SETI....Worthless rubbish OR Worth Trying Anyway

There is a down side to looking for E.Ts if and when we do make contact we mightn’t like what we find. There is a school of thought out there that we’d be better off keeping or heads down and wait a few more centuries before announcing our self’s. Remember "V"

but that assumes they will behave like humans.

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

Agreed. Even if the existence of life is believed to come from God and Heaven (and thus for our misgivings must earn our way back in!), I can't see no reason at all why God would not do the same for other parts of the cosmos. We have freedom of thought, and I'm sure He (She? Maybe It) was sure this was bound to crop up at some stage on THIS planet! So why not on others? Evolution has a way of making things work out, so why not distant civilisations become so advanced as to be able (not just want to) to communicate to each other?

Having said that (and it was opinionated, so no offence meant), it does all rely on beliefs, right? Devout SETI researchers do their work believing E.T. in some form is out there, and some day will bother to make contact (I don't see why Earth, though... ).

Until then, it is like Astrology affecting nature - you either believe it, or you don't...

Seanie.

Our own history has been blighted by disastrous first contacts between peoples on this planet. So imagine what it would be like between them and us.
Well meaning them maybe but your assuming their better than us.
Who's to say there not the end product of a very adversarial society.

Mankind has spent 2000 years following a guy they called the son of god.

A God that there is no tangible evidence of his existance appart from human beleaf and here say.

We are trying to justify spending money on looking for aliens that we have no evidence for either. The SETI project was very specific in what it was looking for, not alien big brother shows, not ship to ship communications. Its looking for a beacon signal that we assume that a civilisation in our part of the galaxy would have placed for the specific purpose of announcing their presence. If its there it should be obvious. We haven't found it. It's unlikley that we'll suddenly discover something that we have missed before. detecting alien communication signals would be very hard as they would be very very weak, it takes some of the largest radio telescopes on Earth to communicate with the spacecraft we have in the solar system afterall.

While I am sure advanced races may have developed better ways to communicate than EM waves they remain our only known method, by relying on them we are limited to looking for races at a similar level of development to ourselves (at the time the signals were transmitted) and thus we are pre-selecting a sub-set of all civilisations for the search.

Thats missing the SETI point though. Any civilisation more advanced than us will have discovered ways to communicate on the em spectrum. They may have better ways but chances are they will see radio as a basic way, using the specific gap in the spectrum that SETI searches in. Therfore if they want to announce their existance it makes sence for them to use the medium that will give the greatest oppertunity for others to detect. Thats radio waves.

There are other ways, directed laser beacons have been mentioned for a while. Perhaps it would be worth now trying to invest more in looking for these optical anomilies rather than seti@home. Scanning for lasers should be relativly easy also, you are looking for something with a very narrow wavelength. Though it might be harder in practica than the piggyback approach seti uses at aricebo. Its probably the next thing to try since we are still quite a bit away from being able to look for warp signatures in deep space!

Cheers,

Move 20 LY away from earth and turn around, then do what SETI do now and see if you find us. I don't think you will TBH.

Bart.

This is my problem with all this, if we were located say only 100 light years from earth (next door!), using current detection methods we would not be able to detect our own civilisation at all!.
The only way our attention would be drawn to our planet would be through our planets influence (gravitationally) on the sun and then visually detect the earth and run its light through a spectroscope and detect the traces of life giving substances such as water/carbon/oxygen and try determine the temperature, and even at that, all we could say is that there is a high probability of some sort of life. All this is currently beyond our current level of technology, but it might be possible in 50 years or so.

I'm not saying we shouldn't be looking, but its really like winning the lottery, we could either detect a signal tomorrow or in 7 thousand years time. I personally hope we do find something, if we did it would be a great stepping stone, isnt it better to know someone else is out there rather having them land in your back garden out of the blue !


To me, life in the universe is 2 questions.
1, Does/can life exist elsewhere in the universe?
2, Are they here?

1, I would be shocked if there wasn't life elsewhere.
2, IMHO No, until someone can change my mind with real evidence, (basically its gonna take an alien abduction to convince me :lol: )

Our own history has been blighted by disastrous first contacts between peoples on this planet. So imagine what it would be like between them and us.
Well meaning them maybe but your assuming their better than us.
Who's to say there not the end product of a very adversarial society.

i am not imagining they are better than us or worse than us, or for that matter anything like us. some people imagine them to come to conquer us, some think they will be the galactic peace core. i don't think they will look or act like us, the odds of that happening are probably zero.