Carl Sagan on the reason for SETI

I got the link to this YouTube video from Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy website. The late, great Dr. Carl Sagan explains why we search(ed) for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.

I hit the site every couple days for a healthy injection of wonder and awe.

I read "Cosmos" twice. Though Sagan had the gift to explain complexities of the universe to lesser beings like myself, I still had to run through it again. I believe Plait to be his logical progeny.

He ran a projection (using highs and lows of highly speculative numbers) to calculate the number of intelligent civilizations in the Galaxy. He estimated that it is between 10 and 1,000,000. A million sounds like a lot unless you understand how huge the Galaxy is. And we have to hope to either hear a deliberate message at the exact moment it was sent to us, or undeliberate background broadcast (like TV and Radio) during the short period that they use those technology (we ourselves are beginning to reach the end of out broadcast period).

The odds off SETI success is incalculably small.

That being said, I've had my powerhouse workstation running SETI@Home for years, going back to the days before BOINC. Before that I had it working on cryptography cracking with Infinite Monkeys.

There won't be any great exploration of space in this incarnation of human civilization. We can't stop the same group of aristocrats from screwing us over at every turn, so we won't develop into the Star-Trek kind of civilization that can reach out into the galaxy. Democracy, or it's more modern name - socialism, is being purged from the world as we roll back into a feudal state with only Lords, Ladies, and peasants. There is no justification or intellectual capacity for advanced science in such a world. In the future, we will need to produce only enough to satisfy the desires of a tiny upper class and a subsistence wage for their servants. As the rest of us gradually lose what little we've built during the Enlightenment Age, the drive of technology will plateau and gradually revert as its secrets are hidden away into corporate fiefdoms and eventually lost. Maybe one day we might be able to restore a proper society, but I doubt it. The wealthy elite have proven they will salt the Earth before they lose control, and we have proven we would rather accept sub-equal status than accept responsibility for our own governance.

They say last thing to die is hope. Giving up on things like this is evidence that we've finally reached the point where we have lost even that. I suppose that's a good thing though. No hope is better than false hope.