Given that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been given a $100 million shot in the arm, I am motivated to explain why I think it is a colossal waste of money.
Reason #1: It’s not going to work. It hasn’t worked so far — no signs of intelligent life out there at all — and while a negative result isn’t necessarily a sign of failure, it does mean the likeliest explanation is that intelligent life is very, very rare. Or that it’s not interested in talking to us. Or that they’re using a communications technology we haven’t discovered yet. Oh, there are so many excuses from the SETI community!
Worden is also circumspect. “We might not find anything,” he says. “But that begins to tell us something significant about the universe. A null result is still a good one.”
All right, I say, you’ve got a great big null result so far. A grand goose egg. What does it tell you? The significant answer so far seems to be that now you’ve got an excuse to ask for even more money, so you can search harder.
Reason #2: It seems to turn smart scientists into insipid, facile dimwits. I am constantly appalled at the goofy rationales they give for SETI.
“SETI is very much a shot in the dark,” says associate director of Jodrell Bank Observatory Tim O’Brien at the University of Manchester, UK, who is not involved in the project. But he agrees that devoting telescope time to the search is worth it. “Imagine if there was a message and we simply hadn’t been listening.”
Right. Imagine if fairies actually existed, but we hadn’t been clapping hard enough to keep them alive? Clap! Clap your hands! Clap harder! See any fairies yet? Well then, you clearly need to give me $100 million to clap a lot more. If I don’t find any, though, you can’t complain, because the null result tells us something significant about the universe: that fairies are really, really hard to resuscitate, apparently.
Reason #3: Taking a shot in the dark is dangerous. Do you have any idea what you’re trying to contact out there, or who is hunting for you? Even if these hypothetical, undetected aliens are not hostile, or prevented by the physics of vast differences from physically harming us, has anyone considered the effect of a significant signal on Earth? SETI investigators already exhibit an almost religious fervor, a faith in things unseen, a hint of confirmation might unbalance them completely. And do we really want to talk with an alien civilization so dedicated to piping out their one-way message? I have no reason to have a conversation with the proselytizer who is broadcasting their propaganda here on Earth, why should I want to talk to one a thousand light years away?
But yes, the SETI fans will say, you can’t assume the messages will be bad or pointless, and we won’t know unless we tune in. See Reason #2.
Reason #4: Are we really ready to communicate with a galactic civilization? The house is a mess, the rain forests are being chopped down, we’re slaughtering all the other species, and our own species is slaughtering itself over the proper skin color or holy book. Is this really the best time to go looking for company? Imagine if their first question is, “How’s your meteor defense system holding up?” or “Are your greenhouse gases under control?”, and their reaction to our answer is to drop the line and suggest communication might be more productive if there is some hope that our species will exist long enough for more than a few exchanges. Or worse, that they’ll be sending along some salvage ships to pick up the pieces in a few centuries, when we’re gone.
I suppose we could flip that, and what we’re really looking for is a nearby SOS, with a civilization in meltdown. Wouldn’t that be a prime target for scavenging?
Reason #5: It’s simply terrible science. It’s nothing but an expensive fishing expedition driven by wishful thinking. I’m all for basic research without a practical goal, but science should at least have the goal of increasing our understanding. What does SETI help us understand? Human psychology, maybe, but there are cheaper, more effective ways of doing that. Before you go poking into some mysterious hole with a specific instrument, you have to have some justification for doing it, and the SETI researchers have failed to do that.
At best, they provide TED talks that appeal to science fiction fans. Not good enough.
Reason #6: There are better ways to spend that much money. How about making our house an attractive place to visit? Making our conversations desirable? Learning new things on our own rather than hoping some galactic sugar daddy will send us cool information? It just makes me think of the smart student scouring the web for hours looking for answers to an exam, rather than spending those hours studying and becoming more capable in the subject.
If you simply care about good scientific research, then giving that $100 million to NSF and asking them to distribute the money to promising, productive research would be a step forward.
Unfortunately, this money comes straight out of the pockets of a Russian billionaire who thinks making money qualifies him to understand how science works, and makes him think his fantasies are valid. So he flushes that cash right down the drain, into the waiting arms of the SETI brigade. Bleh.
If Earth gets invaded by Xenomorphs/Bugs/Predators/Tripods/killer space robots/*insert favourite SF monster* because of SETI I will officially be displeased.
Actually, we probably shouldn’t joke about that too much or the military will be demanding extra funding in order to develop super weapons to protect Earth from the notional alien menace that may just possibly be out there somewhere. It would hardly be out of character with the other stupid things the chicken hawks on both sides of the Atlantic have done in recent years.
So a Russian Billionaire drops $100 mil into the pockets of some scientists who will then spend a lot of it back into the economy. Maybe the money could go to better projects, or worse ones. I fail to see the downside other than we might piss off some galactic neighbor. But we’ve been doing that with our TV and Radio broadcasts for decades.
To me, the inverse square law of electromagnetic energy and the fact that we’re bound by it’s fixed speed are the two reasons the SETI search seems largely futile. I hope they share their data freely with scientists interested in studying hypotheses other than the “Advanced alien civilizations in our galactic neighborhood are beaming very high power focused laser beams of data directly at us.” one.
It will give evangelicals a new door to knock on. Maybe they will all go to tell the aliens the good news.
I guess there’s probably a reason why deus ex machina has been a powerful theme in literature and drama. It may be human cultural nature to be conditioned to presume that the top issue is to communicate with the invisible daddy figures that live in the sky. Most European and American scientists and millionaires have always lived in a culture that presumed this, even if the individuals didn’t consciously notice this or agree with it. We can’t always escape the effects of cultural conditioning by just ignoring those pressures.
Spending on SETI sounds fun to me, but there are so many worthwhile projects that the NSF can’t afford to fund, that to me there is no contest. Millionaires can follow what they want. But my view is that citizens have a duty to tax millionaires a bit more, so that WE can fund the NSF etc better. I’m not competing for NSF grants personally, but I want to live in a country where that is going on.
3. Are you going to next propose banning robotic spacecraft to the outer solar system, because – who knows? – maybe there’s a long-dormant alien spaceship out there just waiting to kill us all if it gets a visit from a civilization that developed on Earth? There’s a lot of potential stuff out there that could kill us all, but I’d rather know that it’s out there (or if it’s not) than sit in the dark hoping it isn’t and won’t notice us if we stay quiet.
I’d kind of getting a vibe from you that you dislike space exploration, thinking that it turns our attention towards beyond Earth rather than down towards it to fix our Earth-bound problems. Yeah, you’ve qualified it in the past by saying you support robotic exploration, but . . .
4. I suspect they won’t give a shit. Assuming they have the same values as us on the environment, etc is anthropomorphizing them, just like with SETI’s rather unlikely assumption that some civilization out there is conveniently pinging all star systems with a high-powered radio telescope looking for people to talk to.
5. They’re listening to the skies, right? So if nothing else, they’re giving us more information about the universe – namely that there doesn’t seem to be anybody out there blasting easily detectable radio signals across the stars.
6. SETI isn’t exactly my favorite destination for this – $100 million is enough to fund another telescope here on Earth, or maybe even a small one in orbit. But at least it’s somebody’s private funding to waste, rather than public funds.
Don’t those people realize that even if we found a signal and we had ironclad proof that it originated from an extraterrestrial civilization, it would most likely be from hundreds of thousands of light years away, and thus hundreds of thousands of years old? In other words, anything SETI found would be more like an ancient time capsule than a first contact.
Oh man, I have taken so much crap from various parts of the ‘skeptical community’ over the years for disliking SETI – that makes it especially gratifying to read this points.
Frankly, I’m not bothered by the danger or how unready we are. It’s the bad science, the waste of money, the religious fervor.
And I hope hope hope that nobody counts that $100 million dollars against the total when they’re deciding how much to spend on scientific research.
post, not points. sheesh.
Evolution is a massively contingent process, so the idea that there would be beings with similar technology (radio) at this moment in time and close enough to be found is absurd. Of course Nature may surprise us, but the cost/payback for SETI in general and this new idea in particular seems too low to invest in.
Oh stop complaining, it keeps the SETI gang gainfully employed and off the street. Or would you rather have those animals wilding through our universities and threatening our women?
Hey, #4 is a positive outcome. I expect nothing from SETI, but as fantasy outcomes go, it would be hard to ask for better than messages saying “stop killing the environment you depend on, you spending-obsessed fools”. Heck, that might even be better than the dream of giving us things, which would probably ruin our ability to learn on our own for a long while.
Also:
http://partiallyclips.com/2006/03/09/galaxy/
http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2331
@donterndrup
That’s why I’m not in favor of giving them any public funding support. If some billionaire wants to blow $100 million on them, well, there’s worse things he could be spending it on (especially in Russia).
As noted at #3, the idea is a dud right from the start – the alien equivalent to tv / radio broadcasts are simply not going to maintain signal strength nor coherence over the vastness of a single light year, made worse by the fact that the parent star is going to drown everything out anyway.
I am in favour of SETI, if only for the effect that a positive result would have on how we would see ourselves in the context of the universe. Of course, the most fervent godbots would find reasons to reject the implications of evidence of intelligent life elsewhere, but at least some of the more rational believers that mankind is unique and ‘chosen’ might be able to reconsider the issue.
On second thoughts…..nah, religions have evolved powerful compensatory strategies, and if all we have to go on are the data from technologies that most people can’t understand, then any halfway competent religious leader will have no problem excising the implications from his view of the universe, one way or another.
Maybe SETI should focus on the other loons who want their strong AI because there is no way it will end Skynet’s style.
Stlll the best chance to find a non human intelligence
Humanity will always tries everything.
Can we make weapon too powerful to be used ? checked
Can we jumpstart a massive extinction ourself ? checked, waiting for the final score
Can we jumpstart a runaway greenhouse effect ? still working on the subject
Was Malthus right ? Not decided yet, won’t stop population growth until we know because God Said Malthus is Wrong
Is torture working ? pretty sure the answer is no but maybe with more try…
Holms @ # 14: … the parent star is going to drown everything out anyway.
Don’t the SETI hunters allow for that and search in the frequencies less subject to interference on the logic that ETs would use those?
I participate in the SETI@Home project, as a very-low-cost/potentially-very-high-benefit gamble, and that in turn has led me to Oxford University’s climateprediction.net, an HIV-proteomics project, and other worthwhile, relevant, here-and-now shared computing efforts through the World Community Grid. At the very least, SETI can help increase interest in science, much in the vein of gosh-wow science fiction luring the young into more serious studies.
The general trend in our communications has been to use lower power and/or directional radio communications, and to encode the signal into something that looks increasingly similar to noise.
I.e. you’re not going to pick up Netflix from light years away, or if you did the packets would be encrypted and routed along different paths haphazardly so it would be incomprehensible.
I read an interesting paper pointing out that long range interstellar radio communication is very possible at low power, provided that you use the Sun’s gravity to focus the signal. Of course, you can only do this from 500-1000 au out along a particular line from the star you want to look at / talk to. That’s about as directional (and undetectable) as it gets.
All this says to me that the only way SETI is going to work is if the aliens already know we’re here and are spending a lot of money to wave at us.
monad/#12:
While I’m not generally a fan of X-Files-ish ‘we’ve already contacted aliens but the shadow government has suppressed it’ conspiracy theories, the scenario in which:
a) the aliens say exactly what you’re imagining, and, subsqeuently,
b) The Powers That Be freak out, declare the aliens are commies, and the world must never know…
… suddenly seems to me at least an amusing premise for a short story. Or at least an SMBC comic.
(/So get on that, Wienersmith!)
Oooooh! I remember A for Andromeda from way back at the beginning the 60’s! That Fred Hoyle has a lot to answer for!!
What? Pointing out the questionable scientific value in the search for aliens, or the expensive practical issues inherent in sending people to Mars, means one dislikes space exploration? Liking space exploration doesn’t mean you’ve got to sign up for an “everything space related is worth it, and even the scientifically shaky bits are awesome and deserve lots of money” dogma. You can also, *gasp*, like space exploration and question the endeavor’s worth in the context of “earth bound” problems.
@MarkM1427, You’re vastly overestimating the sensitivity of their radio telescopes, and the size of the Milky Way galaxy, which is only 100,000 light years wide, and we’re about 1/4 of the way in, so 75,000 lightyears away is the rough estimate of the farthest away star available, after which it jumps to around a million lightyears or more to reach another galaxy. Since the galactic core puts out way more radio interference than is physically possible for a civilization to pump into a radio signal without doing something crazy like blowing up stars as a transmitter, we’re never going to be able to look straight through it, which cuts our maximum visible distance down to at most 50,000 light years.
Radio signal dispersal and general interference from random “stuff” in space means that even with a super focused high-strength signal being sent, we wouldn’t be able to see it at more than a couple thousand lightyears tops (Technically the Arecibo signal would be visible at 25k lightyears, but we could only afford to broadcast it for 3 minutes. Searching for something like that is beyond pointless, and even the SETI people know this) and most of their high priority listening targets would be within 200ly. (and thus at most around that many years old) Still a bit old, but not nearly on the scale you’re giving. If we’re just looking for radio broadcasts of our own “normal” level, about 100ly is our maximum detection range (ie: if they’re further away than that, we can’t watch their TV/radio broadcast because it would just be static.)
(This is why it’s vitally important that we get FTL travel right away, so we can go recover those lost episodes of Dr. Who before the signal strength is too weak to catch.)
Still, even if there was a civilization out there that sent a signal, we would have to have been looking in the right direction at the right time to see it before they stopped sending it, which is kinda like finding a needle in a haystack if the needle was only going to be there for about three minutes during august, and we weren’t even told which day it would be there on, or if the needle was really even there or not. Or even if it was actually August, and not last May when we weren’t looking at all. Also the hay is made of metal, so we can’t even use a magnet to sift through it.
All of this SETI funding would be better spent on just general useful radio telescopes doing actual science, and then the SETI people could just run their @home clients on the data to mine for the signals they aren’t going to find.
All right, I say, you’ve got a great big null result so far. A grand goose egg. What does it tell you?
Double down!! It works for homeopaths…
Maybe there are species that arise technologically and die because they spent money searching for extraplanetary civilizations instead of big rocks whizzing toward them. Or something.
Reminds me of my one joke:
At a U2 concert, the crowd is going wild as the last notes of “Where the Streets Have No Name” ring. Bono hushes the crowd. You can hear a pin drop. Bono claps once. Then again. Then again.
“Every time I clap my hands, a starving child dies,” he explains.
Out of the hush, a single voice rings out. “Then stop doing it, asshole!”
You forgot one. Space is big. Really really big. Even if there ARE signals flying around everywhere, odds are we’d never run across one.
I do take issue with your “hearing them would be dangerous” bit though. Sounds a bit too “man wasn’t meant to tread here” for my tastes. Oh odds and bodkins, AI MIGHT destroy us all. Aliens MIGHT invade us. Genetic engineering MIGHT get us eaten by dinosaurs. Particle acceleration MIGHT trigger the true vacuum catastrophe. Fire MIGHT burn the whole world down.
I was once very interested in SETI and put my computer work on it as part of the distributed computing effort a very interesting idea. That was before I started to really think about the reality how vast the time/distances actually were and all of the other reasons PZ listed here.
I am also beginning to think there is really very little reason anyone from some other solar system would ever need to come here other than what the stated reason in Star Trek, Because there is increasing evidence that there is nothing here on earth that is not some where else in abundance some where between with out the gravity, except for life and the by-products of life. I will leave the concept of intelligence out for the present.
uncle frogy
@MarkM1427, even a time capsule from a dead civilization would surely be worth having. Especially since, if they put as much thought into the contents as our SETI people have done, we could compare our science with one that had arisen independently.
Unless you have a custom purpose-built rig, and live in a place where most of the energy is either renewables or (questionably) nuclear, you probably would do better not doing any of that anymore. Home PCs are woefully inefficient for such purposes. You’re not donating “CPU time”, you’re donating joules.
I don’t buy the it might be dangerous argument. You might as well not explore anything with that mindset.
I will make two comments giving a dissenting opinion to P.Z.. Note: Although I do not work much on SETI myself, I am a research scientist at the SETI Institute (which has not yet been directly involved in this new Milner-funded effort) :
Re. “It’s simply terrible science”
There is a rule that should be applied to all SETI programs: do good science even if there are no aliens. Fortunately, this is possible.
The sensitive broad-band high-resolution surveys that are planned for radio SETI are also extremely useful for radio astronomy in general – finding and monitoring transient radio sources such as blazars ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blazar ), irregular variable stars, astrophysical masers ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megamaser ), and whatever extreme event makes fast radio bursts ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_radio_burst ). So you should design a survey for radio transient astronomy, and have SETI be simply one of many branches in the data-processing pipeline.
Optical SETI programs rely on long-term detailed monitoring of stars, under the assumption that whatever notional aliens like to use lasers. Such monitoring of many stars is also useful for understanding stellar physics, which among other things helps improve models of how the Sun behaves (important for understanding the history of the solar system).
Re. “Taking a shot in the dark is dangerous. “
There is an important distinction here between looking for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence and making our presence obvious to whatever aliens may exist. The programs Milner is funding are strictly the former. There isn’t any screaming in the jungle being proposed by this group. I will not attempt to make any predictions re. what might happen if a SETI program were to find something.
Tangentially, it happens that my own research is part of the most-detectable radio leakage off the Earth. P.Z. mentioned a “meteor defense system”. We have one. Among other things, we address the asteroid impact hazard by tracking potentially-hazardous objects with high-power radars. Most of the radar beam misses the target and goes off into space. Somebody with an equivalent radio telescope to the ones I use could see that beam from tens of thousands of lightyears away, in the extremely low-probability event that they happened to be looking in the right direction at just the right time.
I hope that making sure that a rock pile isn’t going to fall from the sky in a hundred years isn’t counted as being dangerous.
Are you skeptical of SETI(TM) only. I agree that pointing radiotelescopes at various points in the sky and just looking has yet to yield anything over the past decades. But, there are additional and perhaps more scientifically rigorous means to establish whether we are the only intelligent and sentient beings in the universe. I like to think of SETI in the broadest sense.
1. We should answer the question of whether there is life at all outside the earth. I think that if we discover cute photosynthetic chlamydomonas under the ice caps of Callisto, that in and of itself would be an earth shattering discovery. Given that intelligent life on our world evolved from primitive protists, it stands to reason that these sorts of discoveries should be part of SETI.
2. I would argue that one task that should be front and center is the search for the neural basis of human intelligence and consciousness along with its evolutionary origins. We are nowhere close to understanding the complexities of our own nervous system and how biological neural nets yield a mind. We should accomplish this before we try to speculate about alien minds. Therefore, I would argue that the search for the neural basis of consciousness or SNBC should be an integral part of SETI.
3. There is logic in concentrating our efforts around solar systems that emit energy signatures that may point to intelligence. That is, the greater the heat output (beyond that of the star around which the planets orbit, etc.), then this may implicate that intelligent life has evolved technologically (eg. spacecraft, Dyson spheres, etc.). Although, a counter argument is that an intelligent but not so adventurous civilization may want to stay put and not travel beyond their stratosphere.
4. This is a consequence of 2 and 3. Could we not develop artificially intelligent space probes that mimics aspects of human intelligence to explore regions of space that may support intelligent life? If we could land a probe on a comet, why not a life-seeking R2D2 or a Huey, Louie and Dewey (ie. from Silent Running) to those solar systems far, far away?
5. Social justice needs to be a part of SETI. We need to push the envelope of human equality before we attempt to communicate with those multi-gendered, green colored, multi-headed, hyperintelligent, self-replicating autotrophs who live on the opposite shore of the Laniakea galactic supercluster.
I think this should all be part of SETI. But if all this expensive undertaking yields to dick all, would it all be a waste? Think of the downstream benefits of knowing that protists exist beyond the earth. This leads to the potential for us to live outside earth on some extraterrestrial oxygen rich ecosystem. Who could deny the downstream benefits of understanding consciousness or developing devices that adopt neural computing. And hey, if we all treat each other right and we are the only ones…….need I say more? I think SETI as it currently stands needs to broaden rather than remain as a sci-fi Carl Sagan dream (ie. Contact).
I agree with Professor Ludd, er, I mean, Myers. There’s so little likelihood of a result that the millions of people-hours and antenna time should be used on something or some things more productive.
My only quibble with Professor Ludd’s, er, I mean, Myers’ objections to SETI is I fail to understand how SETI causes a danger to Earth and/or humanity. SETI is passive. It listens. There are numerous electromagnetic signals leaving Earth each nano-second but SETI isn’t sending any of them.
Could be worse, could be listening for god.
michaelbusch @30: You win the prize for most valuable comment in this thread. I used to see zero value in SETI, because so what if we do find aliens? Even if they are just a dozen light-years away we will never be able to have meaningful conversations with them.
But it turns out SETI research also covers other areas that are halfway useful. I lurve me some astronomy, and SETI is indeed part of it.
I think #30 (michaelbusch) wins the thread. They are spending the $100M doing good science; the SETI is almost a by-product. Can’t see a problem myself.
Aw gee, you should look on the bright side of Yuri Milner’s investment. He could finance some other vanity project like a bicycle team and two of the world’s top riders for the Tour de France [Oleg Tinkoff] and run around annoying them. Or, if he were in this country, he might throw a few hundred million at running for president. Or, being a sugar daddy to some republiscum running for the same.
joel @34: If you want an example of how having SETI be a part of a more general astronomy program can work in practice, you might review recent science results from the Allen Telescope Array: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2011&q=%22Allen+Telescope+Array%22&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5 , which the SETI Institute operates with SRI International.
Anisopteran @35: I do not know the details of the new projects at Green Bank and Parkes that Milner is funding, so I can’t speak to what the science results from them would be.
I agree, but if we listened for a thousand years or more and finally found intelligent life somewhere nearby (still seems like a long shot), I don’t think people would just stop there. It would be risky, if not dangerous, to make contact at that point. But what else would you do? If you were just interested in finding (unintelligent) life, that’s much more likely to happen, and it wouldn’t make sense for the next step to be communicating with the alien bacteria (or giraffes* or whatever they are). So the question is something like this: why were we focused on intelligent life, if we weren’t interested in doing intelligent things with them once they’re found? Of course “doing intelligent things” could be anything from having a conversation to trading to going to war — which obviously isn’t to say any of those are feasible or carry no risk — but it’s hard to imagine it would stop at a passive detection. Even if most everyone decided it was all a bad idea after we found them, that’s got to be at least part of the motivation for people interested in programs like SETI: although that’s not step #1 (detecting) it is implicitly in steps #2 and up (which of course we haven’t gotten to yet).
*No offense to giraffes. I know you’re not listening, but you’re not really that stupid.
I have to disagree with PZ and the other anti-SETI folks here. Yes, there may be goose eggs, false hopes, monsters, and bad investments out there; but if you wait until your house is in perfect order before putting out the welcome mat or even installing a doorbell, you’re just insuring that you will always be alone. A cogent argument against SETI would require a detailed analysis of why continued negative results would contribute nothing to radio astronomy methodology or any other spinoff areas, or to human psychology or anything else, and I don’t see that.
In the grand scheme of entertainment, sports, pop culture, or [name your favorite boondoggle here], 100 million in private money is a pittance. While I probably wouldn’t approve of a 100M NSF grant for either SETI, or to search for fossil rabbits in the Precambrian, I do hope that both SETI and the fossil hunters are keeping their eyes and electronic ears open.
But another expedition to Mount Ararat is right out.
I suspect some of the scientists promoting SETI are just going along with it as a way of getting more radioastronomy funding.
The only good reason is #1.
Assume that SETI has a decent probability of working (I don’t think it has) and the other reasons become very weak.
Scientismist:
No it wouldn’t. There are already lots of ways (and reasons) to make progress with radio astronomy, etc. michaelbusch put it like this in #30:
That’s taking advantage of the general progress being made in those areas of study, not contributing to it. It seems like there needs to be some kind of an argument from you, not just a mere logical possibility, that specifically looking for intelligent life will enhance or motivate those other research/engineering programs. It might happen somehow, for all we know, but it doesn’t seem likely to be a factor, since all of those other specific areas of interest already are interesting/useful to us in their own ways. People shouldn’t do things for no reason, so you should be able to show that there is some extra special sauce being added to the mix somehow if you’re actually going to give a reason why it should be done, and the only thing opponents need is to lack of evidence for that. From the evidence I’m aware of, there’s only a cost for data-processing/manpower/resources/etc. that could be directed to those other specific programs, not a benefit that the others receive. If you have evidence to convince me otherwise, then it should be presented as such and not just made as a promise.
What many people totally blind out, If the Aliens have a SETI program, the first they learn about us is 100 years of radio and then 70 years of TV.
Encouraging thought, ehy?
Strongly disagree with points #3 and #4. If SETI were to be successful, it wouldn’t notify any aliens of our presence. That would be a decision to deal with later, and it doesn’t make sense to saddle SETI with that argument.
The first point that you made is, I think, the only one that needs to be made.
There’s only one reason why I don’t like SETI. Its premise, like many sci-fi movies, is that there are civilisations somewhere in the galaxy that are approximately at our level of technology. Given the enormous age of the Universe, the odds are that any hypothetical civilisation would be either thousands or millions of years behind, or more advanced technologically than ours. So, probably they wouldn’t be interested, or not in possession of the necessary technology.
Exobiology is another really irritating contemporary scientific enthusiasm, it’s rather like theology.
As others have pointed out, SETI isn’t the same as METI (message to ETI), but either way, there is almost nothing we can to that would add to the risk of detection by any hostile aliens out there.
If life is rare in the galaxy, Earth itself is an omnidirectional beacon that shines far brighter than our ability to broadcast radio waves into the cosmos. Our oxygen atmosphere betrays the existence of complex life, and a closer examination of the trace elements (including the way they have changed over the centuries) likely betrays the existence of some form of technological society existing on the planet surface.
And if intelligent life is commonplace, then we almost certainly already have neighbors keeping an eye on us from afar.
As for scavenging… scavenging what, exactly? What resources does Earth have that aren’t abundantly available elsewhere in the galaxy, especially to an interstellar capable civilization? Perhaps it is only life itself that is rare, and even then, any wholesale raiding of the lifeforms on a planet would be incredibly inefficient compared to taking a few select samples with them.
Even as slaves, we would be a terribly unreliable alternative to automation, AIs, robots, etc.
Yeah, you can always think of some reason why an visiting alien race might be hostile (religious fanaticism, for one), but I believe that plausible reasons are nowhere near as numerous as most people believe.
Reasons #3 and #4 are horse-shit, whatever the merits of the other arguments. SETI is doing nothing but listening at the moment, aside from the occasional plaque on a spaceprobe that will tens of millennia to get anywhere at all, and a couple of attempts to beam signals at an uninteresting neighbour or two, in the wild optimism of SETI’s early years. Even if they detected something, there would be a lot of discussion before the scientific community even considered thinking about the possibility of sending a message.
Not that a lot of stuff hasn’t been beamed out already; those early warning radars were beaming high-powered coherent signals far and wide for several decades. If there’s anything nasty out in range, they already know we’re here; best thing to do is to keep an ear open to see if we can spot them on the approach. Like watching for asteroids, it might only give us advanced warning of something we can’t actually do anything about; but, on the other hand, if we don’t pay any attention, then we will be surprised.
And as an urban hermit who is never ready for visitors, I say fuck that excuse. I know it’s horseshit when I say it, but I know it’s not a good way to live. If they’re out there, then we should damn well put out the welcome mat and make the place ready for unexpected visitors, whether they’re going to turn up tomorrow or a thousand years from now. No good hiding from them pretending we’re not here (I have done this), they’ll either never come this way again, or show up when we’re really not ready for them.
And finally, SETI is paid for on the same basis as every scientist has their project paid for, by arguing for it. If they’ve argued well enough to get $100 million, I say good on ’em. How many New Horizons would that have paid for? How many ITERs, how many CERNs? 30¢ from each American? I can’t even buy a second class stamp for that little, and I probably have more in a forgotten jacket pocket.
Well, SETI as it is currently constructed requires that the aliens we are hoping to detect would both 1) use a lot EM transmissions for communication and 2) broadcast at a MUCH greater intensity than we are currently doing, because our current technology cannot actually detect any signal that isn’t a focused beam directed intentionally at us, at an intensity stronger than anything we can economically manage ourselves right now. (ie, SETI currently would not succeed in detecting earth’s/humanity’s exact clone from the nearest star)
No. 2 requires them to both be significantly more advanced than we are technology, and have access to substantially more energy that we currently do. These prerequisites make 1) a bet that an advanced civilization will not develop a communication method more sophisticated than radio.
NelC,
100.000.000 $US would pay for 2222 Post Doctoral fellows doing one year of cancer research.
Go find those 30¢.
Of course, if the aliens we are trying to find are truly much more technologically advanced than we are, then the most efficient and logical course of action to find them is to let them find and contact us.
Their detection ability should be far greater than our own, meaning they will have a far better chance of detecting us than we would of detecting them.
Their ability to communicate would likewise be far greater than our own, meaning it will be much easier, resource and technique-wise, for them to communicate with us than for us to communicate with them.
Likewise, their ability to decode/understand our transmissions will be far greater than our ability to decode/understand their transmissions, meaning the most efficient way to communicate is to let them do the work of decoding and translating.
In other words, if all you wanted was to discover intelligent aliens, the most efficient way to do that is to make yourself as attractive a target for them to initiate communication with as you can.
One just has to hope that one’s “look at us, we’re interesting to talk to” messages don’t get interpreted as “look at us, we’re delicious to eat”….
And if aliens more advanced than we are are common (again the only scenario where SETI as it is currently set up has any reasonable chance of success), we have far more to fear from their indifference than their malice. The chances that an advanced civilization would find it worthwhile to expend the time and effort engage in hostile action against earth is remote. There is absolutely NOTHING here that they can’t more easily obtain elsewhere in the universe. The only unique thing about earth is its biosphere, and if the aliens want that they can easily obtain all they could ever hope for by taking a few samples and cloning/breeding them.
The greater risk is that they damage us unwittingly while engaging in some project because they DON’T know (or care) that we’re here.
In which case our safest course of action is to broadcast our existence as loudly and widely as we can….
ModZero @ # 28: Home PCs are woefully inefficient for such purposes. You’re not donating “CPU time”, you’re donating joules.
In which case, why do so many serious science projects participate in the distributed-computing array of the World Community Grid?
As I read the Tasks window from my current project, as rendered by the BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) module on my MacBook Pro, I’m about halfway through an estimated 740-hour work unit to run an experimental model for an Oxford University climate study. I received a medium-sized squirt of data and code to begin thus; unless interrupted, in a few weeks my laptop will send another squirt back, and the climatologists will have a little more info for improving their model. Newer hardware could do the same job faster, and if Big Climate had the money denialists like to imagine, Oxford could buy a Cray to do the same thing between breakfast and tiffin. But apparently they don’t, or why would they (and so many other, often public-interest programs [WCG’s latest (before the Hawkins-Milner SETI story, that is) brag features a new carbon-nanotube water filter]) farm out this and similar jobs to us slowpoke amateurs?
Sometimes, “inefficient” may work out better than “nothing”.
Another consideration is the age of the universe. How likely is it that two sufficently advanced civilizations would exist at relative times so one could hear the other. The whole time capsule idea assumes that said capsule didn’t go past the Earth millions of years ago.
For example, considering humanity’s shortsightedness, I’m not optimistic we’re going to be around much longer to either make more noise or to listen for someone else’s.
michaelbusch @30:
My ignorance of stellar physics could, and probably does, fill libraries, but can you expand on what we could learn about it from looking for optical laser pulses?
I am not impressed by this arguments.
While I happen to think SETI doesn’t have a chance of succeeding because even if there are technologically advanced civilizations out there they aren’t likely to be doing anything SETI will detect and the odds are too long against this method achieving anything.
But, under Reason #1: It’s not going to work. you argue it hasn’t worked yet so don’t do it any-more. That’s an argument against every incomplete effort which is not persuasive.
Reason #2: It seems to turn smart scientists into insipid, facile dimwits. Just like arrogant atheists prove their cause is pointless? There’s no cause so wrong or right you won’t find fools supporting it. This is not an argument against any cause or ambition.
Reason #3: Taking a shot in the dark is dangerous. So ignorance is preferable to investigation for investigation carries risks? When did you start to argue against education as if a priest?
Reason #4: Are we really ready to communicate with a galactic civilization? More of number 3 – we don’t deserve knowledge for we are reckless and childish. Again you argue against science as if a priest.
Reason #5: It’s simply terrible science. This I agree with. I judge the odds are too long and the required behaviour of civilizations for success too unlikely. But I also think that of an awful lot of things other people are interested in but I cannot forbid them.
Reason #6: There are better ways to spend that much money. There’s always another claim on wealth and no end to demands on it. This is a corollary of #5 – if the science is poor other investigations with better odds of success are more deserving of the money. I happen to agree, and accept it as an argument against SETI.
But in the grand scheme of things SETI uses little of our wealth, little enough I am not much perturbed that it is spent and as I noticed a friends computer puttering away on it’s screen saver on SETI’s number crunching I thought it’s engenders a nice sense of community in cooperating towards a grand goal. There’s a lot of worse things the money might be spent on and not all it does is wasted.
I think PZ’s personal dislike of the effort and the arguments he makes are instructive – they make, apart from the essential observation that SETI is fairly poor science, little sense and seem as rational as demands people don’t investigate the natural world by priests afraid it will take them away from his flock.
Don’t go there! There be dragons!
The Count,
correct. The only significant parameter for discovery of alien life that we can somewhat control is the longevity of our technologically advanced civilization.
As of now, folks in a 100 ly shell around planet earth can detect human radio signals. That’s about the time we started to emit them.
If we are lucky and there is a civilization in the next spiral arm, it takes about 10.000 years for them to find it and to contact us. From our perspective, if we find that civilization first and emit a super intense radio signal to their position, we’d expect an answer no sooner than 20.000 years after sending that message.
So, yes, if the intend is to discover and to interact with alien life, it would be more wise to spend our resources on sustainability of our civilization than anything else. E.G. Fix that equality discrepancy, fix poverty, abolish wars, invest in renewable energies, protect biodiversity, you name it. Else we are dead before ET gets our message.
To me, setting aside the problems of the likelihood of life and intelligent life in the Universe, and of course the vast interstellar distance, the problems with finding Extraterrestrial life boil down to how likely is it that another extraterrestrial civilization exists right now that we can communicate with? And how likely is it that intelligent life will develop sufficiently advanced technology?
It is all too likely that the time span of technological civilization in the Universe is severely limited. It may be technological civilizations don’t last very long before self destructing or simply dying out. (Say less than 100,000 years) If that is the case there could have been many extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy but because their existence is so “brief” we are the only one existing one right now.
Also it is possible that there is a fair number of intelligent extraterrestrial creatures out there, however virtually none of them have developed, or will ever develop, sufficiently advanced technology to ever talk to us. In this Universe there could be all sorts of super intelligent species of whale like creatures on water worlds. There could be all sorts of species of intelligent aliens who just don’t advance much beyond a certain “primitive” level of technology. It simply should not be taken for granted that intelligence will necessarily result in “advanced” technological civilization.
If you add the fact that the radio signals get quickly buried in the background noise of the Universe, (I’ve read that has little has 20 light years is enough to drown out such signals.) it would seem very unlikely that we will contact intelligent extraterrestrials anytime soon.
consciousness razor @42:
Gee whiz, I didn’t know that expressing an opinion that a privately funded SETI project might be a better idea than a privately funded Noah’s Ark expedition (or a vanity campaign for a presidential nomination?) might require me specifically to defend possible SETI spinoff enhancements for science.
Here is a bit more from that quote from michaelbusch in #30:
I was just taking his word for it. I really don’t know if SETI is as futile, as barren of any “extra special sauce,” and its continuance as detrimental to the future of civilized values as PZ and some other folks here seem to be saying it is; but I do think that without a better analysis, a condemnation of it as “a colossal waste of money” is a bit extreme in a world that wastes so much more in so many ways.
I can’t really agree that “People shouldn’t do things for no reason.” Quite possibly the majority of what human beings do is “for no reason.” Usually they call it sports or entertainment — or religion. Sometimes they even call it science (though it can certainly be disputed whether it deserves the name). When it is public money involved, maybe I’ll object (as I do object to pouring ever more public money into professional sports facilities).
It seems to me that a large part of the interest in SETI is simple human curiosity about how close we can get to a probability of zero: of being certain that the search is logically and technically futile. If the case can really be made that it’s as close to zero as we’re ever going to get, and that further effort will not and cannot affect that probability in any meaningful way, and that there is no other significant value in continuing it, and that the public monies invested in it are significantly greater than other boondoggles; then somebody should make that case with a detailed analysis so we can all be done with it. If someone feels they have reason to do so. If you don’t mind, I’ll decline the invitation.
More and more, what science learns about the universe tells us that habitable planets and primitive life look ever more likely. It doesn’t follow that intelligent life is common; in fact there are good reasons for thinking it’s quite rare. But the developing picture of the universe increasingly undercuts the hypothesis that the only place intelligent life can be is here on Earth.
Thus, here are my five reasons to spend modest amounts of money on SETI (“modest” meaning amounts in the $100 million to $500 million range — that is, roughly as much as a mid-range robotic planetary probe.)
1. Assuming that ET is out there, it would be better to know than to remain ignorant. If we never search, we won’t ever find out. Of course it’s a gamble. That’s why the investment should be limited.
2. Passive listening poses no danger.
3. Much like the Voyager Record, an ongoing SETI program betokens humanity’s hope of a better future.
4. A confirmed detection would provide additional incentive for us to put our planetary house in order, both to be ready for visitors and prepared for possible hostility.*
5. SETI has already been a spur to development of computer and communications systems, and this would continue.
* There are good reasons to doubt that advanced civilizations would be hostile, and the laws of physics (as currently understood) make the logistics of interstellar warfare prohibitively daunting.
Rob Grigjanis @54: Optical SETI has had two main versions – searching for extremely short laser pulses and searching for longer-lasting narrow spectral lines attributable to somebody with a laser rather than to the star concerned.
The data product for looking for pulses is a long time series of the brightness of the star at different wavelengths. The timescales optical SETI usually focuses on are extremely short (e.g. nanoseconds), but at the same time you also pick up things like stellar flares and the oscillation modes of the stars concerned on longer timescales (milliseconds to minutes).
The data product for looking for longer-lasting narrow spectral lines is extremely high-resolution spectra – the same that get used to study the relative motions of different parts of stellar photospheres (on the Sun, we call this solar granulation) and also to search for planets tugging the star around. In fact, most such SETI projects have relied on data-mining stellar spectra collected by stellar physics and planet-hunting projects rather than working on their own (and, of course, they have have as yet found nothing).
michaelbusch @60: OK, thanks Michael.
Fears of humanity causing its own extinction are, to my mind, overblown. Civilizations are fragile, but our species has been quite resistant.
A far more likely scenario is a collapse, or significant degradation, of our current civilization, but with survivors, who will at least have a chance to rebuild. Throughout evolutionary history, fluctuations in population size are far more frequent that straight up extinctions.
There could be a cycle of growth and collapse, and at each apex it is possible for the civilization to reach levels that can produce/detect radio emissions, or even consider colonization of local interplanetary space.
Such could be the more likely pattern for alien intelligences as well. The stars may not light up with signals, but instead blink. Only two civilizations that happen to blink “on” concurrently (from their own temporal reference frames) would have a chance of detecting each other.
This is not what you were originally doing. I wouldn’t see the point in doing that either, but in any case, that’s not what your earlier comment said.
You don’t need to defend possible anythings. It either is or isn’t doing something useful for other scientific or technological projects. If you’re suggesting it is or that it will be sometime in the foreseeable future, then you should have evidence for that, not be “expressing an opinion” about something unrelated. A cogent argument can be made that there simply is no such evidence, in much more detail than I or anyone else has given here, so you were simply incorrect about that or confused it with something else.
So it’s a waste of money, but not a colossal one. Is that really the best argument in favor of … well… anything? You should admit the obvious point that it has costs associated with it, and the further point you may not agree with is that there are no apparent benefits to other projects like you had speculated about. You are of course free to speculate about whatever you like, but that’s not going to be rationally compelling to anyone else unless you have something to support it. SETI is taking advantage of scientific and technological progress, which is not in itself a problem (yet the costs I mentioned are still costs). But that’s also not the same thing as causing or contributing to scientific or technological progress. I don’t think you can simply claim that on the basis of nothing, or that we’re holding such progress back by spotting all of the weak links in this chain of reasoning.
52:
Hey, it’s free-ish joules for them! And good at making the public “engage” in science.
You do realise that with properly coded apps your laptop can use a *lot* less energy than if it has something stealing every single CPU cycle? That’s how most power efficiency wins were made for home computers, they go cold whenever they can, and by running BOINC on it you ruin that. And they can go cold quite a lot if all you do is stare at Pharyngula. If you want something that’s efficient at converting joules into data, you want FPGAs and GPUs and purpose-built rigs, not someone’s laptop. And the only purpose of letting you into those programs is hoping that maybe you’ll catch the bug and start spending real money on it.
I have no choice but to agree, which is sad, because I actually really like SETI in theory. It’s a good thing it’s coming from a private donor, because I’d be pissed if it were public funds.
Here’s the thing… I’m actually very confident (thanks to the Drake equation and my basic amateur understanding of evolution) that we are the only technological species in our galaxy… or at least the most technologically advanced. I think the chances are there, but still low, for our galactic neighborhood.
Of course… of course… when you take into account the entire universe, it’s probably inevitable that there are other technologically advanced civilizations, probably even advanced way beyond us.
But they aren’t visiting us, and probably never will, if for no other reason than the distances involved.
I don’t think people who hope for aliens or insist we’ve been visited or whatever understand how big the universe is. We had to invent a whole new measuring scale that uses time to measure the size of the universe, and it still measures in the tens of billions of lightyears. And then, on top of that, the universe is expanding at a probably infinite rate of speed. How in the hell are you supposed to get from point A to point B if the space between points A and B is expanding at an infinite rate, pushing A and B away from each other at an infinite rate?
I mean, wormholes are great and all, but we have no way to expand or stabilize them, as the hypothesized matter needed to do so might not even exist. And warp drive is great and all, but the energy needed to create and sustain a warp bubble would potentially damage the fabric of space time and definitely vaporize (within seconds) everyone and everything enclosed in the bubble. And the TARDIS is never going to happen… I doubt it’s actually possible to “capture” a black hole at the moment of its creation, and the whole “bigger on the inside” thing does not seem even remotely scientifically plausible…
And yes, I’m just as disappointed about that last one as every Doctor Who fan, because having a TARDIS would be awesome.
All that said, I still think space exploration is brilliant. I still want to see humans return to the moon, I want to see humans on Mars, and I want to see the beginnings of human exploration on the other planets and moons and various other bodies of our solar system.
It’s not about abandoning earth. We have so much to do here. It’s about the simple drive for exploration, and I don’t care how advanced they get… a robot will never do what a human can do.
Robots should not go for us… they should go before us. Our solar system is there for us (because we’ll likely never get further… in fact, I’ll bet Pluto is the farthest we humans could ever get into space) to explore. Let’s explore it.
100% with PZ on this. Even if we turn the questions around it’s difficult to imagine any useful results. Let’s say we *did* find a signal which is unambiguously from an intelligent life form – so what? How does such knowledge benefit humans? I’d much rather give money to people studying the bizarre life forms we have on earth – at least we learn something which may be of value. Besides, the SETI proponents have never convinced me that a signal can be detected and if they ever mention aliens detecting radio and TV transmissions from decades ago I know I can’t take them seriously.
Yubal @49: And the latest movie in the Terminator franchise would pay for 3777 cancer PhDs. And that thing you like that other people don’t? How many cancer PhDs would that pay for? “I think this money would be put to better use elsewhere” is an empty argument, kind of implicit in the existence of the others; they wouldn’t be there unless PZ thought the money would be better spent on zebra fish or something.
Sorry, but when it comes to extraterrestrial intelligence, all reason leaves me. I say: go, SETI!
#67, NelC: Good to know we can dispense with grant review committees, then.
Movies have a different purpose than research proposals: they’re for entertainment. There is a process , flawed as it may be, to determine which movies get funded, and it’s not the same as science.
Science also has a process for determining which projects get funded. There are protocols. We know them. There are expectations for what constitutes good science, just like there are ideas people have for what movies would bring in good box office. “I think this money would be put to better use elsewhere” is not an empty argument, because we do it all the time.
SETI is bottom of the barrel for science. I am continually shocked that it gets any funding at all.
Oh yeah? Well… you just don’t like it because there are no… erm… things… with your… beard… yeah!!
I like the idea of ETI, but I’m not so sure about the S. The distances, the timings, the amount of sky coverable at any time eh… I have my doubts. I believe (for tenuous definitions of believe) that there’s life out there even intelligent life, but I doubt that there are enough of them close enough that’ve been technologically active and broadcasting from long enough ago or for long enough for there to be any real chance of spotting them. Nice thought, though.
As already pointed out, this is a project that listens, not sends, so that’s one objection dealt with. The Russian billionaire did start a doctoral course in particle physics before turning to making money, so I think he’s OK on the basics of what science is. However, likening someone who says “what if intelligent life does exist elsewhere” to someone who believes in fairies, and calling them “insipid, facile dimwits” is both rude, and an very unscientific assumption that you know the answer already and they are wrong for continuing to think there could be signals. Bad science and bad manners from you, Prof. Myers.
Regarding why aliens would come to Earth (Amphiox, #51):
Perhaps we’d make a good transitional fuel source. Like whales.
More seriously though, I’m inclined to agree with the general gist of SETI being useful, if only because it does things other than SETI.
If memory serves the Space Race was started to beat the Soviets to the moon. Which must be the single most idiotic (but also very American*) reason possible to initiate a huge science project. Okay, so it was a bit more complicated than that, political expediency and so forth, but still. If you need to tell people you need a few trillion dollars to plant your flag before someone else puts up theirs, fine. I’ll take the resulting rockets and the satellites and the orbiting labs and find some other uses for them.
If you need to tell people you’re looking for ET to loosen their wallet, fine. I’ll take the telescopes and the data and use that, too.
It’s not the best way of funding science but while we are talking about capacious private pockets it’s not that much of an issue. Just don’t pick anyone’s pocket and don’t lie about what you’re ultimately doing.
*I’m not conflating the two, mind you
P.S.: For anyone keen on the general topic of aliens and contact, I’ll take this opportunity to recommend the (hard) SF Book “Existence” by David Brin. It has a rather interesting take on the issues. I shan’t spoil it though – the internet will probably do that for me should you decide to look it up.
@brett and @michaelbusch beat me to the comments I was going to make, so I’ll just chime in agreement.
The most important part to SETI research criticism is what Michael Busch detailed- SETI researchers are scientists first and make sure useable data is collected in efforts. I think of SETI as a very broad, very shallow whole sky survey looking for anomalies so that other researches can investigate them in detail. PZ might have a blind spot in this area and seems to be forgetting the maxim “If we knew what we’d find, we wouldn’t have to research it.”
This Yuri Milner… eh. He’s part of the oligarchy that sold Russia underneath the Russian’s peoples feet, particularly being a major figure for internet access price gouging… until about 5 years ago only 10% of Russians used the internet more than once a week with pay-for-bit being a major barrier. He and people like him are a good chunk of the reason why space research and development is falling to the whims of adventures (Branson is another example) instead of being developed evenly and responsibly with public money. So fuck this profiteering asshole and his vanity projects.
@4 – “The Word to Space”, by “Winston Saunders” (Poul Anderson), 1961.
SETI makes contact with the planet Akron, some 24 LY away. Unfortunately, Akron is under the control of a worldwide theocracy, who decide that we need them to proselytize to us.
(and yes, SETI has heard enough jokes about Ohio, thank you very much.)
If you think it’s difficult trying to have a conversation with 48-year gaps between asking a question and getting an answer…
Amphiox @ # 62: There could be a cycle of growth and collapse, and at each apex it is possible for the civilization to reach levels that can produce/detect radio emissions…
Yabbut the cycle, if any, which comes after this one will have no easily-extractable metals/minerals (except for certain waste sites – where everything will be heavily oxidized &/or in difficult-to-work-with alloys, except maybe aluminum) and zero accessible fossil fuels (except for occasional puddles laced with toxins). How do they ever reach an industrial phase?
ModZero @ # 64: And the only purpose of letting you into those programs is hoping that maybe you’ll catch the bug and start spending real money on it.
Citation(s) needed. Even here, assertions of nothing but cynicism need some support.
Butler @75, nail, head of, hit it you have. This is my standard argument when one of my woooier friends start talking about ancient advanced civilizations that must have, existed before us.
“Yes, but where’s the footprint they must have left on the environment?”
“Oh, I see, they used up all of the unobtanium, so when it was our turn all we had left were the common elements and fossil fuels. Riiiiight.”
The Count @ # 76 – Thanks for the kind words, but actually all I did was crib from Charles Galton Darwin (grandson of that Charles Darwin) and his book The Next Million Years, which pointed out in 1952 that, once the oil and coal run out, we will have no choice but medieval-level civilizations (at best) until evolution makes us into a different species.
I think that this is really an issue of personal preferences and personal dislikes wrapped in a veneer of science. P. Z. Myers and many of the commenters are personally uninterested in or opposed to the idea of intelligent extraterrestrial life, so of course they think any money spent on it is wasted. Truth is, we know nothing about extraterrestrial life, or even the probabilities of different kinds of extraterrestrial life. Any “scientific” reasoning cited by either side is pure guesswork. There’s nothing wrong with looking, especially when it’s funded by a private donation.
Oh, really?
Odd. Reading through I got the sense that lots of people disagreed with the overlord and were, generally, supporting of SETI (or at least the funding boost) or at least not explicitly against it, just sceptical.
Personally I belong in the sceptical category. It doesn’t seem likely that SETI will find extraterrestial life at all.* But I am definitely not “uninterested” or “opposed” to alien life. I’d be thrilled if we found something like microbes, even fossilised ones, either in our solar system or another. Same goes for intelligent life, of course, but my bet would be on microbes rather than megacivilisations.
*Prove me wrong, please.
Let me give you an idea of just how excited I am by the prospect of life in the universe, springa73:
I know, rationally, that if anything even approaching something that could, with major reservations, be called “a thing that resembles a life-like thing” exists on the probable ocean underneath all that ice on Europa, it is, at best, simple, single-celled molecules. However, emotionally (and perhaps childishly), I continue to desperately want to see us dig into the ice and explore that ocean in the (ridiculously unsubstantiated) hope that the robot will be inspected by a curious… something.
Again… I know this won’t be the case. I know that, when we explore Europa, we’ll at best find fascinating geography and an abundance of organic molecules and that’s likely about it. Why do I know this? Because evolution. Because the ridiculous number of things that need to come together for it to happen, and because of this. But I can still dream.
You know why I like Star Wars and Star Trek and Doctor Who and Battlestar Gallactica and Stargate SG1 and so on and so forth? Because I adore the idea of a populated, busy Cosmos, where ETs interact with each other all the time. I would love it if we were actually getting visited. I’d be one of those idiots wanting to meet the aliens if I thought there was at all a rational possibility that they were actually visiting us.
But again… if you really think we’re being visited, or that there are technologically advanced ET civilizations out there close enough to contact, then you really don’t grasp how big the universe is, or the fact that it’s expanding in size at an infinite rate of speed.
We may not be technically alone in the universe, but we are functionally alone due to the ever-increasing size of the universe and the laws of physics.
I’m not saying SETI is useless. I’m just saying that, if you’re holding your breath for positive results, you’ll suffocate. We certainly won’t see any results in any of our lifetimes (and I plan on living a very long time, science willing).
NateHevens #81:
The expansion and size of the universe really aren’t very relevant to the possibility of detecting life or civilizations. The only possible life or civilizations that we could ever detect are within our own galaxy, and realistically only within our nearby neighborhood, and the expansion and size of the universe really have no impact on our galaxy.
Our galaxy has around a hundred of billion star systems, at least half of which have planets. We may only be able to adequately survey a small fraction of these (say, a few tens to hundreds of millions…a few million of which this SETI project is trying to survey), but I don’t think the idea that there may be life or a civilization in some of these star systems is that unreasonable. We don’t yet know how common the conditions for life are, how common life is, how common complex multi-cellular life is, or how common civilizations are.
I’m not sure how feasible this SETI project is: in how many of the millions of star systems surveyed could we detect a civilization that was emitting as many radio waves as Earth? I really don’t know the answer to that, but to me that’s the main question. If it has a real chance of detecting an Earth-like civilization on all of the millions of star systems, then it doesn’t seem like an unreasonable investment to me at all. If it can’t detect an Earth-like civilization on any of them, well, then it’s a worthless investment.
Long time reader, sparse commenter. But after reading this post this morning, I felt the urge to chime in. This is possibly the only Pharyngula post I have ever really disliked, and it actually made me a little emotional… I was so dismayed to the point of being a little sad. Here are my thoughts on PZ’s thoughts, in response to each point he makes.
1. You have no idea whether it will work or not. I agree, the odds are vanishingly small that we will discover a signal from beings similar to ourselves – and that is what it would take for people to classify the finding as some extraterrestrial life form. But SETI isn’t all about Jodie Foster sitting around and listening for some bleeps and bloops in a pattern. As another commenter said, there is other stuff that SETI does. Not just science, but more importantly, public outreach. Even knowing that the odds are slim is not a good reason to simply stop the “search” altogether. We may as well give it a try, because it pushes the envelope of our understanding of what life might be, where to look, how to look, etc. Like NASA (but smaller-scale), there may be positive returns that we cannot predict.
2. This one is… weird. Very strange for PZ to straw-man some other random scientist. I am all for lampooning cranks and religious nutbags, but this one just seems a little out of character. Was there an actual point to this “point?”
3. This is a little contradictory to 1. and 2., and also does not make a whole lot of sense. If there is no hope for contact, it is not dangerous to proceed. And who is to say some random alien is piping out their message? It sounds like PZ is worried they will be annoying religious nuts – given how idiotic religious nuts are, and how young our species is, and how weird our species is, I doubt that will be the case. If we find anything at all. And then he proceeds to straw-man SETI investigators for no discernable reason. Ooh, they might become totally unhinged if they think they find anything! Mmmkay.
4. This one is SUPER weird. How are we going to have real two-way communication with distant stellar systems? There would likely – inevitably? – be only a one-way exchange. Or a two-way time-capsule exchange. The time requirements are so great that we don’t have to worry about some species “dropping the line” or whatever. We leak radiation everywhere already, and likely alien species would too if they are out there and use EM to carry signal. Again, as we have stated before, the distances are too vast and nobody is going to be converting planets the size of Jupiter into pure energy just to come visit another stellar system to pick up the pieces of some long lost civilizations. That’s sci fi, PZ.
5. Public outreach. Pushing the envelope for what we can detect, how we should detect things, what we should look for… heck, even what “life” means. Can’t SETI get in on the action, or is that all reserved for only biology researchers in prestigious academic institutions? Also, public outreach. SETI can be a valuable asset to work with in that realm.
6. Where have I heard this one before? PZ, this is so disappointing and frustrating, and I cannot remember a time where you played this false choice fallacy. We can do _all_ of the awesome things. Again, we do not know what the return will be, but SETI can work in outreach as well as in detection and analytics techniques. I do not know how much published science their investigators produce, but their engineers build things. Everything we build goes somewhere. The money does not go poof and vanish. I agree, we should throw the NSF 100 million bones here and there. Heck, maybe give ’em another $100 billion a year for good measure. But the SETI Institute does good and is worthy of some funding too. Also, I like their podcast, so there’s my disclosure of interest.
So there you have it, those are my qualms with this post. It sounds like PZ had a bone to pick because he feels hopeless in the search for life elsewhere. I agree that there is lots that NASA can do – far more than SETI – to investigate the origins of life here and elsewhere even while limited to our own solar system. But SETI does other things, and can’t they work with other organizations, too?
From a purely selfish angle, I am quite happy to have a Russian billionaire throw some money at my favorite radio telescope , Parkes.
Regardless of the status of SETI those guys will manage to do good science with it. Parkes has a multi beam horn which makes it a fast survey scope. A good choice for this kind of project.
#67, NelC
And the US military budget would pay for 13.555.555 Postdoctoral research years (salary only). And I don’t care if they work on cancer or describe new species that no one cares about but that will die soon. They do good research. What was your point again?
My interest is irrelevant. Relevance is related to the interest of the funding organizations (aka the taxpayer, even if you obtain your funding from the private sector which is obtaining those funds by cheating out the average tax paying person when it comes to fair pay). You found some stupid money to fund your insane research proposal? Good for you!
How many science fiction books could be produced/bought with that money?
That’s bollocks. Taxpayer funded studies in cancer results somewhere between an few single digit percent and 0.1% improvement of cancer diagnosis and treatment according to the NCI and other sources. That’s a significant number. It works. Does it work to the benefit of the taxpayer? Well, that depends on the financial situation of the taxpayer who also has to pay for a cancer treatment, the own or the one of a beloved one. Would the SETI and US military budget be better spent on cancer treatment (not saying research here, I mean treatment of an actual patient) ? Given the results of those programs, absolutely. I am aware that cancer treatment affects in most cases only those who have too much and live long enough to develop cancer, and not those fellow human beings in Africa or elsewhere who die by the age of 45, long before that colon cancer predisposition gene would have an adverse effect. Talking economic equality here in case you missed it, and yes, it is more important than what you and me “advocate for”.
zebrafish are cheap and just another model system for whatever you like to study. Also, it doesn’t matter what PZ would spend the money on, the question is what WE would like to spend the money on. Bill Gates sinks Millions of Dollars into extermination of Malaria. It’s a good way to spend his excess cash imho although I can’t tell if it is working or not. From what I read it is doing good, although the problem is a) widespread and b) complex. I am really happy Bill doesn’t blow those tiny fractions of his personal wealth on the futile and irrelevant search for extraterrestrial life. Our civilization tries the best to get extinct in the next 5000 years. Some are racing for 500 years or less. If we detect an alien civilization in our lifetime, we better be around to initiate communication, assuming they weren’t extinct yet when our signal arrives. What should we spend our money on if we want to accomplish that? Big ass telescopes to fish in the noise band or zero interest micro loans to the poorest of the poor, sustainable energies and preservation of our eco system, a new way of governance that would grant peace? All of them?
Again, the poorest of the poor don’t benefit from cancer research at all, they usually die before they develop cancer, out of poverty. However, this entire human civilization can’t work without the people we chose to leave behind right now. That little tiny bit we do about cancer is worth its while, because it works for a fraction of the human population. And it will benefit the poor as soon as someone fixes politics (not it!). The discovery of alien civilizations won’t do shit for anyone, primarily because we won’t be able to communicate with the extinct species whose signals some guys might pick up, but also because we won’t stick around for much longer until we fix out own boat.
Funding priority matters.
#83 Carter Kindley
1)
See, you say yourself it won’t work under reasonable assumptions.
2)
That was not a straw man, PZ made a good point here.
3)
It is also no “danger” to allocate our research efforts to proceed with homeopathy, it’s just a bad idea, if you ask me, or anyone else. You could also dig holes for tree saplings and fill them before the saplings arrive, no damage, just a waste of time and effort.
4)
Bayesian analysis suggests we won’t, so stop worrying. Do you have any concept how fucking big this space around us is and how long signals travel at light speed to get from A to here?
5)
whatever. (seriously). point is, “It’s simply terrible science.”
6) No. Simply No. I won’t even bother to write down on how many levels you went wrong here.
Decided it would be fun (for me) to do some math on how close we could expect a civilization to be.
Current estimates place the number of Earth-like planets within 30 light years at about 100 (aside: it’s absolutely amazing to me that we can actually do this kind of estimate, now that we’ve observed hundreds of exoplanets). If we want to provide a super-generous estimate, let’s imagine that every single one of those planets harbors life, and every planet with life produces a civilization that lasts 1 million years out of 5 billion years that the planet is habitable, and that we could detect with radio waves over that entire span in principle.
With these incredibly generous numbers, the expected nearest civilization would be roughly 150 light years away. Chances are it’s much, much further.
I think that the fundamental fallacy behind the “it would be better spent on things that immediately benefited humanity” argument is that it assumes that if the money wasn’t spent on SETI, it would be spent on cancer research or fighting malaria or programs to reduce poverty. If that was actually true, then it would indeed be hard to justify spending it on something that is such a long shot. Since this is a contribution from a billionaire private donor, however, it seems more likely that if not given to SETI it would be spent on things unrelated to science or charity or improving the condition of humanity.
Even in the case of public funding, I think that it is a dangerous precedent to argue that something must be of immediate practical benefit to humanity to be worthwhile. Surely there have been many scientific discoveries that seemed of no practical use at the time they were made, but turned out to be very useful for unexpected reasons later?
As long as SETI piggybacks on real research, and keeps up their present 2.5 FTE staff for distributed computing, I will continue to have 1/3 my excess computing power go to the project (my other projects are Rosetta and Einstein). I don’t expect to find anything before my demise. But if you don’t run what appears to be the low success experiment, you don’t find the breakthroughs.
#86 Yubal
1) I acknowledge that the likelihood that any significant extraterrestrial intelligence is found in our lifetime seems small. You missed the point, here. To use a convenient saying, “the voyage is the destination.” We have basis to assume there will be something (something…. who knows how recognizable it will be) out there. This isn’t like some endeavor to research something that has no known plausible mechanism. Plus, anything done along the way may have spin-off science or tech.
2) It was a straw-man. He picked one guy who said one phrase that seems silly on its surface, and claimed that this shows that SETI makes scientists insipid facile dimwits. That fits the definition.
3) I agree with you on homeopathy, but your analogies are flawed. I was pointing out an inconsistency in PZ’s points with this statement. Again, SETI is not necessarily a waste of time – lots of great radio astronomy science is coming out of the institute. We are talking about large telescope arrays and great, interesting radio imaging data. You largely miss the point again.
4) I get the feeling you did not read my post, but yanked some phrases from it and cranked about like an undercover Planned Parenthood “investigator”. Immediately after the sentence you quoted, I write “There would likely – inevitably? – be only a one-way exchange.” I’m not worried. I have as good or better an understanding of the time scales and distances being discussed than you, so no need to be condescending.
5) Public outreach is important. I suppose that is a subjective valuation, but I think rational people agree that it is important to keep the public interested in science. That requires a multi-pronged approach to which SETI can contribute.
6) Alright, I got a little airy and hot-headed here. In seriousness, though, there are plenty of useless endeavors you can pull cash from to be put to better use. My worry is that there is a bit of a “Dear Muslima” tack being taken here: ‘there is so much awful going on down here, or so many other ways I can think to spend $100 million, so that means we cannot focus our attention or this paltry sum of money on this worthy endeavor.’ Why not fund SETI with some private dough, _and_ boost spending in other fields of science? Both would be noble things to do. At the same time, we could pump some more money into developing infrastructure in impoverished regions. Take the funding from military funding worldwide and call it a day. I think SETI is worthy of some funding, you don’t – fine, but why? I would rather hear your opinion than flippantly dismiss or talk past each other.
My final point is to reiterate, as #89 Nerd of Redhead (et al.) stated, if you don’t even try, you are guaranteed to never get there. SETI isn’t about just finding extraterrestrial life, it is about (mainly radio) astronomy. Lofty goals can drive good science.
This is an interesting discussion because it goes right to the heart of what is and is not worthy of scientific endeavour and how it is decided what gets funded and how. I think SETI is right now in a transition stage from “alchemy” to “chemistry”. Alchemists were wrong about almost everything, and on the whole wild eyed fantasists. But there was a kernel of truth in the whole “turn lead into gold” quest that led eventually to a deeper understanding of the natural world and then to unimaginable riches and benefits to the human race.
In my lifetime I have seen SETI go from wild-eyed fantasy of a Star-Trek galaxy to something more practical and useful. Without Carl Sagan going dewy-eyed over “billions and billions” of stars harbouring life and the quixotic “ET message” plaques on the Pioneer missions, we would probably not have the Kepler space telescope nor the Rosetta/Philae comet probe. Both of these are driven by a SETI emotion, but both are leading to deeper understanding of our universe and our place in it.
The Kepler exoplanets will be studied intensively over the next 50 years and lead to a revolution in understanding planets like earth. We will know with some certainty by the end of this century if life is common or non-existent on other nearby planets like ours. It looks like comets will also become the focus of intensive research into their role in the creation of life. These endeavours are clearly SETI as we struggle to understand how life is possible.
As SETI matures, better questions are being asked and the focus becomes more looking deliberately at specific objects that don’t quite make sense and show signs of possibly being artificial. Semi-detached binary stars, low mass x-ray stars and certain rouge stars all need to be investigated to discount advanced technology and discover the unknown natural phenomena that drives them (or not). There is already beginning investigations into suspicious high energy oddly directed bursts on strange frequencies that shows some signs of extreme data compression. If they are natural we will discover currently unimagined science, if artificial then it will take centuries to decompress and interpret.
On the whole, when a new field of endeavour begins there are many false starts and much time and effort is wasted until the correct path forward slowly becomes clearer. Many pioneers are by necessity dreamers and extreme optimists, and often wildly wrong about many things. Despite this I believe SETI is, in the long run, the most important endeavour in human history. We cannot answer the question of our own existence through studying our own single solitary example. We must explore every possible avenue, every reason why life did not begin, every path that stopped short of intelligence.
Yes, it will take millennia, and we must be careful not to expend too many resources during this beginning stage when we are still incompetent and without the needed capabilities. But without SETI, no other science really has purpose, it is just children playing in the playpen. We either reach out to the stars or stay in the playpen until we go extinct. So what if it takes 100,000 years to send and receive one message? We better start thinking in those timescales and build a civilisation that is sustainable at least that long.
And guess what, a civilisation that takes SETI seriously will transform itself into one that takes justice, equality and sustainability so seriously they become the guiding principles, written into the DNA of each individual. SETI may very well be the key to building the world that we so badly want. So yeh, I think SETI is totally worth it.