Is SETI a Waste of Time?

Great Debates
21

[QUOTE=Voyager]
The knowledge that we are not alone. Perhaps some high technology. Perhaps a totally different perspective on philosophical issues. The first is big enough.

We only recently started listening in on enough channels to be interesting - you can hardly count Project Ozma. Though the odds are long, the ante is small and the pot is big, so the expected value is pretty darn good.
[/QUOTE]

Knowledge that we are not alone and perspective on philosophical issue OK. Reasonable people can discuss the benefits of this.

Technology exchange? Please. Star Trek is fiction.

22

But honestly, how much money is this? It’s chump change. It’s not like SETI is sucking up money that could be going to fund the Iraq war or other important things. And it’s not funded by the taxpayers. SETI isn’t even one program, but rather a collection of several programs, most of which aren’t active any more.

As for the objection that the likelyhood would be that any signals detected would be too far away for two-way communication, so what? We don’t have to establish a communication system, just listening in on the signals would be worthwhile. If they’re 100 light years away, so what? Why is that a problem? The mere proof of the existance of such signals–even if we couldn’t make any sense out of them–would be worthwhile.

23

[QUOTE=Duke of Rat]

If you could get past the first few exchanges and establish streaming content, you might have a little more context of what’s going on on each planet, but it could take hundreds of years just to establish a rapport. If the stream indicated a disease or war or natural disaster was happening there, it’d be 100 years before we knew it, and another 100 by the time they got our reply, by which time they might not even be there to reply.
[/QUOTE]

Yeah, but so what? Sure, it may be a while before we hear back from them (assuming they’re interested in communicating further with us at all), but what’s a century or two in the grand scheme of things?

Knowing that we’re separated by hundreds of years, we could send a “big picture” message to begin with if we wanted to. Not “Sup! Good to hear from ya. Not much going on here… a few wars here and there, research is going at a reasonable pace, our population is increasing… what’s up with you?” and then wait a century.

Maybe something like “Hello. You are the first extraterrestrial contact our species has ever made. We’ve inhabited this planet for X number of orbits around our star, we’re now the dominant species and we’ve just begun a technological golden age and we’re amazed to find you… yadda yadda yadda… here’s a history of our species as we know it… yadda yadda yadda… understand that there’s significant latency between our messages, but we would love to communicate further… blah blah… we come in peace as long as you don’t have significant petroleum reserves… blah… blah… if you know of any other peaceful civilizations, please send them our coordinates and request that they start communications… if you have any technologies that would speed up communications, send that our way too.” Etc.

If we deem it wise, we could even start a project to transmit the sum of all human knowledge to them, starting with the entire digitized contents of the Library of Congress, the textbooks and manuals of the world, Star Trek episodes, etc. etc. And then continue that process as long as we choose to, perhaps even mirroring the new Internet content that Google finds every day out into space.

And… what if they thought of the same thing? It’s possible (though not necessarily probable) that the first message we receive would’ve been sent purposefully as a means to establish communications, and as such might be long, detailed, contain unimaginable technological advances, whatever. Who knows? The problems we have are latency and noise, not bandwidth.

The question really shouldn’t be “Is it worth our time?” but rather “Now or later?”. If there is intelligent life out there and both species survive long enough, we’ll run into one another eventually. Haven’t we seen that in our own history? Most nations sat around content in growing fat and prosperous or perhaps battling their neighbors, but once in a while they’d produce an explorer or two who would then set sail for the great unknown. Many of these explorers would return finding nothing of value, others yet will discover something but die in the process, but once in a while, entire new worlds are discovered with all the subsequent upheavals they imply.

Sure, a meeting of species – should it ever occur – may turn out disastrous for one species or both, but the thing is, humans are so naturally curious and bent on exploration/conquest that we’d try anyway even if some of us decided it wasn’t such a great idea. We could kill SETI now if we so desired, but somebody somewhere is bound to resurrect it someday in some form or another. It’s easy to flick a switch and turn off a radio telescope, not so easy to flick a switch and turn off human curiosity. If we don’t do it, our kids will; if they don’t, their grandkids will; even if there’s a nuclear war and we’re bombed back to the stone age, half a century later, a new spacefaring civilization could arise and try again. But if there’s a chance… however slim… that this meeting could occur in our lifetimes, that you and I may be the first homo sapiens ever to hear from a mystical being in the sky… wouldn’t you be excited? I dunno. It just sounds so much more interesting than to die saying that I worked 9-5 for thirty years and earned my own white picket fence.

?

Yeah, Trek is fiction. So?

Technology exchange isn’t. It happens all the time between human tribes and civilizations. Why couldn’t it with extraterrestrials?

And how would you know whether this is a “reasonable” possibility or not? All we, as humans, know is what we’ve learned in our isolated existence. We can calculate the probabilities of establishing extraterrestrial communications via the methods that we know about, but we don’t know if there are means or methods out there to reach us that we’ve never considered before. Ask a medieval horseman how soon the enemy could reach him at top speed, and even by his grossest overestimations he’d never say “ten minutes via a stealth supersonic bomber”.

24

I remember reading somewhere that the problem with SETI is that if there was a clone Earth X light years away we couldn’t detect our own transmissions with our current technology, where X is a fairly small distance…like 30 or 40 light years I think it was.

Can someone comment on the correctness of that?

25

[QUOTE=Cervaise]
I am perfectly happy to have a fraction of a fraction of a penny of my tax contributions going to the effort to listen to the skies…
[/QUOTE]
When it comes to gov’t expenditures, I have a hard time accepting the ‘portion of a milli-penny’ / pie chart analogy. I’m not saying it’s used incorrectly - just that there’s more than one way to break down & look at that expenditure.

NASA says SETI’s annual budget is $4 million. What’s a nearly invisible fraction of a penny from each taxpayer to some is also the total annual tax bill paid by 288 median-income taxpayers. Ask just about anyone if they’d mind that a milli-cent of their federal taxes is spent on SETI, and they’d shrug. But ask that same person if he minds that every federal tax dollar he and 287 other people pays goes toward the program, and you’d likely get a far different response.

26

I always had a couple of questions about the SETI efforts and it caused me to write to the SETI institute. I wound up having an email exchange with Seth Shostak, the Senior Astronomer there. Here is my email exchange.
My original email to the SETI Institute:

I was wondering this the other day and then looked up the information
on your website. If a signal from another civilization has to be repeatable,
then any civilization looking for us would not consider us a “find.”

Your faq says this regarding signals:

“they are credible only when they can be found more than once.”

But then you also says this in your faq:

----SETI researchers have not been very interested in broadcasting because of the long time one has to wait for a reply. If the nearest civilization is 100 light-years away, we would have to sit around for 200 years for a reply to a deliberate broadcast. Nonetheless, a few, mostly symbolic, intentional messages have been sent. One message, transmitted in 1974 from the Arecibo Observatory, was a simple picture describing our solar system, the compounds important for life, the structure of the DNA molecule, and the form of a human being. The message was transmitted in the direction of the globular star cluster M13, about 25,000 light years away.----

So, if every civilization took your way of looking at things, NONE of them would be transmitting a signal that could be found repeatedly. So, why bother looking when we, ourselves, would not fulfill the requirement of your standards of finding an intelligent civilization? In other words, why should we expect to find repeated signals from other civilizations when we are not doing the same? If anything, we should be sending signals somewhere, so that a similar project on another planet would find out signal and figure out that we lived here. Who cares how long it would take or if we’d even get a response? At least, then WE’D be proof to that alien civilization that they are not alone even if they never responded.

Just curious.
Shawn

Dear Shawn,

Thanks for the e-mail. Your point is a good one, but keep in mind two things: (1) actually, signals from Earth (mostly TV and radar) would be found over and over. So that might clinch it for the aliens. (2) We’ve only had radio for a hundred years or so. They may have had it for 100 thousand. I’m sure they can afford to keep their transmitters on…

Cheers,
Seth Shostak

My second email:

Thanks for replying to my email. I was impressed that Dr. Shostak responded because I had heard of you and had listened to you on The Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast. My last question to you was generated because I had been thinking about the “Wow!” signal. Because it was not repeated, it’s not conclusive that it was from another intelligence. However, you replied in your email that another civilization would be able to detect us based on our radio and television transmissions alone and not necessarily due to any active transmission on our part.

My question is now more refined: Let’s say that a planet with an identically-developed civilization existing on a twin of Earth exists 30 light years from us. Using the methods we are using now, could we detect that civilization? In other words, could we detect ourselves using our own methods and would we realize it as a civilization?

And with regard to the “Wow!” signal, I have read a few articles about how several possible reasons have been eliminated. However, I have not read about any natural sources that could have generated the signal. Are there any natural phenomena that we know of that could have generated the signal?

I find the SETI project fascinating because I think it would be the most important discovery EVER if a signal were found. And Contact, the novel, is one of my favorite books (the ending was much more satisfying than the movie’s, in my opinion).

Thanks,
Shawn
Dear Shawn,

No, we couldn’t detect “ourselves” from 30 ly with the type of SETI searches we ourselves run… Well, that’s not quite true. We could hear certain radar transmissions at that distance. I’ve written an article about this for SPACE.com… you might find it archived on the SETI Institute Web site.

No known natural phenomena could have generated the Wow signal, but there are plenty of equipment faults or earthly interference that could have.

Sincerely,
Seth Shostak
End of email exchange.

27

[QUOTE=Reply]
Yeah, but so what? Sure, it may be a while before we hear back from them (assuming they’re interested in communicating further with us at all), but what’s a century or two in the grand scheme of things?

Knowing that we’re separated by hundreds of years, we could send a “big picture” message to begin with if we wanted to. Not “Sup! Good to hear from ya. Not much going on here… a few wars here and there, research is going at a reasonable pace, our population is increasing… what’s up with you?” and then wait a century.

Maybe something like “Hello. You are the first extraterrestrial contact our species has ever made. We’ve inhabited this planet for X number of orbits around our star, we’re now the dominant species and we’ve just begun a technological golden age and we’re amazed to find you… yadda yadda yadda… here’s a history of our species as we know it… yadda yadda yadda… understand that there’s significant latency between our messages, but we would love to communicate further… blah blah… we come in peace as long as you don’t have significant petroleum reserves… blah… blah… if you know of any other peaceful civilizations, please send them our coordinates and request that they start communications… if you have any technologies that would speed up communications, send that our way too.” Etc.

[/QUOTE]

That’d be great if they were in a position to understand any of it. What if their technology was at the level of Marconi wireless? We send them the sum total of all human knowledge and they think it’s just static. It might take many back and forth transmissions to just establish a language.

Whales have lived on our same planet for millions (?) of years, we could converse in real time, not messages delayed by hundreds or thousands of years and I don’t see us getting the sum knowledge of whale history from them.

It’s all romantic daydreaming.

Decipher whale-speak and I’ll take it more serious.

28

[QUOTE=crosssection]
Who profits monetarily from SETI?

Usually these projects allow someone to get rich. Either the landowner or builder at the sites, or some administrators and directors at the top.

I just wonder if vested interests keep this going long after its scientific hopes passed the point of no return.
[/QUOTE]

Just how much money do you think is spent on SETI, for crying out loud? Nobody can get rich from SETI money, for that you need a Department of Defense contract.

29

[QUOTE=gazpacho]
Knowledge that we are not alone and perspective on philosophical issue OK. Reasonable people can discuss the benefits of this.

Technology exchange? Please. Star Trek is fiction.
[/QUOTE]

I doubt it would be an exchange. Unless there was an incredible fluke, any civilization we would hear from would be thousands of years ahead of us, or more. We’ve had radio for only an instant. Thus the technology would go one way - to us.

If civilizations die after a few hundred years, we won’t be hearing from anybody.

I’m not quite sure what you mean by the Star Trek crack, but one flaw in most sf with ftl travel is that the civilzations we meet are either at our level or older and stagnant. That seems very unlikely, and is a good reason to think that ftl travel is impossible. :frowning: But that doesn’t rule out radio contact. It won’t hurt for us to wait 200 years for technology that is 1,000 years ahead of ours. We might not even have to wait that long if the radio message is a tutorial.

30

[QUOTE=Duke of Rat]
That’d be great if they were in a position to understand any of it. What if their technology was at the level of Marconi wireless? We send them the sum total of all human knowledge and they think it’s just static. It might take many back and forth transmissions to just establish a language.

Whales have lived on our same planet for millions (?) of years, we could converse in real time, not messages delayed by hundreds or thousands of years and I don’t see us getting the sum knowledge of whale history from them.

It’s all romantic daydreaming.

Decipher whale-speak and I’ll take it more serious.
[/QUOTE]

We don’t know how to communicate with them directly, and as far as I know we never have been able to, but that still hasn’t stopped us from decoding other human civilizations’ messages and learning from their technologies. I suppose SETI is hoping for more human-compatible extraterrestrials, or barring that, super-intelligent beings who could treat us the way we treat monkeys and teach us new things. Yes, it’s all romantic daydreaming, but which dream isn’t until it becomes a reality?

31

SETI is valuable, even if we don’t pick something up. Because not picking something up is also a valid result - it’s data that can be used by others to advance our understanding of what’s out there, even if the answer is “not much”, or “not easily found”.

32

[QUOTE=Reply]
We don’t know how to communicate with them directly, and as far as I know we never have been able to, but that still hasn’t stopped us from decoding other human civilizations’ messages and learning from their technologies. I suppose SETI is hoping for more human-compatible extraterrestrials, or barring that, super-intelligent beings who could treat us the way we treat monkeys and teach us new things. Yes, it’s all romantic daydreaming, but which dream isn’t until it becomes a reality?
[/QUOTE]

I don’t think it’s wrong to dream about it, but I think it’s a little far fetched to hope for something even remotely “human”. If we can’t decipher the languages of beings in our own back yard, then maybe we don’t need to be poking about in the cosmos for pen pals. And I just used whales, I didn’t even think of the Star Trek connection when I used that example, stupid of me. It does illustrate that we aren’t really very good at decoding language, there is some “intelligence” in there, the whales know what they are saying.

Think how hard it would be to learn even a different human language at one lesson a millennium.

Dream on, many great discoveries were probably only dreams once.

And I had the SETI@HOME client in a machine some time ago, so I’m not really opposed to it per se.

33

[QUOTE=JohnBckWLD]
When it comes to gov’t expenditures, I have a hard time accepting the ‘portion of a milli-penny’ / pie chart analogy. I’m not saying it’s used incorrectly - just that there’s more than one way to break down & look at that expenditure.

NASA says SETI’s annual budget is $4 million. What’s a nearly invisible fraction of a penny from each taxpayer to some is also the total annual tax bill paid by 288 median-income taxpayers. Ask just about anyone if they’d mind that a milli-cent of their federal taxes is spent on SETI, and they’d shrug. But ask that same person if he minds that every federal tax dollar he and 287 other people pays goes toward the program, and you’d likely get a far different response.
[/QUOTE]

Only if he didn’t have a basic understanding of fractions.

-Joe

34

For me, the point is not to get lessons from some distant advanced civilization. There are two things here for me, both brought up in Cosmos. First if we find a signal, then we will know for sure that we are not alone. Even if we can’t understand it or if it’s no help at all. Geez, just to know that we are not alone would change everything. The other possibility is that we don’t find any signals. This too would be a profound discovery in that we may be the only ones here and that out of the vastness of the universe we would have to realize the rarity of life and it’s fragility.

35

[QUOTE=Shawn1767]
The other possibility is that we don’t find any signals. This too would be a profound discovery in that we may be the only ones here and that out of the vastness of the universe we would have to realize the rarity of life and it’s fragility.
[/QUOTE]

You can’t extapolate that to the entire universe though. We’re just talking about our own rather small sector of the Milky Way.

36

[QUOTE=Shawn1767]
For me, the point is not to get lessons from some distant advanced civilization. There are two things here for me, both brought up in Cosmos. First if we find a signal, then we will know for sure that we are not alone. Even if we can’t understand it or if it’s no help at all. Geez, just to know that we are not alone would change everything. The other possibility is that we don’t find any signals. This too would be a profound discovery in that we may be the only ones here and that out of the vastness of the universe we would have to realize the rarity of life and it’s fragility.
[/QUOTE]

Why would it change everything? People have a tendency to overestimate the effect of big events, but after the initial shock things seem to get back to normal pretty quickly. Without an actual impact on our daily lives, how would knowing that smart aliens exist actually affect our day-to-day living?

And how could prove the nonexistence of aliens any more than you could prove the nonexistence of God?

37

I’m not sure I buy this argument. In some ways, extraterrestrials who broadcast their alien language in the form of electromagnetic signals would likely be more similar to us mentally than terrestrial whales are: e.g., they’d have at least a somewhat similar understanding of the math and physics required to make such broadcasts.

I don’t think it’s too farfetched to suppose that detecting some kind of recognizably deliberate pattern in signals from a technologically advanced extraterrestrial culture would actually be less difficult for modern humans than interpreting whale song.

38

Reply said:

Out of “big events” I would say that discovering intelligent life other than our own, would probably be the biggest in human exploration. I doubt anyone could estimate what the impact would be for the way humankind would react. Yeah, sure, it won’t make a difference in how I shave in the morning or get to work, but in a profound, deep-down way, it would change how I look at the world. To actually “know” there was someone out there. Religion would have to deny or incoporate the idea. There would probably be a renewed interest in space and astronomy. Until Paris Hilton has to spend a few days in jail or TomKat gets divorced and the discovery is moved to page 9. But for some of us, it would be something that would be the ultimate discovery.

And I did not mean to suggest proving the nonexistence of aliens, I just meant that after a long search and not finding anything would suggest that we be better stewards of our own planet because we hadn’t found anything else out there which means that in this incredibly vast universe, chances are that we aren’t going to hook up with any alien intelligences even if they are out there.

39

[QUOTE=Kimstu]
I’m not sure I buy this argument. In some ways, extraterrestrials who broadcast their alien language in the form of electromagnetic signals would likely be more similar to us mentally than terrestrial whales are: e.g., they’d have at least a somewhat similar understanding of the math and physics required to make such broadcasts.

I don’t think it’s too farfetched to suppose that detecting some kind of recognizably deliberate pattern in signals from a technologically advanced extraterrestrial culture would actually be less difficult for modern humans than interpreting whale song.
[/QUOTE]

I don’t see why the ability to communicate in the electromagnetic spectrum would have all that much bearing on the type of information transmitted. Conversely, there are human civilizations on Earth that can communicate with each other and have been able to for centuries that have no electromagnetic capabilities. They are smarter than whales and nobody in the universe would ever know they existed.

Right now, if we started receiving whale, we wouldn’t understand it. That some civilization is out there pinging away with prime numbers or some “intelligent” content is a stretch. We are the most intelligent species we know of and a whole lot of our electromagnetic broadcast history ain’t rocket science. Why would we assume theirs would be? Sure, there is some inherent technology embedded in the transmissions, but it’s not the blueprints to our civilization. And by the time anybody receives it, decodes it, understands it, and replies, we may no longer have a civilization to write back about.

That’s the thing about the “inhabitable planet” recently discovered. Only 10 light years away. Right in our own back yard. And it’d take what? a thousand years to get there in a spaceship? Still, a notable discovery.

So while it would be big news that we discovered an extraterrestrial transmission, I just feel that the distances involved would make the timescale so large to be outside the human attention span. We all know about the Battle of Hastings in 1066, a thousand years ago. We know a lot less about the 1000 years before that. Of course we feel that our civilization, our technology, our collective memory will be here in 1000 years. Will it? Now if we said “Hi” right then (1066) to aliens, and they got it today and replied, and it takes another 10 centuries for us to get that reply, I just don’t see how it could be much more than a novelty. Plus the fact that by the time we get any transmisson, the aliens that sent it may well be long dead, or moved past the technology to the point that it’s no longer in their collective consciousness. We might very well both miss each other completely.

I don’t want to be a wet towel, but the time/distance problem just seems to be insurmountable to me.

So I get your point about an alien transmission probably sharing some laws of physics that would make it recognizable as intelligent, then again they might slap some 1024 bit encryption on their version of “I Love Lucy” and we’d never crack it :slight_smile:

40

I’ve read that Ben Franklin saw one of the early Montgolfier balloon experiments in Paris and was very impressed. When someone scoffed, “What use is it?” he replied, “What use is a newborn baby?”

We haven’t been listening to the cosmos for very long. We’ve already learned some interesting stuff. Who knows what we’ll learn next week, next month, next year? It’s a tiny, shoestring effort, but if we found proof of an ET civilization it could shift human history forever.