I thought I’d take a different tack on understanding science denialists. Are there any subjects on which I would be called a science denialist?
I can think of a couple of examples immediately. I’ve been called anti-science because I reject the bigotry of the “human biological diversity” or hbd crowd; I’ve also got quite a few fuming ranters who hate the fact that I reject evolutionary psychology as an ignorant fraud. I’ve written about those things before, though, and they also seem to draw in a lot of angry privileged assholes, so let’s not go over that again.
Instead, here’s something that maybe we can discuss dispassionately, but where I do sneer at the status quo.
I am a Search-For-Extraterrestrial-Intelligence (SETI) denier. I really am. It seems to be a popular topic among pro-science people, but I just roll my eyes whenever it comes up, and I’ve written a few things where I state my biases against it, but I’ll just make it crystal clear: I think it’s bad science driven by unrealistic fantasies, I don’t think its proponents think rationally about it, and we ought to stop throwing money at it.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not because I disbelieve in aliens — I rather suspect that life is relatively common in the universe. It’s not because I think it’s impossible for us to contact aliens — I just think the odds are prohibitively low. But every time a SETI person opens their mouth (like, for instance, Seth Shostak, who I also think is an extremely nice guy, and also very intelligent), I hear nothing but innumerate babble.
For instance, there’s a new formulation of the Drake Equation, that chain of variables of mostly unknown values that can be filled in with whatever numbers fit your prejudices and then allows you to do a calculation that give you whatever number you want. We are getting better estimates for some of those variables as we get more information on exoplanets, but others are still mostly baloney.
Based on recent exoplanet discoveries, Frank and Sullivan assume that one-fifth of all stars have habitable planets in orbit around them. This leads them to conclude that there should be other advanced technological civilization out there, unless the chance for developing such a civilization on a habitable planet in the observable universe is less than 1 in 1024 (a 1 with 24 zeros!). For our own Milky Way galaxy, the odds of being the only technologically advanced civilization are 1 in 60 billion. Thus, it’s very likely that other intelligent, technologically advanced species evolved before us. Even if only one in every million stars hosts a technologically advanced species today, that would still yield a total of about 300,000 such civilizations in the whole galaxy.
OK, that starts out fine — I can see making an estimate on a lower bound, and I’d also agree that the likelihood that we are the only technological civilization in the entire great big galaxy is low. But then we’re back to nonsense. Where does this estimate of one in a million stars having a technological species come from? Sticking an “only” in there is a rhetorical trick to make it sound like it’s such a conservative estimate, you ought to accept it. But I don’t accept any values derived from the Drake Equation!
At least this article does go on to present the argument I would make: I don’t know the total probabilities, but some of the individual probabilities are so low as to make the whole exercise pointless.
The Archilles’ heel of these statistical estimates is of course the biological uncertainties; Earth is still the only planet where we know life exists. The appearance of life may be extremely unlikely, and so might the evolution of technology. After all, there are many intelligent species on our planet, including dolphins, octopi, apes, parrots, and elephants, but only once in 4.6 billion years has a technologically advanced species evolved. And life cannot have appeared in the very early Universe until heavier elements produced by the explosions of many supernovas became abundant.
My guesses about the probabilities would be much lower than the astronomers’ guesses, I suspect. But the number is irrelevant. It’s a bad gamble.
I compare SETI to playing the lottery. If you win, it might be a huge payoff — hundreds of millions of dollars in one case, or amazing new knowledge and deeper understanding of the universe on the other. I can agree with that. But you won’t get me to buy a lottery ticket by telling me the size of the potential prize (I know, that works for a lot of people, but they’re thinking emotionally, not rationally…not that there’s anything wrong with that). I know deep down in my analytical brain that if I throw a few bucks at a remote chance of a life-changing event, I’m still almost certainly going to be living my life the same way I am today, tomorrow.
And who wants that kind of radical life-changing event anyway? Lottery winners aren’t made happier by getting a bucket of money dumped on them, and the results of a successful SETI search are even less certainly positive. If we aren’t beaming our hard-earned secrets of science and technology to random stars in the galaxy, why should we expect other species to do us that favor? If we use us as an example, aliens would be more likely to transmit their holy books to the stars, or the contents of bad sitcoms, or ultimatums demanding tribute or face total annihilation.
So the “size of the prize” defense is irrelevant. Don’t care.
But here’s a different argument I also see all the time: SETI is cheap! Only $2.5 million/year! This is not a rational argument. I agree that SETI is cheap, but one could say that astrology is even cheaper to study, and promises just as much insight and new knowledge and practical applications, so why not have the country invest, say, $2.0 million? Or $200,000? Or would it be only fair to cough up just $2? Telling me that some flavor of research requires only pocket change is not a good reason to do it.
I’m not even saying that there are other things we could spend the money on — there are always other ways to spend money. It’s that asking whether something is affordable, and whether something is worth doing, are two completely different questions, and answering yes to the first does not imply that the answer to the second is also yes. So quit thinking that announcing “it’s cheap!” is a substitute for explaining its value.
The only line I can respect is the “it’s voluntary” argument. Do you want to spend some part of your income on SETI, or astrology, or lottery tickets? You are free to do so. I’m not an advocate of banning any of those things (although I would suggest that the state should not be in the business of exploiting the gullible with lotteries).
If a million people want to each send a few dollars to SETI, I’m not going to stop them, just like I’m not going to stop millions of people from putting a few dollars in the collection plate at church on Sunday. It’s pretty much the same thing.
Just don’t try to tell me your poorly thought out fishing expedition is “science”, and therefore deserves more funding.
I expect some will now disagree with me, and that’s fine. At least we won’t be arguing over something that destroys lives.
I didn’t think (or was deliberately ignoring it) that SETI was trying to contact ET life. I always thought it was just listening; to see if we hear anything that might be other than simple. I approached it from the screensaver, SETI@home, where anyone interested in helping, who has a home computer with extra unoccupied time; can run a little program analyzing the signals that’ve been collected at various radio telescopes during the ‘scope’s extra time (ie The data was collected to keep the scope busy between actual tasks),
As in: SETI is not dialing the phone randomly to see who connects, to start a conversation; but going around town with a earphone listening to hear if anybody is talking anywhere.
..
or so I liked to think of the project (however deluded that may have been). YMMV
Hey! I buy lottery tickets! (But I do so knowing full well that I’m not going to win the jackpot (but yay if I do), and that they are a band-aid tax on the poor to cover tax cuts to the wealthy.)
Yes, that’s what I’m assuming, that SETI is about listening and hoping the distant aliens will altruistically bestow upon us their wisdom.
I think it’s humbug.
The question is not so much “IS” there other intelligent life out there, but also “WAS” there or “WILL THERE BE.” In a universe that’s billions of years old, and billions of light years across, it’s almost inconceivable that civilizations might co-exist either concurrently, or within shouting distance of each other (Star Trek notwithstanding!). Any radio signals SETI might chance upon would almost certainly be thousands or millions of years old. After all, it’s probable that other civilizations might be stupid enough to elect leaders like the Donald and quickly devolve out of existence within short periods of time (celestially speaking)..
SETI is about listening and hoping the distant aliens will altruistically bestow upon us their wisdom.
So it’s prayer?
Yes, absolutely part scam and part humbug, fueled by decades of sci-fi TV, perhaps the most ridiculous part of which was the existence of many interplanetary species fortuitously near the same level of development and within shouting distance of each other. Of course there are aliens, but separated in space by thousands of light-years and in time by up to 12 billion years (assuming the first 2 billion necessary for formation of necessary elements). And in any case, what the individual or collective interest of the human species a thousand years from now, let alone a million or a billion will almost certainly be unimaginably different from what it is now.
Uh?
“SETI is about listening and hoping the distant aliens will altruistically bestow upon us their wisdom.
I think it’s humbug.”
Not humbug, straw man. SETI is about listening, the rest you added yourself to make it look sillier.
This may derail the discussion a bit, but imagine that we do find extraterrestrial life. What would the consequences be?
One day there was a news item on the TV about an alien space ship approaching earth. For a moment it felt real, and my first reaction was: fear.
Do we really want to contact extraterrestrial life?
while using all of our understanding of “Nature” to build devices to extend what our senses can detect to further our understanding of “nature” is something that is good in and of itself. To focus on looking for extra-terrestrial intelligence seems like wishful thinking. The time frames / distances are absurd, the dozens of light years to the closest stars are impractical, the millions of light years for the rest or the billions beyond our Galaxy to distant Galaxies when 4 score and ten is what we can expect
prayer indeed!
uncle frogy
There are several points being brought up here, so let me try to address some of them.
“…SETI is about listening and hoping the distant aliens will altruistically bestow upon us their wisdom” – this isn’t a fair characterization of any SETI program I know about; it’s what some news sources *write* about it, and I think you know science reporting is *terrible*. It’s no more fair a characterization than “biology is about finding the cure for cancer” or “physics is trying to find the god particle”. “Listening for wisdom” would be a silly goal, so I’m not going to try to defend it.
My endorsement of SETI is based on this: we have a question – are we alone in the universe – that many people are interested in (for evidence I present the entire body of Sci-Fi books at your local library). SETI is the best way to start to answer it. I would use the same arguments for funding SETI as I would for abstract mathematics, or philosophy, or art. If it did absolutely nothing else, answering this question will *make some people more happy*.
The “it’s cheap” argument is rational as a cost/benefit analysis. How much “good” do we get out, compared to the cost? I might compare it to, say, the University of Minnesota’s College of Biological Science, which my google search suggests has a $50 million annual budget, and $22 million of that came from “State Appropriations and Other” sources. (I’m getting this from http://finance.umn.edu/Budget_FY2015/AcademicUnitSummaries2014.pdf) I’m not suggesting we should fund one or the other, that would an excluded middle fallacy! Rather I wish to demonstrate what a fair comparison would be – if it’s fair to ask of SETI, it seems it should be fair to ask it of the Biology Department.
I’d actually be interested in hearing what everyone considers adequate justification for other academic disciplines, and I’ll see if I can provide similar ones for SETI. How would you argue for the value of solving the Twin Prime Conjecture?
Lastly – PZ, what is it with you and space? Did Carl Sagan steal your lunch as a kid or something?
I suppose I have different rationale for SETI, which is NOT that we’re looking for a huge lottery payout, but rather that SETI is essentially a branch of archaeology that should seek justification, priority, and funding in much the same manner
i.e., NOT the Most Important Thing EVAR, but study of ancient civilizations — and anything we turn up via SETI is going to be about as ancient as it gets (given that we’ve pretty much ruled out anything vaguely-current-human-equivalent existing within 1000 light years of us) — does in fact provide value/insight and justifies a certain amount of expense in going around the world doing targeted poking at various rocks to see what turns up.
One could even infer an abstract imperative to collect and preserve whatever knowledge we can before it is lost.
The hard part is knowing whether there’s anything out there to collect
problem is, if you turn the telescope off, you might miss something.
Do we really want to contact extraterrestrial life?
It’d be a bit like when European colonists encountered low-tech civilizations in the new world. Only the technology delta could be vastly worse. We’d offer them out primitive beads and shells and iPhones and if we lucky they’d just leave.
I’ve encountered futurists who make arguments like that advanced civilizations will be peaceful (because: if they aren’t they won’t have survived their nuclear age) but it seems equally reasonable to argue that explorer civilizations would have to be curious and aggressive and daring – which is probably bad news.
It’s always seemed to me that the idea of face-to-whatever meetings is pretty silly. No alien that had a roughly human-compatible biome would land a ship and take off again; they might get ants or tardigrades or lawyers or some other indestructible and ruthless Earth life-form. For that and the practical questions of space travel it’s always seemed to me that one-way trips are all that makes sense, unless the aliens have a skyhook (e.g.: warp drive) which they don’t or we’d probably be overwhelmed by aliens already.
A tempest in Russell’s teapot.
Marcus @14:
Sagan made that argument. That, his breathless flogging of the Drake equation, and the cringeworthy “We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean” crap, put me off him for good. Still, in the Grand Tapestry of human folly, wickedness and waste, SETI is at worst a tiny thread. And for the price, it’s at least cheap PR for science, if not good science in and of itself.
I would think that the SETI project would lead to/has led to advances in Computer Science. Does anyone know of a bigger distributed processing project?
wrog:
we’ve pretty much ruled out anything vaguely-current-human-equivalent existing within 1000 light years of us
No. That’s an absolutely enormous volume of space, containing on the order of 20,000,000 stars. How would we have ruled that out? Communication leakage of the sort generated by radio and television broadcast is going to be attenuated drastically in just a few tens of LYs, never mind 1000. And 1000 years ago (or today from 1000 LY), you could have pointed a radio telescope array directly at Earth and you would hear… bubkes, because we were still ~900 years away from generating any coms radiation at all. So how would we rule out a “vaguely-current” civilization 500 LY away that was at 1800 CE level tech?
None of this is an argument for SETI, which I don’t care for either in its current formulation. But your statement sugests we know a great deal more than we do about the possibilities.
Google.
@11
If one believes (as I do) that certain kinds of state spending (say, crewed space exploration, SETI) are useless, then one believes they constitute stealing lunches from schoolchildren, yes. Or perhaps medicine from elderly. Take your pick.
And, yeah, I know, US would probably spent most of that money on military, not schools… oh wait, but much of space stuff actually is thinly disguised military spending.
I don’t necessarily consider SETI bad science, more like low probability of success science. Last I knew SETI had 2.5 FTE staff, and enough money for servers and bandwidth necessary to keep the distributed computing system going. The signal data is from piggy-backing at Arecibo and, more recently, Green Bank. Meanwhile, BOINC (the distributed computing software overseer), runs 14 astronomy projects including SETI, 9 biology projects, 1 cognitive science project, 3 earth/environmental science projects, 13 math/computing/game projects, 8 multi-application projects, and 6 miscellaneous projects.
Since it is voluntary to supply computing powere, there should be no problem with any of the above.
I run three projects with my spare computing power.
That’s… one of more incoherent arguments against SETI I’ve heard in a while.
I mean, on the one hand you say, “I just think the odds are prohibitively low” and
“My guesses about the probabilities would be much lower than the astronomers’ guesses, I suspect.” (So a variation on the argument from personal incredulity, I guess.)
And then you say, “I don’t accept any values derived from the Drake Equation” and “But the number is irrelevant. It’s a bad gamble.”
So… “the number is irrelevant”? What kind of argument is that?
(“We don’t need numbers in science!”)
So why is it a “bad gamble”?
“And who wants that kind of radical life-changing event anyway? Lottery winners aren’t made happier by getting a bucket of money dumped on them, and the results of a successful SETI search are even less certainly positive.”
Oh, I see: “We might learn something bad, so don’t try to find things out!”
Hey, just don’t do science at all, that way you can really minimize your chances of finding out something that maybe isn’t positive.
Re radio and TV broadcasts: The time window of multi-kW broadcasts in the 500 kHz – 600 MHz range of frequencies of a civilization may be less than 200 years.
We have already cable TV, internet, and cellular networks with myriads of low-power microwave transmitters transmitting on the same frequencies, which are generally speaking more readily absorbed by the atmosphere. My guess is that viewed from Andromeda, our civilization is degrading into a chaos of garbled 0.7 – 3 Ghz signals 8-).
Me @ 23
…viewed from Andromeda in about 2.5 million years, if they can detect anything…
While I do work in space science, I can’t say I have very strong feelings either way about SETI, but I’d like to express some disagreement with the arguments in the OP.
I think the characterization of that 1-in-a-million ‘estimate’ is unfair, as it really isn’t presented as an estimate, but a calculation of what the consequences of such a figure would be. I read it as simply pointing out that a possibly tiny frequency here still produces a large number there.
Also,
Well, thats not any kind rational argument. Size of the prize is always relevant to an investment decision. To my mind, the obvious payoff from any discovery of extraterrestrial life comes from the new science, the added information on the range of possibilities under which chemistry can get sufficiently fancy to do things like sprouting solar panels to catch star light, or walking around on legs. Obviously if such a discovery comes in the form of a communication from an intelligent mind, the amount of expected information goes up hugely. In such a case, we not only get info about the range of possibilities for biological systems, but also the range of possibilities for high-level, naturally evolved computation. I can hardly think of anything more mind expanding that trying to decipher a message from another star. I think it would have significant consequences at the level of our entire civilization.
So the small price of SETI-like research definitely is not irrelevant.
It is, rather, comparing programs such as SETI to astrology that is irrational, as astrology has no expected payoff at all, while SETI has at least the small probability of a huge scientific prize.
I’m not expecting aliens to send us the secret of everlasting-life, but the possibility of discovering other modes of life and intelligence seems to me to be well worth exploring.
I may be wrong, but I don’t thing the ATA is being publicly funded anymore, AND when it was, it was also being used for more traditional astronomy.
From phys.org in 2009:
From Seti.org:
Actually, looking again at that last sentence, it may be that some taxpayer dollars are still being used for the ATA, but it is still doing “normal” astronomy in addition to looking for LGM.
As Ben Johnson once wrote of Shakespeare: “He knows little Latin and even less Greek”. “Archilles” .. hmm.
I’m still waiting for our other ape relations on this planet to invent geometry, build houses (not just a lean-to or a habitated cave), reinvent the wheel, and create a functional quantum computer. If we go through all the taxa on this planet to arrive at a figure for the percentage of species capable of creating a beacon to other star systems, we have 1/some-estimate-pulled-out-of-the-air. One of the hallucinatory numbers floating about is 315M. Even if we were to say that 315M was a known and exact figure, that percentage of 1/315M is still bullshit and not applicable to the rest of the universe. Statistics don’t make sense for one-off events and all the evidence to date is that we Homo Sapiens sapiens are a one-off event. There is clearly no mandate in nature that prevents the existence of other similarly capable creatures, but we can’t claim to have any reasonable estimate of the likelihood that there are any others.
I also don’t believe the SETI hype that beacons can be detected from other star systems; the rate of arrival of photons will simply be too low to detect. Sure we can see stars at vast distances, but those stars are unimaginably bright and we simply have no sustained source of electromagnetic radiation which is even remotely as bright and with a low enough beam divergence.
We actually have beamed hard-earned secrets of science to random stars in the galaxy. The graphic you attached is evidence of that.
If we did contact ET, wouldn’t you want to ask what their genetic code is made of? I’m pretty sure they would also have biologists, and I see no reason why that info would be censored by either side. Also, if they have the capability to send and receive signals over 50-100 light years, they probably already know how to construct lasers and nuclear bombs and missiles. As for ultimatums demanding tribute, we couldn’t send it to them and if they can come and fetch it themselves, why aren’t they here already?
If we found life evolved anywhere other than Earth, even microbes, it would be the biggest event in human history.
Do you have any questions about the foundations of evolution? Biochemistry, genetics? You can’t rewind Earth to the Precambrian age and start over, but this would be as close as you could come.
madscientist #28:
“My estimate (of an Aricibo-type radiotelescope talking to its twin) yields a unity signal-to-noise range of about 3.2 kiloparsecs, or roughly 10,000 LY.”
Admittedly, this article was written by a microwave SETI proponent, but if you read it, he appears to know his stuff. Plus, astronomers a few years ago created a pretty hi-res image of the microwave background radiation that has been dissipating and cooling for 15 billion years. That’s a pretty weak signal. Also, we may not need to communicate over kilo-light year distances, most of the stars we can see in the sky are less than 100 LY away.
(Continuing my #31) Also, the New Horizons spacecraft was able to communicate quite well at a distance of 4.5 light hours using a 12-watt amplifier with a 2 meter diameter dish, and the receiving dish is only 70 meters wide. You only need to scale up 10,000 times that distance to talk to Alpha Centauri. For example, using a 1.2 kilowatt transmitter and a 20 meter dish and keeping the same receiver would do it. An Arecibo on each end would seem to me to be able to improve that 4.3 LY distance by a factor of 1000.
Maybe the aliens have a policy of sending “a poison pill” to kill off all life as soon as they detect another civilization in order to keep down competition, it could already be on the way.
Say rather that SETI is good science wrapped in bad rhetoric. It is at heart just a radio survey of the sky, and there is nothing unscientific about radio telescopy. The radio portion of the EM spectrum is often the only source of information we have when looking at obscured regions; higher frequencies suffer heavy extinction when passing through e.g. dust clouds. A particular area of interest where radio waves play a key role is in observing the galactic core and our local supermassive black hole.
The rot sets in when we consider the justification surrounding the science, and I agree that a lot of otherwise good scientists wrapped it in utter silliness even from its very inception. This was not done for no reason though, as it was at least partly done in order to obtain funding from a reluctant congress (sadly, a dry recounting of the benefit of radio telescopy is rarely compelling to an unscientific politician).
And there, I believe they made a miscalculation. The effort to ‘sex up’ the good science on offer went too far, with glib pronouncements of easy detection and the potential to amaze the world by making contact, and this drivel was mistakenly made out to be the central goal of the project by naming it SETI. I really wish it had never been named that, as that has irrevocably associated a good project with utter lunacy.
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh are you kidding? I must agree with Rogue Scientist’s comment #11 – you really seem to be annoyed by astronomy in general. It’s something I;ve noticed going wayyy back to when you disparaged the biological project being carried by rocket to ISS (iirc) as nothing more than a publicity stunt.
“Lottery winners aren’t made happier by getting a bucket of money dumped on them,”
Speak for yourself. I received a small inheritance last year and it made me tremendously happy to have money to buy the things I wanted. A few million dollars would make me ecstatic.
I see no reason to believe that alien life, even technologically advance alien life, might exist at the same time as us – there are many opportunities for life to arise in this and any other galaxy. And there are lots of galaxies.
I agree with the point you go on to make though: that the distances between are all but guaranteed to be prohibitive of any communication.
Drastically less than even that, given that the signal is not focused in any particular direction to begin with. Communication with distant vehicles such as those around another planet is only possible at all because those vehicles transmit in a tightly focused beam pointed directly at us; an undirected transmission, in order to reach us reliably, would require too much of their limited power budget.
This reasoning would seem to omit that the signal would degrade proportional to the square of the distance.
flue virus? e. coli?
@32
how would increasing the size and power of a transmitter -receiver change the speed of light by any factor at all let alone 1000?
uncle frogy
uncle frogy
Aside from the holdouts of AM and FM radio, are there really any broadcasts still happening today that SETI could actually detect (without explicit knowledge of the transmission methodology)?
Does anyone know of a bigger distributed processing project?
The internet.
Addendum to my #39:
Since most phones now are internet connected, I count them.
#37 frogy
Moarscienceplz is not referring to the speed at which the transmission travels, but rather the coherence of the signal when it arrives. Powerful transmittors help by making the signal much more discernable over long distances.
Probably not beyond a few dozen light years, but it doesn’t really matter anyway. Earth itself is a far brighter beacon. Any interstellar-capable civilization will undoubtedly be capable of conducting exoplanet surveys from a much greater distance than even our oldest radio transmissions have traveled thus far. If life is rare, detection of Earth’s oxygen-rich atmosphere would be enough to pique any observer’s interest, and it might be possible to detect signs of civilization from any trace gases detected.
In that sense, SETI’s long term success is bound up in the future of our long term study of exoplanets, a branch of astronomy that is still very much in its infancy. It’s likely many years yet before we have the capability of detecting signs of life on such planets, but the possibility that we might one day have a rough idea of how common/rare life is in the galaxy, is a tantalizing one.
The
And even if they did, it’s an open question as to whether they’d end up developing a technological suite that includes radio communications.
” After all, there are many intelligent species on our planet, including dolphins, octopi, apes, parrots, and elephants, but only once in 4.6 billion years has a technologically advanced species evolved. ”
Once? What about the lizard people with their underground civilisation and their envoys hidden among us, running our affairs in secret? WAKE UP, SHEEPLE!
They are surveying so many things more than just possible transmissions from ETs. They are also sharing their research with other astronomers and the like when applicable. Unless I’m mistaken, they are greatly involved in exoplanet research, which is good research for general knowledge in many areas. They really aren’t all that much about ETs, and never have been. Even if they were, they’re still using the scientific method and collecting valuable information anyway.
PZ
Uh, I’m gonna add my voice to those pointing out that this is a mischaracterization. While I’m sure some people involved in SETI hope for this, it isn’t the purpose any more than your work is hoping that a zebra fish will bestow its wisdom upon you.
Wow, PZ…I’m sorry, but that is kinda naïve, and something that smacks of being financially stable. It’s easy to say that a windfall won’t make you happy when you have enough money already. For a single mother who is struggling with debt and trying to raise three kids on their own, even a $5000 prize would be a phenomenal boon. I know I would be ecstatic, my aforementioned single mother would literally fall to the ground weeping for joy. Now, you could argue that sometimes it doesn’t make people happy, or that lottery winners sometimes go broke (though, if you actually look at the data, it’s hardly the “lottery woes” concept people have been conditioned to think it is, most lottery winners keep working and have better saving rates), but just blanket asserting that having the financial Sword of Damocles removed from over their heads would not make a huge number of people happy is absurd. And don’t give me that “being rich bring more problems” bunk. Sure money comes with problems, but it’s way nicer than being broke. To quote ODB: “More money, more problems, my ass!”
@20, ModZero
Except that a lot of revenue has been generated by the space program and its spinoff technologies. So, it’s not like this money is being taken from the budget and never seen again.
I like SETI. I kind of agree, though. Not so much that it’s bad science, but just that calling it science at all is kind of funny. At best, it’s data mining the universe. It’s… outreach.
If there’s a signal out there that’s more than a blorp with a circle drawn around it and “WOW” beside it, it’d be pretty cool if we caught it. Of course, the idea that such a signal is likely to exist is firmly rooted in the days when broadcasts were a thing, and the fact that they’re kind of not anymore* is a bit of a damper on that, but hey, maybe Charlie Chapperzoid radio plays are still making their way to us across the desolate void of interstellar space? Now there’s a blorp worthy of a WOW!
* Ok, sure, they’re still a thing, but they’re not really a thing in the way they used to be. I get my radio talkshows through the internet and call them podcasts, I get my tv through the internet and call it iPlayer, and the airwaves are kind of getting quieter and quieter. There’s still a there there, but I think it won’t be there all that much longer.
(Of course, the problem with those Chapperzoid shows is that they’re all a bit blue, amirite? *waggles eyebrows*)
” After all, there are many intelligent species on our planet, including dolphins, octopi, apes, parrots, and elephants, but only once in 4.6 billion years has a technologically advanced species evolved. ”
Notice how only one of the above species existed more than 50 million years ago? Average brain size and intelligence all over the planet has been increasing since brains first evolved.
This is like heating a pot of water to 100 degrees C, and when the first bubble of steam pops we declare that it was a one-off event and will never be repeated.
@multitool
I do occasionally enjoy the idea that the secret of technological advancement is more in the thumb than the human brain.
“We’re special because we’re super-duper smart!”
“No, sir, you’re special because you have pincers.”
Just wait until the dolphins develop thumbs or thumb-like pieces. We’re going to be in so much trouble.
My take on the entire SETI thing is this: it’s a nice idea, but the main premise used to sell the whole mess is riding on the back of a lot of assumptions which add up to one almighty string of coincidences.
We’re assuming there is:
a) something “out there” we’d recognise as intelligent life;
b) which is interested in communicating with other intelligent life;
c) using means human technology can detect;
d) and methods humans recognise as actual communication;
e) during the period humans are best able to receive this communication;
f) oh, and their intentions are benign at worst, beneficial at best.
Breaking this down bit by bit:
a) We have a remarkably poor record for recognising intelligent life forms on THIS planet (there are substantial portions of our species who refuse to recognise other substantial portions of our species as being intelligent). We’re only just getting past the idea a species has to be simian, or indeed mammalian, in order to exhibit intelligence. This does not lead me to feel confident about our ability to recognise intelligence when we run across it.
b) I point here to the history of colonial exploitation – there were a lot of “undiscovered” tribes on this planet alone. Heck, there was a “new” tribe of indigenous Australians who didn’t wander out of the desert in South Australia until about the late 1960s (they weren’t completely “unknown” – they talked to relations and connections in other tribal groups about these pale-skinned newcomers, and decided they didn’t want a bar of being “civilised” until a prolonged drought basically forced them onto a reservation when the other option was starvation). My point being that not everyone who is out there will necessarily want to communicate, and certainly not necessarily with us.
c) Humans are biologically rather limited when it comes to picking up on various forms of communication – we only see a restricted part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and we only hear a restricted range of frequencies of sound. We’re lousy at picking up pheremones by scent or taste, and our detection of various kinds of kinesthetic commnication is hindered by a lot of cultural assumptions which lead to us getting the entirely wrong idea about what other species are trying to get across to us (compare and contrast: smiling, and baring one’s teeth as a threat). Technologically, we can pick up a bit more of the various electromagnetic spectra, but we still tend to default to looking for things in the range we call “visible light” and the audio spectrum.
d) See above – humans for a long time have tended to presume if it doesn’t speak recognisable language, it can’t be communicating (which has, of course, extended to other members of our own species – the Roman word “barbarian” came from the Greek “babaroi” which basically was a mimicry of the noises these strange person-shaped things were making which weren’t REAL human speech). We’re still having trouble figuring out how other intelligent species on this planet communicate in ways which don’t involve human speech. Why do we assume we’re going to receive something we’ll recognise as a communication? (I’m also reminded of the discovery of the first pulsar – tight pulses of radio waves, which were interpreted as being a form of communication…).
e) We’re presuming those communications are going to be out there NOW, because we’re listening NOW. Wouldn’t it be sad if some day we discovered that yeah, there was a species which was trying to communicate with us, and sending out all kinds of information… in the period between the 13th century CE and the 18th century CE, when we weren’t able to hear it. (And this is leaving out the sorts of temporal gaps that interstellar distances cause – even if they’re sending out transmissions at the speed of light, and located at our next nearest neighbouring solar system, we’re still going to be waiting over seven years for a ping response – 3.6 years there, 3.6 years back, and that’s assuming all the relative positioning stays the same the whole darn time).
f) I point readers to the history of colonial interaction within the human species. As an inhabitant of a former colony, I don’t think I’d be willing to risk it. (On the one hand, we could get the galactic equivalent of the British, in which case we’d face invasion, genocide, systematic depopulation and removal, and cultural domination. On the other hand we could get the galactic equivalent of the Spanish, the French or the Germans… in which case we’d face invasion, genocide, systematic depopulation and removal, and cultural domination. Hard to choose, really).
If there’s a chance, it makes less sense to not look than to look. Discovery is an active process.
The biggest issue that I have with SETI is that it relies on the looked-for other species actively trying to communicate with us at the exact same time (shifted for time of flight) that we are listening in the right direction.
I don’t know how you would even start to estimate a probability of success for that given the many unknowns, but it sounds awfully optimistic to me.
@ 38 ck, the Irate Lump
are there really any broadcasts still happening today that SETI could actually detect (without explicit knowledge of the transmission methodology)?
The original arguments from the 1960s about powerful military radars (specifically, ballistic-missile detection systems) still apply, though there’s not a whole lot of information content in their transmissions. (If they were switched over to frequency-hopping technology, then they’d become very hard to detect, but as far as I can tell that hasn’t happened yet, and there’s not much reason for them to adopt it, either.)
@Rasalhague – That’s false. SETI is not about looking for other species actively trying to communicate with us. It’s about simply picking up signals from other species that happen to intercept the earth hear and now. There’s a difference.
@56 that’s different from what Seth Shostak told me when I asked him about this specifically. I don’t see how the incidental transmission model could possibly work.
The attenuation of a signal is proportional to the square of the distance — it drops off really fast. Look at how weak the signals from our deep space probes get, and how we need fairly precise antenna alignment to pick them up.
Now you think we’re going to just pick up the alien equivalent of I Love Lucy reruns, a diffuse signal to begin with, from a thousand light years away? Against the background of their star and local gas giants howling radio noise out into the cosmos?
OK. I said something about “science driven by unrealistic fantasies”. Confirmed.
Meg Thornton @52:
c) Humans are biologically rather limited when it comes to picking up on various forms of communication … we still tend to default to looking for things in the range we call “visible light” and the audio spectrum.
I’m not sure what this part of your argument is doing: it’s not as though pheromones would be a remotely feasible way of communicating through space! And most SETI projects ignore the visible spectrum entirely in favor of the microwave and radio, because the galaxy is relatively transparent (and because most stars are much less bright) at those wavelengths, making it easier to detect potential signals. And no one is looking for “audio” signals from space!
f) I point readers to the history of colonial interaction within the human species. As an inhabitant of a former colony, I don’t think I’d be willing to risk it.
That’s a possible argument for not sending out communications (though it’s based on the same kind of assumptions you criticize earlier in your comment — i.e., that aliens will be just like us). It’s hardly an argument against listening.
(And it’s not as though Australian aborigines were sending messages to the rest of the planet, and that’s what caused the British to show up and colonize Australia…)
Nope. I have no idea what, if anything, we’ll ever pick up. However how many discoveries were made by accident, by people looking for one thing and finding something else entirely?
Compare that to the number of discoveries made by people that didn’t look for anything at all.
Besides, sometimes not finding something adds to our overall knowledge.
From here:
http://www.setileague.org/seticon/absteu04/link.pdf
I’m taking the result at it’s word (I haven’t looked at the calculations to check) but that sounds about right. I’m guessing “-16dB” is supposed to mean -16dBm? But in any case, this is assuming a 1MW transmitter and a tx antenna with a gain of something in the 60-70dB range (I don’t have an exact reference for that frequency band). That’s a very high degree of directivity being assumed, ie a deliberate attempt to send stuff to us.
Also here:
http://www.satsig.net/seticalc.htm
again assuming very large transmit power with a high gain antenna. The high gain antenna necessarily assumes it’s actually directed at us.
I thought that the Drake Equation was meant to be a research driver and that just pluging in estimates was doing it wrong?
Working our abiogenesis paths and their probability for example fills in part of the equation. That use of the equation can be easily communicated to non scientists and adds to a reason for funding the research. Surveying exoplanets similarly fills a spot and gains political utility by being part of the equation research.
That’s really not the point. The reason we won’t pick up signals not directed specifically at us is because you can’t, at least not with anything other than an impractically large receive antenna. Importantly, not with the size of antenna SETI is currently using.
I agree that SETI is futile but for different reasons. SETI assumes that other intelligent life will be using radio to communicate. That’s like a primitive tribe on an isolated island in the Pacific believing that if other people exist in the world, surely they must be using smoke signals. We *just* attained novice technological literacy a hundred years or so ago, and we believe that the only long-range communications technology we discovered in our infancy is the end-all-be-all of interstellar communication amongst races that may have been around for millions of years? I sincerely doubt it.
I’ve only heard a few other people point this out since I first thought of it 10 years ago, and explained it in this blog post: http://blogd.com/wp/?p=1659
Antennae. Have you looked at the Allen Telescope Array by chance? I’m not saying this will be capable of picking up non-directed signals, but it’s currently forty-something linked radio telescopes and will be 350 units completed all working together as a single unit. I only mention this because I got the impression you may think it’s a single telescope, apologies if I misunderstood.
#38: Are you actually laboring under the impression that all of every com signal transmitted to every satellite or interplanetary spacecraft is captured by them in their entirety?
Oh crap, that’s right.
tsig #33
Competition for what? There is absolutely no material thing that is valuable enough to justify harvesting it in one star system and shipping it to another one. I suppose planets in the Goldilocks zone could be a desirable prize to any species that simply wanted to just pack the galaxy with as many members of their own species as possible, but they seem to be fairly common and if it really is only one habitable planet in a million that evolves intelligent life, that leaves 999,999 empty planets for each intelligent species to colonize.
The Air&Space article troubles to acknowledge, “And life cannot have appeared in the very early Universe until heavier elements produced by the explosions of many supernovas became abundant.”
That pop wisdom sounds reasonable until one actually looks at the research and finds that it is already well established that heavy element production necessary for rocky planet formation was abundantly available at very early times. The supernova rate during early ‘starburst’ star formation (so-called population III) was intense enough to supply the local interstellar medium with ‘metals’ necessary for rocky planets in later-generation star formation well within the first billion years. Such activity would have commenced immediately: most every supernova shockwave propagating through the dense interstellar medium that gave rise to the initial pop III stars would have triggered gravitational collapse leading to the formation of subsequent generations of stars fortified by heavy elements. There is no astrophysical fret that prevents the formation of earthlike planets within the first billion years.
PZ, it sounds to me like you’re not so much a SETI denier as a funding opponent — due to estimating lower probability for arbitrary levels of ETI-based return on investment, and perhaps lower valuation assigned to various sorts of returns. (As with space exploration, there have been indirect non-ETI returns in technology development. SETI led to need for distributed data analysis, which led to the SETI-at-home screensaver software technology development, which in turn led to BOINC, which include some biology and chemistry analysis projects.)
This looks closer to the bulk of the anti-nuke movement (relatively few of whom deny that radioactivity can be used to generate electrical power, but who tend to think costs outweigh benefits) than the climate denialists (who tend more to reject the existence of anthropogenic climate change rather than merely rejecting the ROI for countermeasures) or evolution deniers (who tend to reject the modern evolutionary-genetic synthesis, particularly the inference of common descent).
@52, Meg Thornton
The Drake equation factors that in via the “L” term. The Cold War left a lot of people inclined to consider plausible pretty low estimates for that factor, in turn giving depressing answers to Fermi’s
ParadoxRiddle.This in turn leads to the argument that funding might be better directed to sociology than SETI. Sociology research tends pretty cheap, and our odds of contact go up if we can come up with means to increase our listening time past the “L” average value.
Just to emphasize the point, we are latecomers to a universe that was already filled with over 90% of the rocky (and potentially habitable) planets that our universe will ever contain. Our system happened to form only 4.5 billion years ago – only during the latest third of the history of the universe. Planet formation is associated with star formation, and the star formation rate in young galaxies produced most of the stars during that first third. That fact alone implies our situation is a dime a dozen…
And IF any advanced technology that emerged anywhere in the universe during that earliest several-billion-year interval managed to survive the ensuing ~8 billion years to the present, can we – with our puny knowledge of what nature actually may allow – seriously entertain limits to technological advancement based ONLY on our pathetic aptitude arrived at in a mere few centuries?
I think its entirely possible that the universe is thoroughly saturated with naturally-spawned intelligence (merged, if it happened more than once) that is in principle fully capable of keeping tabs on anything (if not everything) sufficiently interesting. They could be watching us closely right now, in impeccable detail, and they are good at doing it surreptitiously. We can’t tell they are there until we arrive by our own labor and devices at some critical scientific/technological wherewithal. The reason they have not said hello may be entirely a matter of non-interference watching how the natural experiment grows, and it may very well be that with a vast number of emergent technological civilizations such as what we are currently passing through are regarded by them analogically as how a biologist or gardener treats a single flower in a vast biome or garden.
Lots of ‘ifs’, to be sure, but that train of thought leads by plausible extrapolation to serviceable explanation for why we haven’t yet been made aware of them – a plethora of sample emergent technological civilizations such as ours can have reduced our importance to the status of a data point within a vast ‘experimental’ trial. Against that potentially gigantic backdrop we may be (at least so far) too small and unimportant for them to give a hoot.
In other (shorter) words: SETI may be irrelevant. But that doesn’t mean its unscientific, and comparing it to astrology on the basis of a perceived (necessarily contingent) result is just plain stupid. The ‘Drake equation’ was and never has been regarded by serious scientists engaged in the question as anything other than a statistical template for ascertaining a probability – a means of focusing any lines of scientific inquiry that may lead to filling in the factors.
Strangely enough, we have indeed begun to fill in several of them, on the prevalence of planets and planets within earthlike habitable zones. Why is it bad science’ to allow the question to mature further? Its ridiculous.
Someone knocking on my door and wanting to talk about their religion doesn’t, of course, prove that their gods are real. But it is evidence for the existence of door-knockers.
“Yes, there is other intelligent/tool-using life out there” would be an interesting result, even if they were just transmitting long lists of prime numbers.
Yes, it should be voluntary, like buying fancy cupcakes or going to a softball game (to pick two random ways to spend some of one’s free time or money); but sifting through those signals Arecibo is collecting in its spare time feels like it’s somewhere between going to a concert and playing solitaire as a way to spend one’s time: basically harmless and hopefully entertaining.
I think the gambling analogy is absolutely correct. However, in a gambling situation, I disagree that the cost doesn’t matter. If people only gambled money that they could afford to lose, gambling would not have the devastating consequences it does. So the fact that SETI spends a relatively small sum is necessary to show that SETI isn’t actively harmful.
As far as establishing whether what SETI is doing is worth doing at all, that’s harder. To start with, I think it’s important to break this up into 2 questions. (1) Is it worth trying to determine whether intelligent life exists elsewhere (2) Is it worth doing it the way SETI is doing it.
I think as far as #2 is concerned, it’s a reasonable argument that SETI’s methods have such a low probability of success that it’s almost not worth doing. If SETI had anything to discover, they would have already discovered it by now (the odds that an intelligent alien civilization that is about 1000 light years away from us, decided to start broadcasting messages to us sometime within the last 10 years itself is incredibly low).
As far as #1 is concerned, I think while we can pretty much assume and be almost 100% sure that there is intelligent life outside our solar system, there is still value in actually proving it. It’s like in math, where you are almost certain a particular hypothesis is true, but it’s still an event worth celebrating when someone actually proves it so.
I’m not sure what that means for SETI, but I do think we should be making some continuous effort to see if we can prove the existence of intelligent life other than ours.
In a universe that’s billions of years old, and billions of light years across, it’s almost inconceivable that civilizations might co-exist either concurrently, or within shouting distance of each other (Star Trek notwithstanding!).
So as written that’s the SETI fallacy in reverse. The chance of there being a species nearby depends on the rate of civilizations appearing, the numerator in our setup. The denominator, the size of the universe, has no effect. No one knows what the numerator is, so the mostly SETI types want to talk about the denominator and say how big it is.
Where I agree with you after a fashion is that if there is even one species within hailing distance and even vaguely equivalent tech currently–say, within a million years of progress of us–that implies the rate is so high there must have been millions or billions by now, and the Fermi paradox kicks in. (I know SETI types hate the Fermi paradox, but in a galaxy teeming with millions of diverse cvilizations for billions of years, I struggle to imagine why one wouldn’t have gone the von Neumann probe route.)
But for me personally my only real complaint is the amount of mindshare that SETI and similar xenobiology ideas occupy. Science is interesting, space science is interesting, I am sick of seeing almost every space science story being not about the actual discovery but about “scientists say this could mean life is really common!”
@74: “(I know SETI types hate the Fermi paradox, but in a galaxy teeming with millions of diverse cvilizations for billions of years, I struggle to imagine why one wouldn’t have gone the von Neumann probe route.)
Me too…until I released myself of the notion that the vast spatial distances which we cannot currently imagine how to traverse should necessarily present any impediment to a sufficiently advanced technology able to circumvent that limitation. The problem may not even be so mundane a matter of traversing long spatial distances within a time span under the lifespan of a prospective interstellar voyager. (Our own physics already and increasingly suggests wild and wooly possibilities afforded by wormholes and quantum-based teleportation and entanglement schemes that could in principle provide a solution). But I suspect even that perspective is myopic: if a technology is capable of travel through wormholes, they might as well be adept at making entire universes customized for their own pleasure – apart from an infinite number of ‘natural’ and artificial possible universes allowable by nature – and the particular universe from which they sprang which we are still ‘imprisoned’ continues to look exactly like the natural universe that it is, apparently devoid of any ‘others’ simply because whenever a technology crosses over a certain threshold of wherewithal, they basically vanish from our sight, having crossed over the light horizon into universes of their own making. That doesn’t mean they would be incapable of checking in on us: indeed, such an ability could be the very reason we never see them while they might be observing us in every detail…or not, if we happen to be just another dime in a vast garden of a ‘dozen’. Of course, this is all pure speculation, and rightfully should be regarded precisely for what it is. But serious science can and does accept flights of speculation as potential avenues for exploration, if and when such opportunities arise. The trouble with this topic is, and shall remain for quite some time, that we have so little actual information or evidence of what is going on – we can’t even begin to couch it in any scientific terms let alone put any of it to a test. But that restriction shouldn’t ever deprive us of our ability to imagine that natural reality remains unimaginably vaster than the state of the science we currently engage in to investigate it.
If I may point out, from the Fermi paradox point of view, we’re not “there” either: We barely do any space travel and, arguably, have never gotten out of the solar system, though Voyager is giving it a try. It may be that life is abundant and intelligence even relatively easy, but space travel prohibitively expensive and not worth it to practically any life form. In which case, finding, say, another civilization’s old radio broadcasts as they float through our part of the galaxy would be intellectually fascinating, but of little practical value. They won’t give us warp drive because they don’t have it either.
Nonetheless, given that we spend billions on things that are actively damaging to humanity and the planet and the chances of the SETI money, if reallocated, landing anywhere useful are low, I’m willing to spend a couple of million on the off chance that we’ll pick up the Tau Ceti III version of old broadcasts of The Shadow. It’s fun, it’s harmless, it’s cheap entertainment. Why not?
You really are a miserable shit, Myers.
Er, why is the comment in moderation? Did I say something offensive?
this ain’t the right place probably not the right thread but a question occurred to me. If you are traveling close to light speed or even faster (if it is possible) in a star ship of some kind of course. How do you “see” where you are going and how do you avoid hitting something I would think that hitting a something of even an ounce size at that speed would probably be bad yes?
uncle frogy
It isn’t even a goddamn paradox! Or even a mild conundrum! It’s a chain of probabilities, most of which we can only guess at, which lead to a ‘conclusion’: if our assumptions hold merit, there should be visible aliens.
Key word: if.
@75 anchor “having crossed over the light horizon into universes of their own making”. There is a prize in High Energy Astrobiology that is looking for evidence of just this sort of thing. The hypothesis is that certain black holes seem to be feeding off of a star in a very controlled way that is not explained by current physics and may be artificial. This may be evidence of “nano universe building” or some other advanced technology. Some of these emit very short bursts of extremely high energy radiation that shows some signs of being highly compressed data. So studying these objects will at the very least uncover a whole new field of physics, or it may lead to us discover stellivore civilizations. SETI is truly real science: first observe, second find something unusual, third explore, forth explain unusual as ordinary after all… or discover something new and maybe extraordinary. SETI is moving into the third stage.
Exactly! And if they really thought their reasoning was sound, the conclusion ought to be that their assumptions do not hold merit. Easy.
#78: I can’t find any comment by you in the spam queue. Unfortunately, right now that queue is being flooded by one Otangelo Grasso, who is copy-pasting bloody great long screeds into the comment box, and stacking them up in the rubbish bin.
3kramer @81:
That takes my prize for Made-Up-Sounding Field of the week.
Which black holes? Do you mean the one in V404 Cygni?
People have made the point that we are not broadcasting as much radio-freq as we used to, our communications are moving to fibers and low-power microwaves. But our radio-freq radiation was always dominated by military radar. Does anyone know what’s happening with that nowadays? Is that still pinging away as it did, or has new tech silenced that as well?
Further to #81: “unsolved problem in physics” is not the same as “not explained by current physics”. The latter implies that either new physics or a previously unknown mechanism (aliens!) is required to explain it. The former could mean that work on the problem is ongoing within current physics.
@84
along those lines I would also add up-link satellite transmissions, while not supper powerful they are more focused and directional than ordinary broadcast TV signals and are aimed up and out. None of them have gotten very far yet.
uncle frogy
@83 Rob Grigianis: Yes, V404 Cygni is one of a couple dozen X-Ray Binaries that exhibit some behaviour inconsistent with known physics. While it may be that some currently unknown mechanism of existing physics eventually explains these, my understanding is that either “new physics” or “artificial” is currently just as likely. I don’t have the expertise to know, my point was that as SETI observes the universe in more detail anomalies will be discovered that warrant further study. And that will lead to new knowledge that may be very valuable either now or in the future.
We currently do not have a use for black holes that literally suck the plasma from a star and store the energy in an accretion disk, then convert that into the universe’s most powerful focused energy beam. However it doesn’t take much imagination to understand if these X-Ray Binaries did not exist we would want to invent such a thing in 5,000 or 50,000 years. Any civilisation even an eye-blink ahead of us would be drawn to these objects if they are natural and try to exploit them for their own use. Or they would study them and try to recreate them in a more convenient location. Either way they should all be observed very carefully over the next few hundred years.
3kramer @87:
How do you arrive at “just as likely”? I’m aware of two proposed mechanisms for relativistic jets, but haven’t seen anyone saying we might need either E.T. or new physics (yet). Do you have a source for this?
But as I’ve noted further up the post, the project is not even about LGM despite its name. It is a radio sky survey, boringly functional and ordinary.
The project is reasonable, the hype surrounding it is bollocks that brings out all those insufferably glib futurists / fantasists.
Much much MUCH more likely than either of those is that the observations of that type of system are missing detail at this stage, and will eventually discover that the system is simply obeying ordinary physics. It’s possible the system sill add new detail to existing physics, or it’s possible that it is the ordinary product of circumstances that are simply uncommon.
“Stellivore civilisations,” yeesh.
It isn’t even a goddamn paradox! Or even a mild conundrum! It’s a chain of probabilities, most of which we can only guess at, which lead to a ‘conclusion’: if our assumptions hold merit, there should be visible aliens.
Key word: if.
I know from experience that people who disagree with me at the start find this totally unconvincing, but the assumptions are basically the same ones made by the SETI supporters–that we aren’t especially unique as a planet or biosphere to have produced life like us. You’re right that it’s not actually a paradox, as it can be resolved by saying those assumptions are wrong and we are quite unusual (as in, typically between zero and one of us around at a time).
Me too…until I released myself of the notion that the vast spatial distances which we cannot currently imagine how to traverse should necessarily present any impediment to a sufficiently advanced technology able to circumvent that limitation
and
If I may point out, from the Fermi paradox point of view, we’re not “there” either: We barely do any space travel and, arguably, have never gotten out of the solar system, though Voyager is giving it a try. It may be that life is abundant and intelligence even relatively easy, but space travel prohibitively expensive and not worth it to practically any life form.
For me the unaddressed point underlying these arguments is that the galaxy is actually quite small compared to its age. Unless I missed a decimal point even Voyager will cross a good chunk of the galaxy in the next 100 million years.
If you imagine that we develop tech for robust von Neumann probes in the next 10,000 years and get bored enough in the next million years or so to say what we’re saying about SETI now (‘Why not do it? It’s cheap and might be interesting’) we will have filled up the galaxy before it’s added another 5% or so to its age.
If there’s only even one other technological species in the ballpark of our “age” in our neighborhood now, and that’s a typical density, you are positing millions of species over the last two billion years, and it would have taken just one vaguely similar enough to us in ambition to do this.
I’m not convinced at a gut level this is a 100% slam dunk argument, but it sure seems a serious challenge and most parsimoniously resolved by saying “technologically inclined life isn’t common at all.”
@83 Rob Grigianis: Poor choice of words on my part as I was not trying to propose relative odds, merely that the question is still open. If you search for “High Energy Astrobiology” you will find several resorces including a paper on the “Follow the energy” approach to SETI. This proposes that while water is vital to biology, energy is vital to intelligence. An advanced civilisation would very likely be near sources of high energy. Like a dam on a river, the energy source itself could be natural but controlled in some way useful to the civilisation. So finding and carefully observing sources of high energy is key to SETI, and will also be useful for us in the near future of 50,000 years.
But we don’t even have to assume anything that bold. We can grant that there are loads of civilisations, even technologically advanced ones spewing EM everywhere, and the Fermi Paradox still ceases to be paradoxical as soon as we note two things:
– EM signal attenuates proportional to distance squared
– Astronomical distances are astronomical.
And as an added complication, bear in mind that any planet we might hope for signs of life is sitting next to an obscenely large EM emitter called a star.
Back to playing with ifs again.
An open question… where ‘stellivoric civilisation’ is just an absurd answer.
Astronomical distances are astronomical.
Astronomical distances are not astronomical on stellar timescales.
Also, the Fermi paradox has nothing to do with radio transmissions, so the stuff about attenuation is not an issue. It’s all about the travel.
Back to playing with ifs again.
This strikes me like a politician, confronted with an annoyingly plausible question, saying ‘I don’t do hypotheticals’ :)
To be clear, these are the two ifs:
(1) Von Neumann machines are possible and not to complicated to build. This certainly seems true, and talking about them is what inspired Fermi to ask the question. There’s no new physics or quantum leaps in technology involved. I think the ball is in the court of anyone saying this is wrong (and so wrong that millions of years of research by millions of species can’t produce one!) to say what the universal flaw is.
(2) Some species will want to spread out across the stars, even if they can’t make the trip individually. Again, this is something that many humans want to do, so we know it’s true. Arguing that this one trait of ours is vanishingly rare, while assuming the traits of “intelligence” and “technology using” are quite probable, is a steep climb.
These are the two things going into Fermi’s question that are not shared by SETI itself and lead to the ‘paradox’. It seems to me that any remotely persuasive answer as to why either assumption is universally untrue–that there’s a physical law preventing von Neumann probes from working, or a psychological law that says species will never build one–would be quite interesting.
@92 Holms: I am not sure what exactly you think is absurd:
– Some advanced civilisations at some stage in their development want to concentrate, harvest, store, convert and output focused energy at a stellar scale. Are you saying no advanced civilisation has never existed? If so the why do you think that?
– If we look for objects that do all of these things, X-Ray Binaries are at the top of the list. Do you dispute this?
– If X-Ray Binaries did not exist then an advanced civilisation would want to invent something with similar capabilities. If they occur naturally, then an advanced civilisation would want to exploit such a unique resource. If this is what you find absurd, then please explain why no advanced civilisation would want such capability.
– We should observe all X-Ray Binaries closely for signs an advanced civilisation is using one or more of them if or their own purposes. This will take time because some may be untouched, just as some rivers have no dams, canals or other artificial modifications or control structures. And it will be difficult to recognise such modifications as artificial, especially if the control structures are mostly at the nano scale or simply beyond our current resolution. If you think we would have already recognised something as large as an X-Ray Binary as artificial or under intelligent control, please explain why you are so confident in our current abilities.
That’s cute and all, but yes they are. And it’s about contact or detection of any sort, and out of the two, we have no reason to think interstellar travel is the easier.
Talking about developing Von Neumann probes “in the next 10,000 years” to set about “fill[ing] up the galaxy” within the next million years. “Annoying plausible” give me a break.
I have no problem granting your second point, but here you have the burden of evidence around the wrong way. You’re the one proposing it, go ahead and carry it with evidence; the null position doesn’t have to do shit. And no, saying ‘surely in a million years’ is not proof, it is a hand-wave. All you have is the assertion that it is inevitable.
Pure unevidenced speculation. I could equally posit that such technology is simply impossible and have exactly the same evidence backing me up.
I sure do; X-ray binaries are horrifically unstable. But of course, when we are making the paramters of our speculation up as we go along we can simply say ‘oh yes but hey the unevidenced civilisation I propose is sufficiently advanced to deal with that’ and on and on; this is a game of proposing ‘sufficiently advanced technology’ as a short cut to get out of any difficulty.
It is akin to building castles on clouds and arguing about the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin. And that I think renders further discussion pointless; you are willing to natter on about space fairies where I am not.
Holms,
Sums the whole thing up.
Not even wrong.
3kramer @94: I’m not sure what your point is. Is it really necessary for the folk carefully studying X-ray binary data to be consciously looking for evidence of intelligent intervention? How about analyzing data and letting it lead the way without any preconceptions?
Here’s something perhaps a bit more concrete. As I’ve said before, if you want to spend some dosh on finding evidence of past visitors to our system, send some probes to carefully study various L4 and L5 Lagrangian points. Natural places to leave calling cards.
In regard to the Fermi paradox, whether Von Neumann machines are possible and not too complicated to build is the key question. Keep in mind that the nature of the machine you have to build is one that can replicate itself from raw materials that it finds and processes itself. This actually seems like a fairly high bar: you are going to have to mine and refine materials, construct a fab to make chips, and program the new Von Neumann machines. Of course “construct a fab to make chips” in itself takes lots of steps. As you are thinking about this, just how large is this Von Neumann machine anyway and how complicated does it have to be? (I’m not sure how you are propelling these machines but that can raise issues as well.) Are we assuming that the machine can be programmed or does it have to be an AI?
None of this is impossible or forbidden by the laws of physics. On the other hand, it does suggest that fast self-replication is … a lot easier to postulate than to put into practice.
I wouldn’t dismiss the Drake Equation outright. It’s a good starting point for discussion of what’s involved in the emergence of ET civilizations. When FD first proposed it, around 1960, only the rate of star formation was known. But with the numerous exoplanet discoveries, we are starting to get clues about fp and ne in it. But the other parameters still remain difficult and speculative.
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For fl, we have the problem that the origin of life is still not very well understood. But we have had a lot of success in untangling the early evolution of the Earth’s biota, complete with discovering a lot of evidence for a “RNA world” phase. The main difficulty that I’ve seen for it is the difficulty of making RNA prebiotically. But RNA’s ribose-phosphate backbone need not have been the first heredity-molecule backbone of the Earth’s biota.
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For fi, we can look at the evolution of life and subdivide it into several events. Some of them have taken place several times in our biota, and some only once.
* Chemoautrophic energy metabolism (H2, CO2, likely NOx and NO3-)
* Photoautotrophic energy metabolism: oxygen-releasing photosynthesis
* Multicellularity: animallike only once, plantlike, funguslike, slime-moldlike several times.
* Internal skeleton: vertebrates — enables large size, especially on land
* Living on land: plants only once, animals several times, including vertebrates
* Manipulating organs: several times: hands, pincers, trunks, …
* Sociality: several times
* Tool use: several times
* Tool making: once? only a few times?
* Full-scale language: only once
* Self-recognition (mirror test): several times
I’ll continue from where I left off.
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fc: let’s see what’s necessary to create a communicative civilization
* Living on land
* At least some of the population Asperger-ish/nerdy. The “social brain hypothesis” of the evolution of intelligence suggests that that would not be selected for, but the necessity of learning technical skills could select for at least some nerdishness.
* Invention of agriculture: enables concentrated populations. Several times in the Holocene, none before. Climate much more stable in the Holocene than before it?
* Invention of writing: enables extrasomatic memory. Only a few times (Sumer, Central America, China?), but often borrowed and often provoked by knowledge of its existence (stimulus diffusion)
* Development of theoretical science.
* The Industrial Revolution
* Advance up to at least the mid 20th cy. level of science and technology
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Now, constraints on L, the communicative lifetime
* Self-destruction
** War
** Plague
** Environmental problems
** Resource depletion
** Social collapse
* Destruction from outside causes
** Planet’s star overheating it (expected to happen for the Earth)
** Asteroid strike
** Supernova or gamma-ray burst
* Loss of interest
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So there is a LOT that is still very conjectural in the Drake Equation.
@95 Holms: “Pure unevidenced speculation”. As is all science to begin with, and as is your assertion that zero advanced civilisations have ever existed. While your assertion strikes me as insanely pessimistic, the whole point of science is to observe and learn so the fact of the matter is uncovered. “Are we alone” is one of the biggest questions there is, and so science should look for an answer. The question then becomes where to look.
And high energy unstable systems are exactly where we should look. Based on our own experience, civilisations thrive in such environments despite the risks. Most people live under the threat of earthquake, volcano, tsunami, hurricane and such precisely because high energy, unstable systems bring far more benefits than low energy, stable systems such as high deserts.
And your assumption that the null hypothesis is “there has never been an advanced civilisation in the universe” is simply wrong. We know for a fact that even with our current crude instruments we can find the building blocks of life throughout the universe. We know for a fact that simple life can thrive in a wide range of extreme environments. We know for a fact that in our very first attempt to discover similar star systems and planets, we found thousands in a tiny patch of space. Everything we have discovered in the short time we have been exploring this question is expanding the possibility that simple life is common.
We know for a fact that we arose from simple life to our current level. We know for a fact we are driven to continue improving our technology and expanding our knowledge. We know for a fact we want to develop interstellar communication and are already starting to do so. We know for a fact that we want to develop and are starting to already develop interstellar travel, even at the slow speeds current technology allows.
Based on the evidence we have, the only reasonable starting hypothesis is that simple life is common, that technological civilisation evolves from simple life, that civilisation develops and continually improves technology, and that civilisation is driven toward interstellar communication and travel. You are saying that because it happened once, it is evidence that it cannot have ever happened anywhere else at any other time. That is simply wrongheaded.
Uh no, I pointed out that your confident assumptions regarding the existence of ‘stellivoric’ technological civilisations was as evidenced as my null assertion. This is not the same as simply stating there are no other technological civilisations at all, and hence your entire post is based on a misread of my position.
You have this question the wrong way around. You are starting with a massive assumption and looking for evidence to bear it out, when you should be starting with a pattern in the data and working out a best-fit theory. And when looking at the unusual characteristics of say an X-ray binary, the possibility of ‘stellivoric civilisation’ is so far down the list of potential explanation that it is a laughable answer to even bother with in the absence of some extremely compelling data. Until then, assume the mundane.
@97 Rob Grigjanis: You need to specifically look for ETI because it has been shown time and again in science that you don’t see what you aren’t looking for. For example, even the radio signals that SETI inspected previously need to be re-examined because they failed to look for compressed encrypted signals. We may already have proof of ETI in the data SETI have been looking at for the last 50 years. And they may have failed to see it because they were looking for “clear text” data
As regards to “calling cards”, we may not even recognise such things. History is full of people walking past large artificial structures for decades without realising they were man made, and even arguing they were natural long after the evidence started pointing the other way. And there is no particular reason to believe that any ETI would leave a calling card, in fact quite the opposite is more likely. ETI would go to some lengths to hide any observation devices so they could control the timing of unveiling themselves.
3kramer @103: The problem with looking for things we want to find is that we find them even when they aren’t really there. Keywords: Jesus, toast.
@102 Holms: But if you assign a non-zero possibility to at least one advanced civilisation, and you observe an object that has characteristics most often associated with complex life, why would you ignore the possibility that it could be associated with complex life?
Concentrating, harvesting, storing, converting and outputting focused energy is almost the definition of complex life. If we discovered something on Mars that did similar we would be ecstatic. We would start from the possibility that it could indeed be associated with life. We would be stupid to spend decades running down every single other blind ally before considering life. Life would be top of the list.
@104 Rob Grigjanis: Oh, come on now. Much of science is driven from looking for things you want to find. From a cancer cure to new sub-atomic partials, scientists the world over spend careers looking for things they desperatly want to find. Breakthroughs are often made by the person with an almost pathological need to find the object of their desire. The Large Hadron Collider is testament to the power of wanting to find a thing. Dispassionatly following where the data leads? meh.
3kramer @106:
Yes, when there is compelling evidence for the existence of the object, based on previous work. Your handwaving arguments for ET wanting to remain anonymous while building power plants near black holes don’t amount to compelling.
Nonsense. It was built to examine a domain we hadn’t yet accessed (energies to the 10 TeV range), to test the validity of the Standard Model, and perhaps find physics beyond the SM. It’s a testament to exploring regions we hadn’t yet explored. Period.
It could be taken as a particular definition of life, I guess, but it still has nothing to do with observing outbursts from a star. The fact that your idiosyncratic definition maps equally with ‘individual organisms’ and ‘outbursts from a black hole accretion disk’ only shows that your definition is glib to such an extraordinary degree as be useless.
I would’t think the X-ray binaries are a particularly desirable method for collecting stellar energy. After all, your tamed star is radiating in all directions! Any radiation that we can detect is energy lost to the people collecting it, and we see a lot of energy from those systems. Wouldn’t a Dyson sphere be better? From here, it would show up best in infrared. Look for the sub-visible giant stars if you want a civilization that has large-scale energy collection ability!
Not to mention, while humans do indeed thrive in unstable, energetic environments, we go to serious lengths to tame those environments. Dams and locks. Breakwaters. Retaining walls. Lightning rods. If danger can be predicted, we tend to look for engineering solutions to minimize the danger. An X-ray emitter like V404 Cygni may produce amazing amounts of energy, but how the hell do you harness it? How do you extract it from the accretion disk? Where are you living? I seriously doubt any interstellar civilization would choose to live there.
Just my 2 cents.
Depends on what you mean by “we”… Anybody who knows anything about history or anthropology will tell you that you can’t even generalise this across human cultures, never mind to space aliens. Cultural change is a much more complex and uneven process that you seem to think, and like evolution, has no inherent direction.
Again, just looking over the scope of human history and culture, this trait actually is very rare. It’s moderately common in one particular modern culture (and has attained a status normally reserved for religious belief amongst a particular subculture of internet-using science enthusiasts) but it’s certainly not any kind of human universal.