SHOUTING AT THE COSMOS...Or How SETI has Taken a Worrisome Turn Into Dangerous Territory

Recently, several groups, ranging from radio astronomers in Argentina and Russia all the way to the web advertising site Craig's List, have declared that they intend to commence broadcasting high-intensity Messages to ETI... or METI... an endeavor also known at "Active SETI". Their intention is to change the observable brightness of Earth civilization by many orders of magnitude, in order to attract attention to our planet from anyone who might be out there.

Let there be no mistake. METI is a very different thing than passively sifting for signals from the outer space. Carl Sagan, one of the greatest SETI supporters and a deep believer in the notion of altruistic alien civilizations, called such a move deeply unwise and immature. (Even Frank Drake, who famously sent the "Arecibo Message" toward the Andromeda Galaxy in 1974, considered "Active SETI" to be, at best, a stunt and generally a waste of time.)

http://lifeboat.com/ex/shouting.at.the.cosmos

We can't have an ability and not use it.

Wonder if anyone will come?

Either one is awesome to contemplate.

know for sure, it's always possible that the odds will turn out to be wrong. And if we are the only sentient beings in this vast, vast, vast, mindbogglingly vast, impossible to exaggerate how vast universe, that is TERRIFYING. Imagine all intelligence in the universe hanging in the balance, with George Bush's (Dick Cheney's) finger on the nuke trigger. What a comeuppance for God's only sentient beings--to be nuclear wintered out of existence by its stupidest, most greedy spawn!

Further--and I think of this often, actually--the Bushite fuckwads (and their Democratic colluders and other subcontractors) casually smash a MILLION human brains in Iraq, to get Iraq's oil--therein removing a significant portion of the VERY FEW sentient brains in the Universe--or that we know exist in the Universe. There may well be others, but we don't know that. So EVERY human brain is as precious as gold. How dare we! How dare we smash any part of what may be the ONLY intelligence in the entire Universe!

Imagine, too, that we survive Corporate Rule, and actually do go, a la Star Trek, "where no one has gone before," and, with the best of intentions, move out into the Galaxy, and and find....no one, in 100 BILLION solar systems...and continue our dauntless trek to the next of 100 BILLION galaxies, and explore the 100 BILLION solar systems in each of them, and reach the ends of the Universe and find...no one! No one like us in the infinite sands of the Universe! It's an awesome thought. However, even given technological or psychic developments that permit warp speed travel/communication, we will, in reaching the far edges of the Universe, have changed the Universe and seeded it with our own sentience, which will evolve as we go. We will create what it is that we are seeking: an intelligent Universe. That may compensate for the utter loneliness that freezes our souls at the end of our journey, realizing that we are ALL ALONE, UTTERLY ALONE, FOREVER ALONE, HEART-BREAKINGLY ALONE. We are ALL there is!

Our fantasies of finding other sentient life in the Universe, or of being the only sentient life in the Universe, are interesting, too, in that we ignore (and wantonly kill) what are very probably sentient beings on our own planet: dolphins, whales, elephants, chimps and apes, and who knows what others? If intelligence is defined as "wonder" (the ability to appreciate existence), rather than as technological facility (our specialty), quite a number of species could qualify, if only we could communicate with them. Also, some sort of collective intelligence ("wonder") could be present even in small critters (birds, ants, bees, spiders), and very tiny critters (amoeba, bacteria?), if we could understand and access their collective thinking process.

The Greeks nailed us with the word "hubris." We are so full of ourselves, so egocentric--we may be missing everything: that sentience exists all around us, as well as "out there," and we just don't recognize it.

Anyway, I agree with you that both possibilities are awesome--that the Universe is full of sentient beings, or that we are the only ones, in the almost limitless reaches of time and space, to be thinking about it all.

:thumbsup:

And very well put.

HELP


?
dp

... should we be illuminating the welcome mat, when it's obvious that nothing even remotely resembling intelligent life is at home?

:shrug:

Seriously.

And to be honest... he has something of a point. The more we learn about quantum mechanics, the more we discover that the speed of light probably isn't an absolute limitation on the cosmos. Combine that with the fact that any outside life we managed to contact would probably display much the same diversity of behavior that we do, and for similar reasons, and you can see why some people are uncomfortable with giving away our location any more than we already have.

If they're within a 110 light-years, they're a good change they already know we're here and technologically advanced enough to make radio transmitters.

Assuming we're being watched, they will be able to chart our progress by the numbers and types of radio transmitters radiating.

At some point they'll being picking up our TV signals, and they'll have pictures of us and our technology and our language and culture to supplement the audio they have been studying for decades. Now they'll be able to examine, chart, and extrapolate our technological progress on a variety of fronts.



Of course, if they actually do come here to conquer us, there isn't much we can do about it. Most likely they's move an asteroid from the Belt and slam it into the Pacific at about Mach 50. After a couple of years of letting the weather stabilize, they'd move in and take over whatever remnents of humanity are still alive after a nuclear winter and giga-tsunami.

From the "Answers and Arguments" section of the linked article:



""Earth civilization is already glaringly visible in radio, so it's too late to stay silent."

This widely-held supposition was, in fact, decisively disproved years ago, in a paper written by Dr. Shostak himself! In fact, even military radars and television signals appear to dissipate below interstellar noise levels within just a few light years. Certainly they are far less visible — by many orders of magnitude — than a directed beam from any of Earth's large, or even intermediate, radio telescopes.

Moreover, this reasoning is illogical, since METI's whole purpose is to draw attention to Earth by dramatically increasing our visibility over whatever baseline value it currently has. If it's already "too late", then what are they aiming to achieve?"

But you do make a good point about assuming we are being watched. It's interesting to contemplate that perhaps we are being "jammed" - no signals allowed in. That would make a good part of a plot for a science fiction novel.

The METI project is something that we should take seriously, in light of our own history. It's probably safest to assume that the universe is not inhabited by ultimately altruistic beings, so why advertise our presence before we are certain about what is out there?

Not a lot, but a little. I think Arther C. Clarke's assertion that intelligent life is so rare civilizations collapse before they can cross enough light-years to find each other, either because they're too far apart or they don't occupy the same part of the galaxy at the same time could be true.

However, another possiblity is that they have some kind of faster-than-light travel. In that case, they would not be using powerful radio transmitters to communicate between stars; they would use message sloops or put them on regularly-scheduled starships, much like we used to do with snail-mail going on ships and trains. If you wanted to send a letter from London to Boston, you put in on the next outgoing ship. The reply would leave Boston likewise.

It's entirely possible that there is stuff happening nearby but we don't hear about it because they don't send their starships here.

Hundreds of credible UFO sightings have been reported over past month or so.

Hint: "They" are already here.

UFO DOES NOT EQUAL Aliens

Look up at the sky. Anything you see that you can't explain is a UFO, even if it's a meteor, or sun shining off the international space station (which are both, I might add, completely man made and 100% alien free).

Therefore the phrase "credible UFO sightings" doesn't mean anything to me.

Q3JR4.
Needs a little more evidence than, "Look over there, what the hell is that?"

I've always loved this book. It was a very important item in my childhood (so to speak). But I was noticing, this time, how little futurist vision Clarke had about the environment and our planet's ecology. He blithely proposes some kind of massive robot-run manufacturing of every kind of product anybody could want, at no cost, with no workers, and--very noticeable by me, this read--no consequences to the environment. As well, he has everybody jetting around the planet at will--home in the Arctic, second home in the Antarctic--again with no consequences to the planet. He runs past these things very fast. His major thesis, story and idea are, really, one of the most profound and imaginative to be found in science fiction. It holds up well. So I forgive him that one superficial lapse.

Great book. GREAT book! Highly recommended. And it is incredibly prescient about the Bush era of religious nuttery echoing back at us from the Middle Ages, in a way that will totally surprise you, if you haven't read it. Oh God, it's good! What a book!

As for WHOSE attention we might draw, by a purposeful beacon into space--and whether this is wise or not (and I remember some discussions of this when Carl Sagan was still alive, early in the SETI program)...well...it is a highly speculative topic, but I would say that, a) given what we've learned about our species during the Bush Junta, we are much more likely to be a menace to others, than others are likely to be a menace to us; and b) I tend to favor the theory that we are the Galaxy's madhouse, where they send the unevolved sentient beings who cause all the trouble--whether to re-evolve I don't know (I tend to think yes, because, where did we get Buddhist ideas?)--and the reason that SETI has not picked up any radio signals in space is that the communications are blocked to our "view"--i.e., we are in "isolation" (possibly being watched--who knows?--but segregated while we either spin out our madness to our heart's desire, in our lovely little blue ball padded cell, or--hopefully--evolve, get better, figure things out, and die well--with the "Tibetan Book of the Dead" being read over us--and return to the "higher civilization" from which we came.

We sure have a lot of myths and religious ideas that tend this way. We are here to learn, to perfect ourselves. We are lower beings meant to be higher. We are being punished, or anticipate punishment. We have a choice between good and evil. Etc. And the Buddhists have it more right than anybody--that we have the opportunity, with each lifetime (and we go through many of them) to reach the highest consciousness.

Another reason that SETI hasn't yet found any signals may be that the "higher civilization" (that we come from, or that our minds posit in the cosmos) doesn't communicate in any way that we can perceive (or can yet perceive). I have long suspected that the key to long range communications, as well as space travel, has something to do with undeveloped powers in our brains that we tend to debunk and dismiss--psychic powers, paranormal powers. The more intuitive groups, among the human race, might be closer to contact (and/or travel) than the technologically developed. In fact, there are indigenous practices of "dream time" and peoples who hold the world view that dreams are the reality, and waking experience is the unreality.

This notion of mine is related to my feeling that the Universe is VASTLY, VASTLY, VASTLY stranger and more undiscovered than we can even begin to imagine. Contemporary physics touches upon this incomprehensibly vast, wild region of strangeness, and is a truly bizarre subject. Upshot: we don't have a clue what's going on. Every day, it seems, brings some new, outlandish fact-set or theory, trying to deal with what physicists (and cosmologists and astronomers) have recently discovered, which overturns whole paradigms of what was known before. Consider the graviton, which defies space and time, and penetrates them (in one diagram I've seen). If you are a graviton, you just fold space and time up, like a garment bag, and go on your way, anywhere you wish. Or black holes. I mean, come on. A collapsed sun, from which no light can escape, swirling at the center of every galaxy, sucking everything in--and if you approach its "event horizon," your life stretches out to forever?

Think about this for a minute: us, vs. all that. We think about "all that," and are reaching out to "all that"--but with the tiniest of little ant baby steps. A little over a hundred years ago, human beings for the first time began to posit stories IN THE FUTURE--around H.G. Wells' time. Proposing stories in the future had never occurred before to the human mind (or were never written down). Something changed, deep in our psyches--possibly some reaction to our accumulated experience of the industrial revolution and rapid social and economic change (but, then, what caused that?). It was like an "event horizon." There is a before and after. Before, in all of human history and storytelling, we did not compose stories set in the future. And after, our imaginations carried us to limitless space and time, and to the future--to myths projected "ahead" of our time. "Once upon a time" became "once upon a time that has not yet unfolded."

People could think ahead, of course, and built monuments for posterity. But no elaborated tales, characters, events and ideas projected into future times. Myths and stories were placed in the past. Already over with. An acceleration in our brains? A quickening? Some "higher beings" prepping us for something? I dunno. It's always puzzled me. And long, long range communication, and space travel (if constrained by the speed of light) are all about the future--that is, to communicate over the vast distances of space, you are sending something to beings who likely don't exist yet (if their life curves are anything comparable to ours), and they in turn, are sending something to you before you existed; and, similarly, as to actually traveling long, long distances, you are heading into a reality that does not yet exist, and, if you were to return here, it would be a future time, when everythiing you know is gone.

If it is not constrained by the speed of light, however (and even that has now come into question--and is no longer an absolute, apparently), then instant communication (or instant travel) across vast distances would have to, in some way, account for the vast distance traversed. Can the future--your posited communication or travel over a vast distance--be foreshortened? If so, you are foreshortening, or eliminating, the future (the way we do when we make a telephone call).

Hey, it's late at night, here, where I live, and clearly I've gone round the bend a bit, trying to address the issue of whether humans should send a beacon out into space and attract attention to ourselves, or keep quiet and just listen--the essence of the SETI controversy--with the added very political question of who makes that decision (and what any such communication from Earth should say and who decides that?). The OP charges that SETI has become cabalistic and secretive, and intends to attract attention to Earth, without consulting others (widespread and international consultation, as previously agreed to, by all interested parties.) SETI says, what about free speech?

I'm not afraid of anything "out there." I think all our fears about what's "out there" are projections of our own bad karma. And if I'm wrong, and somebody sends out a signal and attracts an alien race that finds us to be tasty morsels, and proceeds to eat us all, well...karma again. We've always been immensely curious and also meddlesome, greedy and violent. Maybe we'll get our comeuppance at last, for all the nasty genocide we've been guilty of. I say, "Go, SETI!" That's my vote.

And I think we have to stop killing each other if we want E.T. to answer.

it had a profound effect on me too when I read it many many years ago...I should re-read it again soon I don't recall many of the details just the big ideas and how vividly the story was built by on of the genre's masters.

:shrug:

and want no part of this screwed up world.

Think of it this way: If we continue to sit here and just listen for signals we may never find evidence of alien life. Our "leakage", TV and radio, actually doesn't travel that far. It dissipates after a few light years, so unless they're very intent on finding us and build an antenna the size of a continent they're not going to find us that way. We're not going to pick up their leakage with our current technology, so the only way we'd find them is to pick up a powerful signal sent intentionally our way. However we'd need to be looking in the right direction when they send that signal our way. Even if this part of the galaxy had several technological civilizations there's a good chance we'd never know about it.

Active SETI would increase the chances of receiving a message in the future because it wouldn't be....one-sided. We'd be sending instead of sitting, waiting for someone to figure out we're here and send to us. Now we may end up inviting an alien armada to come calling, but at least before we're all vaporized we'd know that we're not alone in the universe.

It's just a matter of what you consider more important...increasing the chances that we make contact with another civilization, opening our eyes and forever changing the way humanity thinks about the universe, of MAYBE being safe from some marauding alien conquerors. I know what my answer is. I mean most scientists say that interstellar travel is impossible (they're very, very wrong and they know it) so what's to worry about right?

I mean there's a good chance all SETI is a waste of time because alien civilizations took an alternate technological path and never made use of radio, or have gone beyond the use of radio. Or hell, they're using spread-spectrum technology which wouldn't be detected anyway. But if we're going to do SETI, let's not be dicks and sit around waiting for someone else to do the work.

There are plenty of habitable worlds out there in the vastness of the universe. Why bother killing us to take ours? Would it even be habitable to them?

They would have to know too that we would fry the planet with our nukes before we gave it up.

I dunno, the paranoid in me is strongly opposed to this, but then again we'll probably kill ourselves off before anyone could get here if they're not here already.

I am certain that we agree that agression naturally rises out of the natural order, but aggression is only worth it when resources are slim.

Resources are not slim so why bother? :shrug:

I think it's completely plausible to argue that there is no need for aggression in a spacefaring civilization.

But since we don't really know what a spacefaring civilization wants, or needs, or fears, it's equally plausible to argue that they might have their reasons to desire crushing potential competition.

Also, I see no reason to assume aliens would require a rational reason. We humans kill each other for a whole variety of reasons, hardly any of which are grounded in rationality. They might feel that they have a religious mandate to exterminate any other intelligent life forms. Or, maybe it would be required by their political ideology.

Who knows, it might even be required by their biology.

That they have a biological need to anal probe other lifeforms :P Based on teh evidence anyways.

I guess I'm just falling prey to wishful thinking. The Wife thinks that xenophobia towards non-vertebrates is hardwired into us. A sort of hold over from the time when bugs and vertebrates were really going at it.

How hard would it be to talk to a giant friendly cockroach without vomiting on yourself and wanting to kill it?

Maybe the aliens will just think that we're physically/philosophically disgusting as a species and want to squish us to make us go away... :hide:

I doubt we'll get too many replies but you never know. Probably any reply would be from a robotic explorer, if it's supposed to reply and not just hang around and watch while reporting back to whoever.
That's what I'd do as galactic overlord. Send me out as smart a fleet of robots as possible to check out the surrounding area. Then contact or squish the interesting spots depending on my benevolence.

It might be a good idea to wait though. Let us establish ourselves outside of Earth orbit first just in case there are some bad things out there. We are dealing with some large time spans here so I'm not sure another 100 years will matter if we can avoid offing ourselves and crippling the biosphere.

I guess it all comes down to how many local neighbors we may have and not just sentient life but sentient technological life. (Ha! Could be sentient technology I guess, probably no reason why not) The reason I doubt we do is that this was a really nice uninhabited planet with some seriously interesting giant lizards for a long time and nobody moved in. I'd have expected at least a base to explore the biology even if their form of life was incompatible with our world.

It was a garden spot with no intelligent inhabitants until maybe 100K years ago. Say half a billion before that. Where's everybody been?

The planet was teeming with life. Nice climate, etc. (at least for certain lifeforms). Why wasn't it noticed--if the galactic neighborhood is well-populated with explorer-type sentients? You're right about the time element. Plenty of life here, evident for a very long time, before we came along.

Perhaps whatever killed off the dinosaurs wasn't a big asteroid but a big alien ship that ran afoul, exploring the solar system.

I do tend to think that the numbers--staggering numbers of suns, planets and galaxies (100 billion stars in this galaxy alone, 100 billion galaxies in the visible or estimatable universe*--that we know of)--combined with the staggering length of time that has elapsed from the "big bang" (IF that THEORY holds up), pretty much HAS TO produce more sentient beings, somewhere. There are such big odds against it not being so. And we've now discovered sulphur-based life at the bottom of our own ocean, and life in very extreme conditions of cold and heat. The parameters of possible life--and sentience--have been widened. The number of planets we know about has increased to 300 or so --planets now seem endemic (where once we weren't sure about that at all), greatly increasing the odds for earth-like conditions. The more we find out, the more the chances of life and sentience improve--not the other way around.

So I think there IS "somebody out there." Lots of somebodies. And there are probably many high-tech (and also high-psych? --mental telepathists) civilizations, within our galaxy and outside of it. The question is, would we recognize their signals, and, would they recognize ours? Chances are, many have developed the way we have--similar evolution, similar technology--but they may be far-flung, and comprise only a small percentage of the sentient. And of those, how many would be advanced enough to communicate with us, or visit us? Others may be so advanced that we don't interest them, or their technology is so different that we don't recognize their communications (and our noises are beneath their notice). I think, also, that our mythology--the fantastic religious things we invent--may be a Rosetta Stone of either past contacts, or some kind of telepathic contacts (or future thinking--contacts that are going to happen). 95% of humanity is passionately attached to some religious mythology or other, and, while this might be explainable simply by our mortality (our fears), combined with our very creative, adaptable brains, it could also be pointing to past contacts, future contacts, telepathic contacts, and/or latent powers of communal projection that could be necessary for contact. (Why do so many religions insist on a uniformity of belief--and have such big fights about them? Maybe we have a power to do something, if we all thought the same thought, at the same moment.)

Clarke plays with these kinds of sf concepts in "Childhood's End"--a very stimulating book. (What is it all FOR? Not just science, but all of what we are? He answers that question--and it's a doozey.)


-----

*Just discovered: a galaxy spewing forth 4,000 NEW stars per year!

Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have found a galaxy producing an average of up to 4,000 stars per year. They contrast this with the Milky Way, which only produces an average of 10 each year. Nicknamed "Baby Boom," it is a young starburst galaxy, and its stellar birth rate conflicts with a commonly accepted model for the growth of a galaxy. Quoting: "'The question now is whether the majority of the very most massive galaxies form very early in the universe like the Baby Boom galaxy, or whether this is an exceptional case. Answering this question will help us determine to what degree the Hierarchical Model of galaxy formation still holds true,' 'The incredible star-formation activity we have observed suggests that we may be witnessing, for the first time, the formation of one of the most massive elliptical galaxies in the universe,' said co-author Nick Scoville of Caltech, the principal investigator of the Cosmic Evolution Survey,

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/12/0111258&from=rss

But then again I wouldn't be shocked to find out there isn't.
We just cant say how common life is yet. Looks like it should be common but we just don't have a baseline to judge by. Our count of worlds explored is still 1. Add to that the completely unknown incidence of sentient life and then technological life with an outward focus and interest in expansion. I'd love there to be someone else out there but when I think about all the variables I come to the conclusion that if there is, they're probably nowhere around here. I expect that within 50,000 years we'll have looked at a good chunk of our galaxy even if we never break the light barrier. Self replicating robots could cover a surprising amount of area. Of course if we go the self replicating robot path we may be creating the other guys we're going out to find.

Then again the galaxy may be covered with sentient life who just don't care about their neighbors and wouldn't talk to us if we did show up. That would sure show us!

I did hear a good theory as to why the galaxy wouldn't have been filled with life a billion years ago. If I remember right some of the heavier elements like gold can only be created by fusion in a star and then ejected at the it's death. Our star is probably 3rd generation (again, if I remember right) if it were first or second there probably wouldn't be enough heavy elements for life as we know it. Makes sense to me.

By the way, loved Childhoods End. Haven't read it in years but I remember finishing the book and immediately turning back about 40 pages to read the end again. :-)

It is very unlikely that even an advanced civilization has managed to leave its solar system.

Distances are to great, faster then light travel is mostly not possible. Even if ETI was on the other side of the Galaxy, it would take them 200,000 LY to get here.

I think sending out very powerful signals is ok and all options should be attempted.

isn't that what Steven Colbert does?

"Come and get it!"

Computers Can Talk to Goddamned UFOs.



...At least, that's what Independence Day taught us.

Hollywood wouldn't lie to sale a movie would it?

Q3JR4.

:P

Yes, 10²² stars (current estimate) is a very large number and our system appears somewhat unremarkable. But we don't know how rare life might be. Is it inevitable where the conditions are ripe or is it a freak accident? And then, once life is established, does that necessarily lead to intelligent life? It certainly didn't on earth. The dinosaurs ruled for 150M years with no evidence that they ever developed intelligence or a technology. Maybe life is incredibly rare and intelligent life is extremely rare. We simply don't know at this point.

As far as contact goes, I happen to think that it's not paranoid to want us to proceed cautiously. Every time in our history a more advanced people has met a less advanced civilization, the lessor is usually obliterated.

Who can fathom the motivations, let alone the capabilities, of an advanced intelligence? Assuming that they must inevitably be beneficent is wishful thinking. Maybe the most aggressive, most rapacious faction won out on their planet and decided to spread themselves throughout the cosmos in some alien version of manifest destiny? Maybe they're just plain simple assholes. Sagan, who I love by the way, assumed that they must be peaceful or they would have destroyed themselves. Well, we are space traveling (barely I admit) and we're still fighting over gods. What if they're religious whackos determined that every intelligence in the cosmos must pray to their god or die? We just don't know.

I am all in favor of listening (passive SETI) but loudly announcing our presence seems reckless.