5 ms·
Somewhat hilariously at the same time we think there must be life given the 14B year old universe, we look for 50 years and say, huh we can’t find anything so s
by xt00 3y ago
Somewhat hilariously at the same time we think there must be life given the 14B year old universe, we look for 50 years and say, huh we can’t find anything so something’s wrong.. like sure our initial assumption was that a super powerful alien race would blast a powerful signal that would tell us how to contact them — and this signal they have been powering for millions of years ? — that would be great but seems like that isn’t happening. So likely we need to just keep searching.
- onetoo 3y agoNot an expert in this field, but I don't believe we are looking for any directed "Hello, we are over here! Look at us! Hey, humans, hey, over here!" signals, but more "literally anything that would imply the existence intelligent life." Humanity blasts all sorts of signals indiscriminately into the universe. Our best guess is that other intelligent life would do the same. I mean, sure, obviously we're also looking for the former, but we're expecting the latter.
- thegrim22 3y agoThe vast majority of (radio) SETI relies on primarily searching for intentional, powerful, repeating, beacons/signals. We have scores of unexplained, suspicious looking signals that we just discard because the signals never repeated and so we'll never know what they were and can't ever make any conclusion about them. The only really unambiguous signal we can detect is a powerful repeating beacon, and so that's all we really look for. Also, any "random" non-beacon leakage another civilization might internally produce is expected to be too low-powered for us to pick up hundreds or thousands of light-years away. Nobody in their right mind would design their internal communications to be so insanely inefficient that they'd be blasting it strongly, unambiguously, potentially omnidirectionally, for us hundreds/thousands of light years away to detect. What an insane waste of energy that would be.
- harshalizee 3y agoAll of our radio signals since it's inception hasn't travelled far enough to matter. Even after short distances, out radio signals would be indistinguishable from noise. If humanity stood on an alpha Centauri planet, our closest star, we wouldn't be able to detect life on Earth with the current tech we have.
- actionfromafar 3y agoCouldn't we detect oxygen in Earth atmosphere, which would be weird, because something would have to replenish to oxygen?