nonetheless, ye gads, man, what makes you think we’d want them to know where we are? Haven’t you seen Independence Day!?! But I think the pulsar map was a really clever idea. No idea if the ETs would suss it out, but it’s very very clever from this primate’s point of view. It’s hard to imagine a species that wouldn’t have an appreciation of a simple map, but maybe that’s just that ol’ H. sap. sap. arrogance.
I dunno. Depends on what our priorities are in the future. You think that would be a waste of time. Congress thought that SETI was a waste of time. A good chunk of the human race (members of the Planetary Society) disagreed.
Ah, you only say that because you’ve never communicated by zorfimbert! You obviously have no idea all the advantages they offer over primitive “instantaneous” communication. You’re so entranced with your quantum communication just because there’s no time lag. . . chuckle You humans, you really do crack me up.
Are you saying that scientists will accept that there is or has been intelligent life other than humans–not just the possibility of non-human intelligent life–based on pure reason alone, or some kind of leap of faith? I don’t think that’s how science works. Science works on evidence.
That’s true, and yet many branches of science are in that position. “We’ve found the Slightly Odd Quark; now if we can just find the Really Weird Quark, we’ll prove the Revised Substandard Model of nuclear physics is correct!” How long do you hunt for some subatomic particle before absence of evidence starts sending the theorists back to the drawing board? At some point between “right now” and “the human race and its distant descendants have spent a million years sending space probes out across the galaxy, and have never found any sign of anyone else out there” we would have to start re-thinking our notions of how stars and planets and life and intelligence came to be. Right now, we’re finding lots of planets; so far, no Earth-like planets, but partly there are biases in the way we’re searching–little dirtballs like this don’t show up well with our current instruments. There are things on the drawing board that should be able to directly detect Earth-like planets, and give very convincing if indirect evidence of extra-terrestrial life, if there are Earth-like planets and extraterrestrial life to be found in our neighborhood. And so we will gather more information in order to try to get a better understanding of the Universe and our place in it.