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The silence from SETI is deafening. I'm not even amateurishly familiar with astronomy, but I remember setting up SETI@Home when I got my first computer, and rem
by badRNG 6y ago
The silence from SETI is deafening. I'm not even amateurishly familiar with astronomy, but I remember setting up SETI@Home when I got my first computer, and remember slowly realizing that the universe seemingly isn't "teeming" with intelligent life. Maybe something is out there, but out of reach, or deliberately silent? Maybe we are alone in this huge universe?
It does feel at least a little depressing that discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence seems unlikely in my lifetime. Maybe even out of the cards for humanity. I have to wonder if building communications devices (or "devices" in general) is a uniquely human thing that simply wouldn't matter to an intelligence that evolved some other way.
- usmannk 6y ago> Maybe something is out there, but out of reach, or deliberately silent? Have you read The Three Body Problem series by Cixin Liu? It's a terrific (and recently quite famous + awarded) sci fi trilogy that explores this idea. That all sufficiently advanced civilizations have learned to be extremely radio silent in order to escape detection. Reason being that they all eventually conclude that, from a game theoretic standpoint, the only reasonable thing to do when you detect another civilization is to eliminate them before they do you.
- badRNG 6y agoI have not, I will definitely check that out, thanks for sharing. I feel that SETI is something I'm woefully uneducated on, and can't find good places to jump into research before sources seem to go wildly off the rails.
- markus_zhang 6y agoYeah I can testify that it's one of the best Sci-Fi novels these years. I read the original Chinese version but I heard that the translation of 1st and 3rd book (by same person) is excellent.
- m3kw9 6y agoBut earth debunks that theory, no body came to destroy us yet.
- catalogia 6y agoMaybe they're still on the way. We didn't start radio broadcasts until quite recently ago.
- VRay 6y agoWe can't send a strong enough radio signal to be detectable at any other nearby stars The Three Body Problem is great, but it assumes the existence of weapons of ludicrous destructive power.. The only other time I've ever seen a piece of fiction where someone had that amount of destructive power was in a cartoon. (And even then I only saw it once) If you assume that there's no faster-than-light space travel, it doesn't really make any sense to engage in interstellar conflict IMO. The same tech that would let you travel between the stars would also let you live in comfortable artificial habitats around your own home star, close enough to the rest of your civilization to be able to watch TV and keep up with HackerNews.
- clort 6y agohow detectable would the EMP from nuclear explosions be? Obviously that is strong, but not very directed..
- bena 6y agoYou do realize that there is gigantic nuclear reactor sitting about 93 million miles from where you are right now, right? An energy source so massive, it would only take a small fraction of it to heat and power several full planets. It would be like billions of nuclear explosions every second. The Sun dwarfs anything we can do on Earth. Any arbitrary explosion of that sort wouldn't even register as noise next to the Sun. Our radio transmissions are directed and deliberate in a way that is noticeable even among the noise. Like watching scrambled HBO on an old cable box.
- m3kw9 6y agoProbably in universe time, equivalent intelligent civilizations will only be using radio waves for communication for maybe few hundred years. To be able to find radio signal from another civ in that window of time is unlikely. A more advanced Comm method is used.
- usmannk 6y agoIn this series they move on to gravitational waves.
- 01100011 6y agoThis assumes that alien civilizations purely see us as competition and not an organism they can achieve synergy with. What if organisms could choose other ways of allying and joining together? What if, say, you had the strong, dominant, ambitious sub-population of a race trying to ally with other strong, dominant, ambitious life forms without thought to race? What if the organisms in the universe which favored peace decided to seek each other out and unite for a common cause?
- mnjn 6y agoThey definitely could choose. The problem is: communication. Light speed, although fast, isn't fast enough for communication between vast distances. How can you establish any sort of trust when messages take decades/centuries to deliver? It'd simply be safest to expect the worst.
- nordsieck 6y ago> What if organisms could choose other ways of allying and joining together? What if, say, you had the strong, dominant, ambitious sub-population of a race trying to ally with other strong, dominant, ambitious life forms without thought to race? What if the organisms in the universe which favored peace decided to seek each other out and unite for a common cause? That could be true. Judging by history, that's not a very good bet. Peace sort of works among humans, in part because we are so close genetically. But Pre-WWI Europe showed that you can't engineer peace even by inter-marrying rulers. Stepping away from humans a small amount, even today people regularly eat primates of various sorts (i.e. "bush meat"). Why do you think humans would ever make peace with alien cultures?
- ahazred8ta 6y agoWhen malicious eavesdroppers are involved, some fates are worse than death... http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff400/fv00307.htm#anunsecuredline http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff400/fv00307.htm#anunsecuredlin... Others like Vernor Vinge have speculated that the galactic net has really bad malware.
- Guest0918231 6y agoWouldn't someone send communication signals to lure or bait other civilizations? For example, spam a friendly hello message on every potential communication channel and encourage new civilizations to reply. When they do, destroy them.
- mnjn 6y agoNo, because that'd just be endangering your own civilization unnecessarily. There's always a bigger, badder civ out there :)
- tsimionescu 6y agoThe problem I see with this idea is that it depends on either FTL travel, or on a horizon of time much larger than I would imagine. If we were discovered by a war-like civilization in one of the nearer stars today, it may well take them hundreds or thousanfs of years to get here even with a probe. Is it really a plausible threat?
- em-bee 6y agothis is where i lost interest in the book. the idea that destroying another civilization is the only reasonable choice is beyond ridiculous. first of all, game theory is based on our current experience and conditioning. if we raise a society where cooperation is valued, then the outcomes of game theory will change too. it is absurd to assume that game theory is universal. but even if it were, and we'd have to assume that all aliens are hostile, the recources necessary to mount an expedition to another inhabited solar system are much larger than the benefits of exploiting a remote planet. it's simply not worth it. what would be the point? my expectation is that before we are able to send ships we'll be communicating for a long period, giving us enough time to share scientific discoveries. i'll even go as far as to claim that developing space travel that can take us to another inhabited solar system will only happen in collaboration with the civilization that we want to visit.
- pengaru 6y agoIt's just that the speed of light is too slow for any relatively recent signals to reach us from such distant sources. Most of what we can receive is very old news. nit: teeming
- badRNG 6y agofixed, thanks
- garraeth 6y agoThe SETI Institute has a very active YouTube channel if you are interested in updates: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzQdkHKOTVT_chwgDcau4sg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzQdkHKOTVT_chwgDcau4sg They also provide publicly available audit for their financials so you can see where they are at: https://www.seti.org/about-us/financials https://www.seti.org/about-us/financials As far as I can tell, they are still going strong. And the YouTube channel is always very interesting, and cutting-edge! It's not always about alien life directly, many times it is tangentially related (helpful [to the search] technologies, breakthroughs, panel discussions, etc). Perhaps not the most refined broadcasts, but they are always very educational and informative.
- internet_user 6y agoDark Forest. Let's hope we do not contact anything until we have really, really good weapons.
- ekianjo 6y agoIts a novel.
- internet_user 6y agoand it's probably the best hypothesis why we don't seem to find much.
- ekianjo 6y agoWhat hypothesis?
- networkimprov 6y agoThere is a glimmer of hope! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal
- gerland 6y agoLast I checked the wow signal was proven to come from microwave interferrence.
- networkimprov 6y agoSource?
- JKCalhoun 6y agoOur own people on this mote have only been teeming with radio communications for but a blip of time (in the grand scheme of things). Perhaps we will disappear only to be a part of the fossil record in just as short a blip. If all radio-species come and go so briefly, consider a signal from another planet serendipitous. But, you know, you have to try.
- joe_the_user 6y agoExcept, not even If an earth-like society existed on the nearest star, transmitting as we do. Neither society could detect the other. Ideas that we could find stuff that is "out there" presuppose societies that are more advanced, and more advanced on our terms, transmitting as we do but loud enough to "hear". PLUS what you mention, we in our current incarnation have existed as a blip.
- cgriswald 6y agoIt presupposes they use radio and that they’re specifically sending a message to us. We have the technological capacity to send such a message. Listening is much cheaper and safer so most civilizations would probably opt to listen.
- joubert 6y ago> Except, not even if an earth-like society existed on the nearest star, transmitting as we do. Neither society could detect the other. Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, is 1.301 parsec away (4.25 light years), so sufficient time for a signal to travel between them and us, no? Maybe you are saying we couldn't detect each other due to a linguistic or intelligence gap?
- ekianjo 6y agoWe are the only animal species capable of sending radio waves in space. For all we know it's an accident. Dinosaurs or scorpions lived longer than us as species but would probably never reach that level. So the universe may well be teeming with life, but not the kind that sends radio waves.
- krisgenre 6y agoTrue. I have always wondered why no other species on Earth have evolved in a way Humans have. Every other species maintains the balance in nature but we are the only species actively creating imbalance and destroying the planet. Prometheus might have been true after all.
- jacobush 6y agoI don't know about that. One species poisoned most other to death, a long time ago.
- gerland 6y agoWhat species might that be?
- amatic 6y agoThere are five known big mass extinction events in Earth life history, the first one is caused by... drumroll... small plants. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAkjETPM1s4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAkjETPM1s4
- jacobush 6y agoThat lead me to this one, he's funny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlUes_NPa6M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlUes_NPa6M
- pacala 6y agoThat's because sooner or later every species enters an equilibrium state with the amount of energy available in the ecosystem. In the process it may out-compete quite a bit of other species, and so we speak of 'invasive species'.
- faitswulff 6y agoIs it possible that the universe is teeming with intelligent life, just randomly distributed throughout cosmic timelines and therefore unlikely to be detected?
- joe_the_user 6y agoIt's the possible that every single star has a civilization at the level of our's, actively transmitting and detecting, yet find nothing. IE, Earth couldn't detect the signal of Earth if they were transmitted from the nearest star. This is seldom mentioned in the press. I learned it here, on hackernews a decade ago, I think. I was shocked. It's shame you get people not knowing basic stuff like this.
- Buttons840 6y agoHow far away can our own technologies detect our own transmissions? If a planet 100 light years away was making as much RF noise as us, could we detect it? I thought we could.
- O81s1iiCHUP9 6y agoOne easy way to think about this is: If our radio signals would make it to a planet 100 light-years away (even if you ignore Inverse-square law), you could probably power them down and still reach all of earth. Why would one pay for that extra, unneeded, power?
- rcxdude 6y agoBecause antenna gain is a function of both the transmitter and receiver, and detection is different from getting a high-quality signal. Most high-power radio signals on earth are aimed at transmitting to fairly low power, small, cheap devices which need to recover a good amount of information from the signal. This is very different from the requirements of a radio telescope (which has a gain many orders of magnitude higher because it has a much larger space, power, and cost budget) detecting a signal (which requires far lower signal-to-noise than reconstructing something high quality from it).
- credit_guy 6y agoIt's about signal and noise. Let's say there is a civilization out there, and we know about each other and want to talk. We point a big parabolic antenna at each other and start exchanging radio massages. That's what we are doing with Voyager right now, we point some high-gain antennas at each other and talk. At the rate of 7.2 kb/s [1], or one quarter of the bandwidth of the old dialup connections. But Voyager is close, stars are far. The closest star is about 2000 times farther than Voyager 1. Radio waves decay with the square of the distance, so if a Voyager-size antenna were to transmit towards us from 2000 times farther away, we'd get a signal 4 million times weaker. So, our friends out there need a much bigger antenna than the one on the Voyager, and we need them to point it straight at us, and we need them to blast a mighty strong radio signal towards us. We should also point a bigger antenna at them (the one we point at Voyager is 70 meter wide, not really a toy). Somehow between their bigger antenna and our bigger antenna, we need to overcome the 4 million decay factor. If our friends are 10 times farther away from us than Proxima Centauri, then we need to overcome another factor of 100. But, our friends out there don't know about us, and they don't set up a mighty large antenna and align it perfectly in our direction. They simply chatter locally using radio waves, in many cases, their antennas are pointing towards their intended receivers, and not randomly towards some exoplanet far far away (the Earth). SETI never had a chance to find anything. [1] https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/spacecraft/instruments/hga/ https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/spacecraft/instruments/...
- baxtr 6y agoYes, I agree. Just note, that this is assuming however, that no alien civilization has developed any vessels that would bring them closer to use, e.g. in our solar system so we could detect their signals
- VBprogrammer 6y agoEven the focus on on radio is potentially misguided. Perhaps there are alien species who's home planet is under some heavy fog so they have evolved to see the reflection of radio waves, to then go bouncing high power radio signals around could potentially blind themselves so they have evolved some other means of distant communications. That's just one failure scenario, if you took a Wifi signal and could somehow transport it back in time 100 years and blast it out at 1000 times the normal energy how long would it take past us to notice?
- hbcondo714 6y agoThe first SETI-specific NASA grant in over three decades was just awarded so there is still hope we will see something in our lifetime. https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2020-12 https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2020-12
- ozy 6y agoSpace is enormous! While our capacity to search it for signs of intelligence is miniscule.
- lend000 6y agoAs other commenters have covered, SETI makes a whole lot of assumptions about what extraterrestrial contact would look like and wastes time exploring the hypothesis that another civilization would behave just like us in our infancy, except at a time when they have the capability and surplus energy to transmit signals many orders of magnitude stronger than we do. To my knowledge, we are not currently transmitting sustained signals that would be detectable through the noise by any neighboring systems, and to do so for any sustained period of time, let alone a significant enough amount of time to be noticed (geological time scale) AND then wait for a response would take a ridiculous amount of energy, and provide no return on investment for literally thousands of generations. And even then, that return on investment might just be an invasion. So in my opinion, SETI is a poor use of compute and investigating the more credible of the tens of thousands of as-of-yet unexplained UFO reports would be a better use of time. Either they are already here, or we will not have the tools to discover neighbors (if they exist) until our technology is far more advanced.
- hrgiger 6y agoCarl Sagan has a nice example for this: " we take a glass of water from ocean and assuming there is no fish exist"