We're doing SETI the wrong and long way around, say boffins If there are other civilisations out there on Earth-like planets orbiting Sun-like stars, we're likely to waste a lot of time filtering out billions of prospects. That's led McMaster University (located in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) boffins to suggest we thin out the field, by looking at planets that are in a position to …
I would imagine that advanced alien civilisations would have little need to use such primitive means of detection, since they would have to be at the same technological cusp as we are. i.e. just a tad more than clueless. They will have matt black trans-dimensional 1x4x9 monoliths or something like that.
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.
I agree - it'll not end well. We've already had the warning too from HG Wells...
"Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us"
"...He sprang to his feet and saw to starboard, and not a hundred yards from their heeling, pitching boat, a vast iron bulk like the blade of a plough tearing through the water, tossing it on either side in huge waves of foam that leaped towards the steamer, flinging her paddles helplessly in the air, and then sucking her deck down almost to the waterline.
A douche of spray blinded my brother for a moment. When his eyes were clear again he saw the monster had passed and was rushing landward. Big iron upperworks rose out of this headlong structure, and from that twin funnels projected and spat a smoking blast shot with fire. It was the torpedo ram, Thunder Child, steaming headlong, coming to the rescue of the threatened shipping."
It didn't end well for poor old Thunder Child.
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.
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."
There's a documentary about it.
Sometimes I wonder if finding (strong) evidence of alien intelligence would be a good thing.
I'm not worried about being invaded or obliterated, just wondering if it would make us feel better or worse, 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.
Well, unless were are very lucky indeed and such life exists on one of the planets within, say 50ly, the range at which it's just about possible to have a message sent and a response received inside a person's lifetime.
But the signals need to be strong, deliberate, and targeted and the recipient has to be listening to that patch of sky so it's also possible that even then we might pass each other by - both looking and listening but never at the right time.
Not that that makes the effort meaningless, just perhaps a little bitter-sweet.
"It's impossible to predict whether extraterrestrials use the same observational techniques as we do," says Heller. "But they will have to deal with the same physical principles as we do, and Earth's solar transits are an obvious method to detect us."
I was going to say, what an assumption, but in fact it has to be what presumption!
WE are looking for aliens who are in fact not alien, but are just like us.
In fact there is a school of thought that says that we are being invaded by aliens all the time, and the only notice we take is to say 'I think I must have another cold'
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.
I'm afraid it's even harder to deal with someone that is, in fact, just like you.
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.
@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.
First off, I'm sure Science is the same for potential Aliens than it is for us, but who's to say that the Aliens do not have other means of detection ? They could have decided to create a vast observation net with buoys every two light-years, and search that way. Or they could literally be sending probes to every system and take a local gander.
So sure, put a priority on those planets that exist in the narrow band where Earth transits, but I fail to see why that should mean we should abandon the rest.
Are there any stars, with confirmed solar systems, containing rocky planets in the goldylocks zone, which have an indication of supporting liquid water, within that narrow band around the eclyptic, and within, say, 60 lightyears?
Those would be the only systems that could possibly support a civilisation to have detected the presence of Earth, and may possibly have detected the extremely minute change in the radio spectrum any TV/Radio transmissions may have sprayed out in that direction.
I'm pretty confident the answer to that one is a resounding "no" .
Anything intelligent further out than those 60 light years would be seeing nothing more than "there's a planet with potential for life" there, with no indication of any form of technology. And seriously.. if anything shows up on our doorstep tomorrow, they must have either cracked generation ships, or FTL travel. Both of which are well beyond our current technical capabilities. In other words: we'd be 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.
We observe several dimensions and speculate about many more, it could be that for the last few hundred years we have been merrily transmitting our presence in a dimension we have yet to perceive, and that dimension might not necessarily be bounded by the speed of light, or conventional time.
If so, we could have been on the radar thousands of light years away only last week. Who knows?
Most folks assume that any alien bunch with interstellar travel and such will be highly advanced thinkers as well. All big-brained and superior to us grunting apes.
It's more likely that they will be grunting aliens standing on the shoulders of a few giants, just like we are today. Our species has radio telecoms, nuclear tech, space travel, is peering into the furthest depths of the universe... yet the average human is still superstitious, tribal, trained to do certain tasks using machines they don't understand. Technological advancement does not necessarily make the users of technical devices smarter.
First Contact will likely be like the crew of the Nostromo or materials prospectors, not philosophical superbeings.
'Could you tell me your planet's albedo, sir?' said the alien, still staring levelly at the horizon as though it was doing something interesting.
'Er. No.'
'Well, I'm sorry to have to tell you, sir, that your polar ice caps are below regulation size for a planet of this category, sir.'
'Oh, dear,' said Newt. ...]
The small alien walked past the car.
'CO2 level up 0.5 percent,' it rasped, giving him a meaningful look. 'You do know you could find yourself charged with being a dominant species while under the influence of impulse-driven consumerism, don't you?'"
this is actually reasonable news. about time they started figuring out how to do the search stuff systematically. now that we are aware of how we can detect, apply that to the smaller count of stars we reckon can detect us with that level of tech. as the level of detection tech advances, widen/change the search accordingly. this resembles a rational plan. [apologies for not saying something funny/pithy.]
Off the top of my head, no. WP reports that "The declination was unambiguously determined to be −27°03′ ± 20′." and I think the Earth Transit Zone mentioned in the article is a circle at an angle of 23.5° to the equatorial plane (declinaion 0), plus or minus 0.262°.
Whether this is off by 3.5° or 50° or something in between depends on the right acension in ways that exceed my unpracticed brain's pay grade. Since guessing wrong on the internet is probably the best way to find out, I'll guess that it is the former and so the WOW signal probably came from a source lying close to the Earth's orbital plane, but a few degrees outside the ETZ.
Disclaimer: I am not an astronomer either. (Yes, it shows, I know.)
Actually, here's a better answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi_Sagittarii#/media/File:Sagittarius_IAU.svg
I think the ETZ in the article is a band either side of the Ecliptic, which is shown on the chart. It's a narrow band and probably no thicker than the blue line! The source of the WOW signal is the Chi Saggitarri group which is next to the word ECLIPTIC. So ... outside, but not by much.
If you shine a torch at say a ball, and look at the dark side of the ball it is dark.
When the sun shines on the earth, the dark side of the earth becomes illuminated by everyone switching on their lights. The longer time progresses, the more the human race develops, the brighter those lights will be.
Any planet that has reached our stage of resourcefulness will surely exhibit a similar phenomenon.
There seems to be an assumption that any visiting aliens will be on either a military expedition, to conquer us, or a scientific expedition, to study (and hopefully enlighten) us.
There is another possibility. From our own historical experience, who have usually been the first people to make contact with "undiscovered" tribes? Generally it's been missionaries!
I await the arrival of a flying saucer full of bug-eyed monsters wearing dog-collars, waving leather-bound books, and urging us all to repent.
The resulting cultural re-adjustment could be very interesting! I wonder how Richard Dawkins would handle that.
I don't think so. I think he'd meet his match. Anyone who has mastered interstellar travel and made that sort of journey would be very very bright. Dawkins likes to pick opponents who are a bit dim or inarticulate. Most of his arguments can be picked apart if you have the time and inclination to do so. On the rare occasions he's been "ambushed" by someone who's both clever and articulate, he hasn't come out it very well.
Anyway, my original comment was intended to be humorous. Looks like I've accidentally touched on a raw nerve. Have I started a flame war? (see icon)
"I await the arrival of a flying saucer full of bug-eyed monsters wearing dog-collars, waving leather-bound books, and urging us all to repent."
The book being titled How to serve Man?
The idea of a nearby alien civilisation being coincidentally at the same early technology level as us at the same time as us is ridiculous. I have no idea why seemingly sensible people have this idea that nearby intelligent life would be relatable enough to us to be detectable.
The undisturbed 500+ million year history of life on Earth is testament to the lack of anyone out there showing any interest. I doubt the physical world holds much interest to any civilisation for more than a thousand years after the discovery of radio. By the time we are able to start "colonising the galaxy" we won't want to any more.
How did the universe start?
If one subscribes to the "big bang" theory then everything that was created at that time would, throughout its life, be at a similar point in development to everything else created at that same time.
It is my view therefore, that the word "ridiculous" is somewhat provocative, and can neither be proved nor disproved until/unless there is proof to the contrary.
"How did the universe start?
If one subscribes to the "big bang" theory then everything that was created at that time would, throughout its life, be at a similar point in development to everything else created at that same time.
It is my view therefore, that the word "ridiculous" is somewhat provocative, and can neither be proved nor disproved until/unless there is proof to the contrary.
"
Not really ..
Its more to do with the age of the solar system, or more specifically , the age of the planet ..
For example, a solar system out there that has been kicking about for ~5.6 billion years, would have had a 1 billion year head start on us ..
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