We're doing SETI the wrong and long way around, say boffins

Re: Smarter than us

Or they're on their way...

Re: Smarter than us

Well the smart thing to do, is to not transmit a big "Hullo" to the universe until after you have built the death star and killed off the potential back stabbing, ingrates, that fester on its protective moon, like the Clangers, oh they look cute, but odds are, the first aliens that truck up for a fight with Earth would be able to buy their loyalty with anything that wasn't soup.

Until then, keep quiet, turn the light down real low and pray the first signs picked up by aliens of humanities existence wasn't Peter Jackson's Bad Taste.

Re: Old Joke

Well, if Jasper Fforde ist right, the aliens will come to earth because they want to know why there never was a third series of Fawlty Towers. We'll see.

However, If you are looking for something, narrowing the field where you are looking should increase your chances compared to doing a random search¹⁾.

Maybe this can be tweaked a bit by adding astronomical common sense²⁾ and stuff like Monte Carlo methods - in other words, look into Bayesian search theory³⁾ and how it might help SETI.

¹⁾ Oil prospecting comes to mind. Also the old joke about the drunk who is looking for his keys - not where he probably lost them but under the street light where he can see better.

²⁾ You work in any field for a long time, you get ideas about what works and what doesn't, and why, and you're more often right than wrong about it.

³⁾ John Piña Craven used it to find lost H-bombs and lost submarines in the ocean.

I do not necessarily agree with the following comment

As you say, as it stands, those who breed most shall inherit the earth, which makes for a pretty grim looking version of the future, which is why selective breeding and eugenics is the way forward.... breed out the stupid, make them, err, less fertile, pair up the intelligent, whether they like it or not, for the good of humankind, and the planet....

But over time the gene pool is dominated by those who have the most children, not by those who are smartest.

Yes, but that says little to nothing about future average intelligence. Hint: look up regression to the mean and heritability of IQ. Oh, and chuck in the Flynn Effect as well.

Ever seen Idiocracy? The first 15 mins or so are worth a look; it shows you what happens if the breeders dominate the population over time

I've been married too...

...knowing we weren't the only sentient life in the universe but knowing to an equal certainty that, despite our new-found co-existence, we could never even communicate in any meaningful way.

"knowing to an equal certainty that we could never even communicate in any meaningful way."

Has social networking demonstrated nothing to you?

Men in Black covered this best "A person is smart, people are dumb panicky animals and you know it"

Re: How Alien is Alien?

That goes oddly well with the "I've been married too..."-post - a lot of people are looking for a partner that is just like themselves and (in the long run) can't deal with someone that is not.

Re: How Alien is Alien?

I've just re-read "The Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russell. Although it's a bit long-winded at times and she spends far more time on character relationships and motivation than I found enjoyable, the description of first contact between two civilizations that completely misunderstand each-other is spot on.

Re: How Alien is Alien?

@itzman

"WE are looking for aliens who are in fact not alien, but are just like us."

Well, yes, that's true and it is of course possible that there is intelligent life somewhere out there that is of a form beyond our current understanding.

It is a conceit to believe that we fully understand all the laws and processes of the universe but we have a good enough grasp to make some decently informed inferences and there is no particularly good reason to believe that life elsewhere operates under physics that are substantially different from that which we understand here and now, which is not to say that their grasp might not be substantially better.

But that's almost beside the point as we are limited by our technology and grasp of physics so we can only 'look' for signals that we are able to receive and identify.

It certainly might be possible that some advanced civilization is capable of generating sufficiently strong gravity waves to be used as a form of long-distance communication but, LIGO not withstanding, we lack the means to detect and interpret such hypothetical signals and certainly to respond in kind.

Thus, as our both our methods of detection and the scale of the exercise itself are limited, we must restrict ourselves to the search for intelligent life using similar methods that we do and could use and thus, presumably, similarly limited in their signal detection and planet identification abilities.

So the search for a particular subset of life that is basically similar in the physical barriers it faces (even if more advanced) is not so much a presumption that life all life must be similar to us but an acceptance of our own limitations.

Re: Maybe we could combine ?

"Or they could literally be sending probes to every system and take a local gander red-neck behind the bushes with some lube."

Fixed it for you...

Royally fucked...?

Depends...

Any space-faring race able to reach us from another star system has ready access to vast material resources in their own backyard without any need for conquest.

Unless they've buggered their own planet, and we happen to be on the only other reachable habitable planet... then how fucked we are depends on their relative level of technology and aggression.