SETI and Intelligent Design

space.com ^ | posted: 01 December 2005 | Seth Shostak

[Liberal Classic]

I realize I'm not authoritative, but the planets we've detected through the wobble are all gas giants. Jupiter, for example, has a mass over 300 times that of the earth. The extrasolar planets we've been able to measure are usually compared to Jupiter.

JPL has a nice site on extra-solar plants, and a cool Shockwave atlas.

[PatrickHenry]

From how far away could Earth be detected using our present technology? How many stars within that distance?

RA isn't here, so I'll attempt an answer. We've discovered about 150 extra-solar planets, some as far as 500 light years away. I don't know the number of stars in a sphere with that radius, but within a radius of only 250 light years there are 260,000 stars, according to this source: The Universe within 250 Light Years.

[Virginia-American]

I wasn't clear. I meant if I had RA's equipment on a planet circling Alpha Centauri, could I detect Earth's radio waves? On a planet around Vega? or whatever star.

Or if there were a duplicate of Earth around a particular star, could it be detected with our equipment?

Actually imaging Earth-like planets may someday be done with massive interferometers in orbit. I'd consider O₂ in the atmosphere a sign of life.

We can't forget that Earth is 4.5 billion years old, over half that time there were no eukaryotes, big animals date from the half a billion ya, and we've only been broadcasting radio for 100-odd years.

[edsheppa]

Yes, we ought to see at least generally how to put it into a shape that can make a prediction (preferably lots of them) we can test practically.

[longshadow]

From how far away could Earth be detected using our present technology? How many stars within that distance? Thanks

It's not clear if you mean using SETI technology, or using ANY technolgy. If the latter, PH has already provided you with an answer. If the former, which is in effect the same as asking how far away can we or a similar civilization of similar technology detect the sorts of radio signals that are generated on earth by humans, the answer is somewhere beyond 1000 LY, and substantially more if you use something the size of the Arecibo dish for your antenna. And even more than that again if Alfred the Alien is using an Arecibo size antenna to transmit his signals!

I'm quoting RA for the 1000 LY number, so if it turns out wrong, blame him!

[mad_as_he$$]

That small device inserted into your sinus cavity.

[mad_as_he$$]

I thought only Art Bell believed in Gnostics!

[longshadow]

Here's a link to one of RA's more technical explanations of how the distance over which one can detact a signal is calculated. You'd have to fill in values for the various factors and do the calculation to see what the answer would be. Heavy GEEK ALERT:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1289285/posts?page=28#28

[mad_as_he$$]

Veger?

[RightWingAtheist]

It was a joke, and humor is the only possible way to deal with quote-miners and board spammers such as yourself.

[Virginia-American]

Thanks, 1000 LY radius is a LOT of stars!

[Virginia-American]

...where they find messages encoded in the decimal expansion of pi...

There is a conjecture that all possible sequences of digits appear in pi. IIRC, this is true for almost all real numbers, but no-one knows how to prove (or disprove) it for pi.

[Physicist]

Designed emissions can also be broad in frequency (e.g., the EM output of a running vacuum cleaner or an atomic bomb).

Canard. Those aren't "designed emissions", they're emissions from designed things. Those emissions are incidental to the functions of carpet cleaning and mechanical destruction. "Designed emission" means that the EM signal itself is intelligently designed.

(But in any case, I waive the point as irrelevant. There's no way to cut the Fermilab data such that every top quark is identified, and no background events remain in the sample. In fact, out of millions of top quarks produced, only a handful get reconstructed, but that's more than enough not only to prove they exist, but to measure their properties.)

What ID advocates are essentially looking for is the equivalent -- something biological that's could have been created but can't also be explained by a known natural process.

You said it, right there. The ID proponents are looking for such an effect. But the entire claim of the ID sales force is that such an effect manifestly exists, and they are proposing ID as a candidate explanation! They couch it in terms of "here we have a mystery...oh, look! an explanation!", when in reality it's an age-old supposition in search of some type of evidence that might someday lend it credence. ID has no phenomena, no way to distinguish such phenomena, and gives no reason to expect that such phenomena exist.

Don't keep on insisting that SETI is the same thing, though. It's different on two key counts. First, SETI has unambiguous examples of both designed and natural signals. Both definitely exist in the universe. By contrast, ID--proposed as an explanation of the origin of life--only has one sort of life to ponder, and it's either all designed, or all natural (except for a growing handful of uninstructive exceptions, easily identified by their patents).

Second, SETI has a quantitative, testable method of separating the natural from the designed. ID has only subjectivity: "this looks designed to me" and "I don't see how this could have happened naturally" and finally "OK, it could have happened in one of those several ways, but you can't prove that it actually did, and besides, here's this other thing I don't understand..."

Look at the resistance to such ideas as continental drift and so on.

One of the great success stories of science. When the only evidence was "the continents look like they fit together", it was ignored. When the hard evidence came in, it was embraced. It would have been irresponsible to embrace it any sooner than it was. I say the same thing about ID that I say about free energy schemes: get back to me after you make it work.

That's is only true if the designer's hand is heavy or they seek to be detected.

The entire impetus behind ID is that the designer's hand is so obvious, one must willfully avert his gaze not to see it. But no matter: if the designer truly is a deity (as essentially all ID marketeers believe) AND he wishes his seams not to be visible, we don't have a prayer of ever finding them.

And if the aliens are really tech-savvy and intent on hiding, we won't ever find them, either.

[Robert A Cook PE]

OK.

So, if/when 90% of "radio" messages now carried are on satellite TO earth (not in the energy-wasting earth-to-universe broadcast direction), or are carried underground through optic cables, or are on high-freq/low propagation bands, how much of OUR energy could be picked up?

We've only had radio waves going (at high power) since the early navy radios of the 1920's, and that covers 80 years out of 12,000,000,000.

In another 20 years, very little wasted energy will be sent into space.

[ThinkDifferent]

There is a conjecture that all possible sequences of digits appear in pi.

Right. But say at the quadrillionth decimal place you find a sequence of a million zeros, then a million ones, then a sequence of ones and zeros that forms a recognizable picture when plotted as a bitmap. Even though you'd expect that sequence to appear *somewhere* in pi, the odds against it occuring so early by "chance" would be astronomical.

[Robert A Cook PE]

Wow.

[Physicist]

(I missed a bridge sentence myself. What I meant by that Fermilab paragraph is that it doesn't matter whether all designed signals are narrow-spectrum, or even whether no natural signals are narrow-spectrum. What matters is that there's a quantitative measure by which the samples can be separated. Top quarks are much harder: unlike in SETI, the signal and the background almost exactly overlap. Most top quark decays look like QCD fragmentation, but even then there's enough of a difference to do science.)

[Robert A Cook PE]

I think I would discount the ID theory ....

IF ANY textbook on biology EVER could be written without ONE using the term "Mother Nature", "as nature intended" or some other "active voice" of DECISION being used to describe why some being accidentally became endowed with fully-functional eyes, temperature regulation, wings, fins, feathers, legs, toes, bones, eggs,skin, blood, or anything else.

An bird does not GROW its wings or feathers in order to fly. It flies BECAUSE it was BORN with wings and feathers. It CANNOT DISCARD solid bones to become lighter by DECIDING to get hollow bones.

A skunk USES its scent and glands and muscles and nerves to squirt an odor on its enemies BECAUSE it was born with those genes to develop those traits, but NATURE CANNOT DEVELOPE those organs.

Find a biology book that discards an active role to "Nature" and does NOT use the term "natural selection" as the absolute, omnipotent, absolute equal of an "intellectual designer."

[furball4paws]

Hmmmmm... a frog eye. Quite nice, and delicious.

[aimhigh]

The signal is recognized as "artificial" in the first place because it exhibits the predicted characteristics.

There will never be such a signal.