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I can’t be the only person who thinks that broadcasting with the intent of advertising our presence is at best, pointless, and at worse dangerous, right? Passiv
by cfadvan 8y ago
I can’t be the only person who thinks that broadcasting with the intent of advertising our presence is at best, pointless, and at worse dangerous, right? Passive SETI is great, if unlikely to succeed, but this just seems like a bad idea.
- jedimastert 8y agoThis is actually a really big debate within the scientific community.
- V-2 8y agoI guess we're broadcasting it inadvertently anyway, with all the radio noise we create.
- rainbowmverse 8y agoMost broadcasts quickly attenuate into noise.
- Diederich 8y agoThat's the trick, right? In the year I was born, the signals that my mobile phone creates and decodes were impossible to separate from noise. It's very hard to say how sensitive listeners might become given enough time for technological development.
- rainbowmverse 8y agoA lot of that is fancy algorithms and not much distance compared to telling an encoded, attenuated interstellar broadcast apart from the background radiation.
- f_allwein 8y agoThere is also WETI, which might be the better approach: http://weti-institute.org http://weti-institute.org
- ythn 8y agoI don't think it's dangerous. Light is too slow and space too vast
- sudhirj 8y agoAt human timescales, yes. Think of it from the other side - the immediate reaction to humans finding the existence of extraterrestrial life will be the start of an interstellar weapons program in every country. Now ask yourself what happens if an advanced civilisation reads the message, assumes correctly that these humans ought to have working weapons by now. They’re just going to dispatch a fire and forget drone and set a watchpoint to make sure we’re taken out cleanly.
- jjoonathan 8y agoRight back atcha. On interstellar timescales, any civilization that fears we will develop interstellar offensive capabilities would need to also seriously consider the possibility that we would survive their first strike.
- sudhirj 8y agoSure, but shouldnt really matter. It's very unlikely that any civilization launches anything from the homeworld, more likely they have the space equivalent roving nuclear submarines. Even if we survive the first hit, it's unlikely we can figure catch the launcher submarine or work out its homeworld.
- jjoonathan 8y agoThe return-on-investment, time horizon, and C&C complexities are bad enough for one-off missions, they would be worse for an actively maintained fleet, and they would be abysmal for a minefield. How do you do IFF when latency is years / decades / centuries / millenia? If human history is any indication, you don't, and suffer the consequences. A planet-buster minefield is much more of a threat to you great-grandchildren than the new-kid-on-the-block aliens ever will be. I don't find this scenario remotely convincing. A good premise for a scifi novel though.
- Ftuuky 8y agoI see you're also a proponent of the "Dark Forest theory". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Forest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Forest
- Yizahi 8y agoI suppose there will be more people thinking about it now, after Cixin Liu published his book about it.
- Ftuuky 8y agoFor sure. It was the first time I saw it articulated so well.
- spookyuser 8y agoIt was articulated so well in the dark forest that I have trouble seeing it any other way now.
- TrainedMonkey 8y agoThere could be many explanations for us not hearing from extraterrestrials. I think you are falling in a cognitive bias trap of having learned too much about one of the reasons and thus assigning it higher probability. Memory is associative, so the more you know about something, more likely you are to use that concept when trying to solve problems or explain mysteries. To ameliorate that I would suggest reading up on other theories. For example great filter or simulation argument.
- jl6 8y agoThose theories are also too exciting (and hence likely to be overbelieved). A more mundane reason might be that interstellar travel and communication turns out to be impossible (or near enough).
- sudhirj 8y ago
- kfk 8y agoYep, it's game theory at it's best and the equilibrium is indeed destroying each other or at least destroy your neighbour
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 8y agoNo kidding, and now the aliens can say we cooperated in being found, which will lead to some pretty boring dialogue.
- onetimemanytime 8y agoSay you're in Alaska in 1800's. Don't know how many others are out there, what condition they are and what intentions they have. It makes sense in a way: maybe they solve all your problems, but maybe you have have something they really want /need. Take your chances? But then humanity is such, exploring, connecting...and fighting :)