SETI - the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.
Scientists are searching the skies for signals sent by other civilisations.
What if it succeeds?
Just suppose we detect a repeating signal of the first 137 prime numbers, or maybe a few minutes of alien The Price is Right, from an intelligent civilization 973 light years away.
What do we do about it?
What do we do? I think nothing, other than continue listening.
We may be able to learn something from them. There is no reasonable way that we can have 2 way communication since turnaround time is almost 2000 years.
On the other hand, the fact that we now KNOW that there is other intelligent life in the universe will have profound effects on us.
J.
I never assumed there was any end game other than “we’re curious to know”.
If and when we discover them (or vice versa), they’re going to be WAY the fuck-and-gone distant from us. Star Trek and cohorts aside, the energy requirements for interstellar travel are almost beyond comprehension, let alone within reach. The timeframes involved, likewise.
I’m aware that there’s a marginal possibility that massive leaps in technology could have an impact on that. But if so, it doesn’t look like a leap that’s right around the corner. We’re well-challenged to manage how not to outstrip our planet’s resources before we get more efficient at managing our current needs. We haven’t managed fusion yet. We’re not even in the same ballpark as interstellar travel.
That is pretty much it.
In reality that chance of SETi finding anything is ridiculously remote. So much so that I would take some issue with calling the SETI crowd scientists. SETI isn’t a scientific enterprise.
If there was an unambiguous signal found, we could look forward to a burgeoning field of UFO cult religions. A round trip conversation with aliens 973 light years away takes about the same time as we are away from the dawn of Christianity to now. A lot is going to happen down here before we get past “how are things going on your end?”
(We would be well advised not to go letting the universe know we are made of meat. Nothing good can come from that. Attaching pictorial menus to spacecraft is hardly smart either.)
Yes, one of the most fundamental questions about life is, “is life common throughout the universe, or is life on Earth a one-off?” We think life must be common on other planets, but we just don’t know. We only have one example of life forming on one planet, so far.
Another question is, “life may be common, but is intelligent life common?” Evolution is all about adaptation, and high intelligence is not an automatic adaptation. Spiders are well adapted to their environment but they’re not about to start building little spaceships. It’s possible that life evolving intelligence, as well as the ability to manipulate the environment in a way that makes if possible to develop technology, is extremely rare. Dolphins are pretty intelligent, but you can’t do much with flippers.
Another advantage to knowing is to have a heads-up so we can prepare for a possible alien invasion. Only half-joking….
If history is any guide, we’ll declare them to be enemies and start building weapons.
All those photos of what appears to be a UFO since the '40’s… Now, consider all the cell phones on our planet now. Most have a camera / video. Still, nothing slightly clear, in the distance or just a ‘bright blob’ ( Air Force videos)… But it’s a fun subject.
But SETI is looking for things hundreds of light years away, not blobs of light a few thousand feet above the Earth’s surface.
I used to think that it was impossible for there not to have been, or currently be, intelligent life elsewhere, albeit out of reach distance and/or time-wise. However, after reading Stephen Webb’s If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens … WHERE IS EVERYBODY?: Seventy-Five Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life, I now suspect that the appearance of any life is borderline impossible. His description of the development of DNA, prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells, plus the variety of possible environmental requirements, some of which may have been influenced by such things as the presence of a moon and associated tidal effects, a period of tectonic stability early in Earth’s history, the presence of gas giants’ gravitational mitigation of planetary bombardment, among other things, has certainly made me believe that life is probably a rarity.
To me, as an analogy, the chances of life being created would be like dumping a giant pile of bricks, metal and other stuff on a vacant lot and, magically, a few days later, a school appears.
The proper answer to “Where is everybody?” is, “We don’t know, but that’s not surprising because we have almost zero ability to detect them. They might be all over the place”.
Seriously… We still cannot detect Earthlike planets around sun-like stars. The terrestrial planets we have found are all around red dwarfs, which are poor candidates for life. We are just getting to the point where we might discover a huge megastructure around another star system if it’s close enough.
Other than that, any discovery will probably require luck. For instance, the beam of a tight communication link could cross the Earth just as we are listening. But other than that… If an alien civilization around our closest companion star emitted as much EM radiation as we do, we would not detect it unless we turned our biggest radio telescopes at it and picked the right frequencies. A civilization like ours would be completely undetectable with current tech more than about 100 light years away. And the galaxy is something like 100,000 light years across.
I think it would be at least as surprising if we had found aliens as soon as we looked, because I think they will be incredibly hard to find.
Let’s leave the ‘self replicating probe’ idea out of it for now. There are lots of reasons to think they might not be feasible, or at least not be feasible without near-magical levels of tech.
Like this:
I’m curious about whether there is multicellular life, single-celled life, or no life in the waters of Europa and Enceladus. I’m also curious whether there are aliens from other star systems with broadcast technology.
If we pick up and decipher alien signals, whether they be intentional or otherwise, we could start an interesting conversation. In the same sense that we have conversations with the ancient Greeks today.
I’m also curious about cephalopod intelligence.
The endgame is to defer that decision to the people around at the time some contact has been made, generations and generations from now.
Or they might be no place yet. It is always assumed that we are an infant race, just now exploring the galaxy, when the opposite is just as likely. We could be the Elder Race, the oldest technological beings even approaching being able for limited space travel. The science fiction trope that we are weak, young, and surrounded by more advance civilisations is probably wrong. Any other life in our own galaxy may be still crawling up out of their own version of primordial mud.
And since water seems to be needed for life, and there are probably many water worlds, how are they going to get into space? If worlds, like Europa, had life on them, how would they even know about the stars? Covered in perpetual cloud cover, no dry land to provide any incentive to evolve beyond an aquatic life, and they are going to build starships, why?
Earth being fairly unique makes a boring story, but it is more likely to be true. Just the right amount of everything and all conditions. Quote the numbers, the odds, there MUST be others out there! No, there must not be.
Advanced anthropomorphic aliens is really simplistic, Star Trek crap.
If we’re the Elder Race, the Universe is in serious trouble.
But that’s the thing. If they do exist, they should be literally all over the place. Including here. Even with plausible technology that we know obeys the laws of physics, it takes a very, very short time to travel between stars. If intelligent life ever appears anywhere in the Galaxy, it should soon colonize the entire Galaxy.
I think predicting when SETI would find anything is quite an uncertain business, but I don’t think it is ridiculously remote. As far is what is out there to be found, it’s Drake Equation stuff, with big uncertainties in many of the factors but still it looks likely life is out there in our own galaxy. The range does gradually get pinned down better and better.
As far as how likely SETI is to find a given level of intelligent population density, well, that seems to be growing exponentially for the foreseeable future. The ability per cost for electronic systems that can search for weak signals has been growing something like exponentially for decades now. And, what we are willing to spend seems to me to be steadily growing, if not very stably.
I read a good paper about this some years back, and wound up thinking the odds looked pretty good for finding something within my lifetime. Granted, that window of opportunity looks a fair bit smaller now. All the same, I don’t think it could take too many centuries.
And, sheesh, what’s a few centuries? In the grand scheme, really, what’s a hundred million years?
We haven’t colonized the entire Galaxy yet, but of course you wrote about intelligent life while the best we can manage is, it seems, Elon Musk. But jokes aside, two questions arise: How long will it take, if we survive as an advanced civilisation, for us to go even one star system further than we are now? What are the odds we will survive that long?
There is no such thing as the Drake Equation. It is treated like it is a math equation that must have an answer, when it is just a thought exersize. Not one of the many, many factors in the Drake Equation has a verifiable answer. Without verifiable, real numbers, it is all nonsense. Adding more verifiable numbers into the equation will still give no answers, because it is not an equation. See Star Trek.
Don’t ask me the odds, but probably no more than a few thousand years. Which, compared to the time for lift to evolve and how long species usually last, is nothing.