SETI....Worthless rubbish OR Worth Trying Anyway

SETI.....short for "The Search for Extra-Trestrial Inteligence" has been running now for many years. There are many organisations and bodies involved in this search. To date, no other Intelegent life form has been detected anywhere in the Universe.

Is this search just a load of rubbish created by the "UFO" community to satisify there intrest in Aliens and to feed their fantisey's.

Or is SETI a worth while cause that mankind must follow up on to see if we can detect life elsewhere in the universe.

That is the Question that i am asking? what do you think?

I have been involved in the seti@home project for the last number of months and i believe that it is worth a try anyway. I think that the lack of any real results from any of the seti projects should not deter us from trying.

I think that the universe is a very vast place and hard to imagine in human terms. Some of the latest quests that mankind is involved in, like the search for planets that orbit other stars, is a testiment to the fact that we will never stop looking for life on other planets.

Many people believe that seti@home is a bit of a waste of time. I believe that it is a learning experience. As time goes on we learn from the results that come back from searches and can addapt and say"OK, we got no results from that search, lets try something different". In this way i believe that in time we will find signals that have been transmitted by an intelegent life form.

Always remember that of all the billions of stars and countless planets that we cant see yet, we ourselves have only been transmitting week radio signals for the last 50 odd years. That means that our week, unfocused, signals have only traveled 50 light years into space.

This is a link to SETI@HOME
seti@home

This is a link to PADDY'S IN SPACE
www.paddysinspace.com

Join PADDY'S IN SPACE from this page
setiathome.berkeley.edu/team_display.php?teamid=127961

Sure, we've been searching for a few decades but our actual penetration into the search-space is minute. The task is huge and we've just been picking away at it.

SETI does not take up a lot of money and is actually trying to answer a really really important question, 'are we alone'. There is very few scientific projects working on something so fundamentally important to the species as a whole.

Basically it's excellent value for money and just because we haven't found anything yet does not mean we won't find anything!

So, in summary, two thumbs up to SETI.

Bart.

Hi,

I think I alluded to this in another thread recently.

I think SETI is essential and I agree with most of what you say except.

i believe that in time we will find signals that have been transmitted by an intelegent life form

I am very doubtful that we will get such a result. Let me elaborate on why I beleive this. As you mentioned we've only been broadcasting for 50 years or so but if other civilisations are as abundent as some might beleive then they will be at different stages if evolution to us. Some not so far ahead, some farther. Their should be many who are farther down the road than us and they would have been broadcasting for possible a very long time. We should have heard some of them by now. Maybe we've just been unlucky thats why I think we should keep trying. I think the reason we haven't heard them is because they simply don't exist OR they are just too far away for us to hear them. That's the only logical conclusion I can come to.

If it's a case that the signals justr havent reached us yet then you have to face the likely hood that were not gonna hear them for possibly a very very long time indeed. Those signals MIGHT be just on our doorstep, but space is a very big place and there's a much greater likelyhood that these signals are still along long way away from us and are not gonna reach us for perhaps millions of years. Simple probability suggests that the chances of those signals turning up anytime soon are very slim.

I don't think that is cause to give up though. Even the remotest chance of making such a disovery that would shake our very existence is worth the effort.

i believe that in time we will find signals that have been transmitted by an intelegent life form

I am very doubtful that we will get such a result.

I've come to a similar conclusion despite my original optimism about the project.

We aren't just looking for alien TV channels, we are looking in a very specific frequency that we think other civilisations would have placed beacons. If they were there we should have found them by now. Its still worth keeping an ear out, but I'm not expecting anything.

The aliens are either not there, not transmitting on the beacons we expect, or not transmitting at all. If they are not found where we are currently looking then perhaps we should look elsewhere. Look for laser communication pulses or something.

Cheers,
~Al

What are the implications of the impending Arecibo funding cuts?

hi all
i personally think that the universe is to big for us to be alone. what makes us so special. there are 4 hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone
and if one percent of them had life there would be millions of civilizations out there


ps
one of the best quotes from the great film contact.i always wanted to say that :lol: :lol: :lol: