Hey, SETI is getting a million dollar upgrade! The Hunt For Extraterrestrial Life Just Got A Groundbreaking, $100 Million Investment Billionaire Yuri Milner just invested $100 million in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Here are some of the upgrades: The program will search the entire electromagnetic spectrum vs the current only 2% of those frequencies. They will collect much more data, that is they will collect as much data in a day as they used to do in a year. They will be looking at 1 million of the closest stars, the center of the galaxy, and 100 closest galaxies to us. Steven Hawking is overseeing this thing. There's a million dollar contest for people to put a message together representing Humanity and Earth. But this is more of a learning exercise, there's no plans to sent it for now. Well, all I can say is Yippy! I'm a big fan of SETI and I have their program running on my computer. I was previously disappointed at the limited range of radio frequencies that they searched through but it looks like they're fixing that. Who knows if they'll find something, but the chances for discovery of E.T. just improved drastically.
I think the hope is that at some time in their history many used radio and we can pick up some of that
I swore I read somewhere that even if aliens used a form of communication we could detect it would be too scrambled and indistinguishable from background noise by the time it got to SETI's instruments. Something about how unless they are in the Alpha Centauri system then we wouldn't detect them anyway. I may be wrong, it was awhile since I heard that. But there are people out there way smarter than I am on this subject so I doubt SETI would even exist at all if that were true. I personally wish he would have donated money to the James Webb telescope project. That is going to be fascinating if/when it finally launches. It won't get the same interest from the public as Hubble did simply because the common person doesn't really understand the significance of it. Hubble already gives the public pretty pictures to look at, but what James Webb can do will be amazing to those interested in Astronomy.
SETI is a waste of time, because they already found signals but ignore them. So they are looking for extra evidence to support the position that there are no aliens. Typical Scientific dogma bull(*)(*)(*)(*).
You're right. SETI was thought up back in the 20th century when all we knew was radio. - - - Updated - - - Yes that's the hope.
You're right! The signal degrades after around a light year or so. So, no, they aren't watching I Love Lucy all those light years out in space. But we might still be able to make out that a transmission is artificial even if we can't see what it says. It would need to be a purposeful high-powered transmission to make it far in space. Like how they are debating whether or not we should break the silence and transmit a message, a concept called Active-SETI.
Oh. Well if nothing is discovered, after all of this, it will be reasonable for people to think there aren't Aliens out there to be discovered. They will also think such activities are for crazy people.
Anyone sending a message cross galaxy by radio would be dead before they got an answer, and if you can't get an answer, no need to send a message unless it's a message of warning. If they have ship to ship or ship to shore communications, they have to be using something alot faster than radio. If they used radio sometime in their history and we're waiting for the signal to get to us, all we have to do is wait - no need spending anymore money on it.
Well, yes, SETI is a waste of money if the E.T.s have given up using radio frequencies and have gone silent. But that assumes that all E.T.s beat us to the silent communication tech, at the appropriate times in their development that corresponds to our observations, before we started listening. That there's no one left in our tech range. However, if Oxymoron is right, we've been receiving signals and just ignoring them. Making SETI a trick. Well, let's not forget that I think SETI's now going to search the entire EM Spectrum not just the radio frequencies (though I'm not certain of this because I've seen conflicting information in other articles). But that means if they're still making emissions of some kind we might pick those up now. For example: Lasers are going to be a thing they search for now.
Also it is easy to work out that life capable of sending out radio waves is rare anyway. So the average distance between two such life forms would be huge. That and what you have written above makes it a feel good thing only.
I disagree, even if we discover nothing with SETI or even if we never discover anything at all period I will still be hard pressed to believe that we are the only things in the entire universe. Our universe is so massive that our human brains have a hard time even grasping how big it actually is. Even our solar system alone is too big for the average person to comprehend. Just look at New Horizons, fastest thing that humans have ever created and launched into space and it took the thing NINE YEARS just to get to Pluto, and thats not even close to the edge of our own solar system. If it were going that direction it would take it 70,000 years to get to Alpha Centauri, thats the closest star to us....70,000 years, fastest spacecraft in history. Even with light speed you aren't getting anywhere within any reasonable amount of time and according to the laws of physics we can't actually do that. We have theories about how to warp but no way to actually do it. So even if aliens literally live in every single star system in the galaxy and the laws of physics are correct then they have no way to ever go and visit anybody else. For all we know the entire universe could have aliens in it and we all think we are alone because everything is just so far apart that we literally can't develop anything to ever reach anybody else. Whether you believe in the natural order of things or a higher power either way the scale of the universe doesn't make sense if our laws of physics are concrete truths. Nature finds a way to adapt to almost anything, we've discovered life on earth in places that we thought were impossible. There are very few environments on earth or things on earth that aren't utilized by anything at all. Nature itself has found a way to use all of planet earth even the harshest of places. The universe is 13+ billion years old, there is absolutely no way in my mind that the entire universe is full of different types of planets yet nothing at all has evolved to live on any of them but our tiny little dot. And when thinking about it from a higher power perspective it's even easier. If we cannot travel faster than light, and everything is so far apart that we can't reach it without travelling faster than light, and we are literally the only living things in the universe then....what the hell is the rest of it for? Unless we trump our own laws of physics and warp then we humans will literally never ever get anywhere past Alpha Centauri. So...why even waste the energy to create the rest of it? For us to look at through telescopes? Thats just my take on it.
Well, sure there's that, and that's a reasonable position. But not everyone thinks that way. My wake up call came when a person with a little alien head accessory came up to me and said "there's no such things as aliens, right?" I was shocked, I never expected that from someone who picked an alien head item. I thought people with alien head stuff believed in extraterrestrials.
This is a serious mistake and I'll explain way. We can make the assumption that the evolutionary processes of life constitute survival. What I mean is, alien life will have some sort of food chain similar to Earth. Stronger life consumes weaker life, the strong survive and pass on their genetics. Humans evolved with intelligence, we can outsmart the strongest gorilla or elephant. Alien life that has evolved to the point of being able to communicate with us in some from, is also a product of this Darwinian process. Let's face it,....life is inherently very violent. We want to imagine a bunch of gentle peace loving Vulcans , but the reality is that alien life will have evolved by killing and consuming lesser forms of life, by exploiting lesser forms of life. There is no reason to not believe that if we are a lesser form of life to these aliens we won't be exploited as well....possibly exterminated. Let a sleeping dog lie. If there is intelligent life out there...I suggest we don't invite them for dinner....we might be the main course.
Well, that's a realistic stance to take. And if you take some people's stories as real, then alien intelligences are already exploiting us for research purposes.
Alpha Centauri is not the closest star (which is actually 3 stars), there's one only about 93 million miles away. You're correct we can't get close to the speed of light currently. If it were possible, an astronaut could get places in quite a reasonable amount of time, in the astronaut's own reference frame.
Through the Wormhole suggested an idea I'd not heard of before. Maybe the aliens are digital life forms. In other words, maybe they ARE the signals we're looking for, though they know enough to disguise themselves and they're living in our computers now Another, linked to the idea of Panspermia, wonders if maybe they're microbes. This idea has been suggested by some very respected people, one of whom was Fred Hoyle. It does explain some rather baffling characteristics of some diseases but beyond that has little support. I think it's silly to believe that advanced life forms would bother us. What use could we possibly be to spacefaring beings, who would have their pick among millions of perfectly good planets that would have no life at all and might not even need planets anyway. Think of beings just a thousand years beyond us, who could make Dyson Spheres or Ringworlds; it's beyond arrogant to think we would have anything they would need to invade us to get
MOTHER (*)(*)(*)(*)ING MORONS! YOU MOFO FU.......... GODAMMIT! What the hell does anyone with a brain think is going to happen if an alien civilization picks up our signals. You know that as soon as SETI finds a signal a bunch of idiotic scientists are going to send out their own signal leading an enemy armada right to us.
You know what I meant! lol ok ok closest star besides the Sun. Proxima Centauri is actually the closest star (not counting the sun) but most people usually just group the entire triple star system together and say "Alpha Centauri". But in reality yes Alpha Centauri is a triple star system not a single star.
This is actually a good point and has been discussed at length by various scientists. Is it really wise to be broadcasting our presence to the galaxy? Sadly we humans only have one reference as to how aliens might actually act towards discovering a new species, that reference is ourselves....And we humans have a pretty horrible track record when it comes to discovering things. If we ever do find aliens with the technology to come and visit us we just have to hope that they haven't taken a page out of our own books and hope that they are nothing like us at all. We humans can't even get along with each other and history has shown that we don't really like discovering "new" things. If aliens do exist and find us here we just have to hope that they have evolved past the barbaric nature of trying to change and/or killing anything that looks or thinks differently than them. Something that we humans have sadly yet to learn. We are sending millions of signals out every day. It's not SETI doing it it's everybody. SETI isn't really looking for a direct signal from an alien world saying "hey look this way". It's trying to pick up radio signals and other miscellaneous signals that are sent out into space via everyday life. You yourself are broadcasting signals out into space so if you are that terrified about an Independence Day scenario then I'd suggest you stop using all forms of electronic media altogether. Now granted yes if SETI ever happens to find a signal "over there" then they are going to shoot a highly concentrated powerful signal back in that direction hoping that whoever is over there may pick it up some day. But if aliens have their own SETI type thing and are scanning the universe like we are then they are looking for your radio waves heading into space just like we are. If we ever do find ET, better hope they are nothing at all like us. If they are then we are screwed.
One of the things that I learned recently, that I hadn't thought of before, is that different planets in the Universe have different Gravities. And you might think: well so what? But actually we can't live in higher gravity for more than a few days, and we need regular exercise to live in lower gravity so our bones don't shrink and we don't loose muscle. So just going from one habitable planet to the next placing colonies and expanding a galactic empire is not something that would be done in reality. So you can stop worrying about conquering aliens.
Fermi's paradox. The odds of an alien sentient life form existing simultaneously with us, is remote. If there was we would have picked up something by now. The WoW! signal from 1977 is about as close as we've gotten. I have no doubt there is probably some alien bacteria or multi-cellular life form, but I believe the possibility of sentient life having evolved and created a technology capable of reaching outside of it's own Solar system is remote. Yes, billions of stars and all that jazz...but life requires a narrow window to evolve to the point of sentience. Sentient life forms probably crop up every now and then, but quickly extinguish...much like we will. There is virtually no evidence, at the moment, of any form of extra-terrestrial life...none that stand up to scientific scrutiny outside of the conspiracy theories. Until we have evidence, I'll assume we are all alone in terms of another entity equivalent or greater to our own species. As the Universe is expanding at a greater rate than gravity can contain it...space is increasing...this lessens the chance even more that any sentient life that exists will be able to contact us, and us them. For all intents and purposes...we're alone.
There's plenty of evidence but you refuse to accept it, you need a scientist to allow you to accept it, like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, who didn't think he was smart until the wizard bestowed a diploma on him. If an astronaut, a pilot and a policeman say they saw E.T., you wouldn't believe it until a scientist saw it, or by scientific consensus without any scientific witness.
