Apparently, this statement is supported by nothing more than the conviction that a thorough enough search will find the extraterrestrial civilizations they’re certain are out there, without much justification of that conviction. Don’t get me wrong, I’d think it would be great if it happened; but I think it’s entirely plausible that we are the only technological civilization in our galaxy. Even life may be rarer than the enthusiasts believe.
It’s most unfortunate that it’ll happen at the same time that the predicted inexplicalbe cataclysmic effect of legalizing gay marriage will finally come to pass and destroy the world; we’ll find aliens, but won’t be in a position to reap the benefits.
But they aren’t saying ‘will’…they are saying ‘could’. Big difference. Look at what the scientist quoted at the beginning is saying:
The chances are GOOD. I’d say that this is entirely plausible. IF there is intelligent and technologically developed life out there, they COULD find such a signal in the next 25 years.
As for life, I think the ‘enthusiasts’ are probably understating it…I won’t be surprised if we find additional life right here in our own solar system. There are several very promising places…it’s just a matter of getting off our collective asses and going out and really looking.
-XT
Yeah, but try as they might, finding a handful of mono-cellular bacteria tucked away in a methane puddle is just not all that cool. What the point of extraterrestrial life if it doesn’t have a disintegrator ray ?
I dunno, an alien ecosystem with multi-cellular life would be cool regardless of the disintegrator ray status
AFAIK we couldn’t even detect our own civilization if the clone Earth was more than ~100 light years away.
You’re forgetting about the legions of citizens subjected to alien anal probes.
It’s clear to me that alien communication is fart-based, which is expecially tough to pick up through a telescope.
What we need are interstellar proctoscopes.
Was this intended to be in the Pit?
Whether it is or not, predictions like this are so goddamned idiotic.
I will also make a great prediction - the Washington Generals are gonna go undefeated next year.
-Joe
Could spectroscopy at a sufficient resolution detect not only our oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere, but also our various pollutants? [/genuinely curious]
We can’t find any intelligence right here, what makes them think there will be any somewhere else?
Or maybe the aliens are smart and are avoiding us?
I hope it happens. We need slaves.
So do they.
Rolling my eyes here
No one listens to me now, what makes you think some super advanced, probably armed to the teeth with superior weaponry aliens will?
It’s pretty cool…if it doesn’t have anything related to life here on earth. Even if it does, it still tells us something.
Besides, we could raid that methane puddle there for energy, and burn those little mono-cellular organisms for a bit extra…
I’m assuming you mean because of radio signal dispersion. Probably true, but there are other ways to find distant civilizations than radio waves, and some of them will (assuming we don’t further gut the space program) be coming on line in the next half century or so, from what I understand. The next generation of space based telescopes should greatly enhance the search I believe.
Maybe Stranger or one of the other space guru’s will wander in, but I’d say the answer is ‘not today’. That said, with a powerful enough space based telescope system (maybe several widely dispersed to give you a bigger ‘lens’) I would think it possible, at least in our own galaxy.
-XT
That may not be an exact quote, but I actually think the chances that it is are pretty good.
True, true, but you got to admit the coolness factor goes way up with disintegrator rays (so long as they don’t use 'em on us). Let’s keep the Slim Whitman albums handy.
Possibly. Details in a minute.
So there are a few things going on right now that are going to have a great impact on SETI. First, the Kepler mission is fully underway. Kepler is looking at a region of sky, watching for transitions of planets in front of stars as they orbit. When a planet occludes a star, its brightness dims a little. By looking for these dimming effects, we can spot planets that can’t be seen directly.
Kepler has been watching a region of about 100,000 stars for somewhat less than a year now. It needs a planet to orbit three times before it can confirm it - a single dimming could be occluding dust clouds, or variance in star output or something like that. You need three orbits so that you get two matching periods, showing that the dimming is being done by an orbiting object.
For an earth-type planet to be orbiting a sun-like star in its habitable zone, its orbit will be close to one solar year. So for Kepler to detect an Earthlike planet, it has to watch the star for three years. But it can watch thousands of stars at the same time, so about two and a half years from now we’ll have a very good idea of how many stars have Earthlike planets orbiting them in their habitable zones.
Kepler has already discovered a number of planets among these stars, but they’re all ones that have orbited three times since Kepler started looking, which means they’re all orbiting very closely around the stars. But finding a bunch of them means the technology works.
So three years from now, we will have a good idea of how many potentially habitable planets there are in the universe. If it turns out to be exceedingly common for a sun-like star to have an earth-like planet, then we can start looking at closer stars in detail. After Kepler, the data would be used by future missions like the Terrestrial Planet Finder, which would take a more detailed survey of much nearer stars, cataloging Earth-Type planets, and measuring their atmospheric composition in detail.
The Terrestrial Planet Finder and the (proposed) Life Finder missions would then be able to start measuring details about these planets and star systems. Because some of the light from the star passes through the planet’s atmosphere, the star’s spectrographic signature will change slightly. This may allow us to actually measure the atmospheric composition of these planets.
We might be able to tell if it’s primarily nitrogen, or whether it has high oxygen content or water vapor. There are some life signatures like methane we might see. And if there’s a high oxygen content, that’s a sign that there may be a biosphere, because oxygen does not last in the atmosphere and must be continually replaced.
One good way of doing that is through photosynthesis. Terrestrial Planet Finder will be able to measure in enough detail to know the rough composition of the atmosphere, so right there we’ll already have good SETI data, one way or the other.
I’m not exactly sure what the capabilities of Kepler are in terms of being able to measure this - it’s not in their science goals, but I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that there was a chance Kepler could return some useful data along these lines, at least in rudimentary form.
Once TPF and other missions narrow down some local candidates, we can then start directing radio telescopes at them, trying to pick up signals. We can’t afford to linger on specific stars today very much, because we have no idea which ones even have earth-like planets. So we do more broad-based sweeps of the sky. But if we know that a star 20 light-years from here has an earth-like planet and its atmosphere shows signs of potential life, we can start focusing in on it.
In the meantime, the Mars Surface Laboratory mission will be roaming around Mars, specifically sampling the ground for signs of life. This thing is the size of a pickup truck and has a nuclear battery, so it can go for a long time, day and night, and will have enough power for more sophisticated experiments.
Within 25 years it’s also possible that we’ll land on Europa near the surface ice cracks - maybe even landing a submersible that can melt its way through the ice into the ocean below, looking for multi-cellular life.
So there’s actually a lot of stuff happening right now that should greatly improve our odds of finding extra-terrestrial life in the next 25 years.
However, there’s one thing we absolutely won’t know until we actually find someone through a radio search: How often a planet that starts with simple life evolves complicated technological societies? There’s no way to know that unless we can see unambiguous industrial pollution in an atmosphere, or until we make contact with something.
The way the science seems to be going, it seems like life should be pretty ubiquitous. The big stumbling block may be the formation of intelligent life. It’s entirely possible that simple life is everywhere, but we’re the first planet to develop a space-going society.
Will aliens be able to build a base near ground zero? What if they have three sexes, could they marry? Will they put the toilet paper roll with the end towards the wall or facing out. The mind boggles.
Excellent review of the current situation Sam Stone. Just to be clear, I am not poo-pooing the idea of looking for extraterrestrial life. The programs you mention are a lot more reasonable than the bald assertion that we almost certainly WILL pick up radio signals from extraterrestrials once we look hard enough.
I put this in the Pit simply because what I took as the over-optimism of the linked article irked me.