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.
I understand your distinction but the only reason why SETI investigators are looking for "designed emissions" rather than the "incidental emissions of designed things" is that they expect them to be more distinct. Going back to your example from Blade Runner, it's like looking for a serial number on the scale of a snake. It's the low hanging fruit that's easy to differentiate.
But failing to find designed emissions, there is no reason why SETI couldn't look for incidental emissions from created things, where they can be differentiated from natural emissions. If SETI can't find the walkie-talkie or TV transmissions, could they start looking for the parts of a vacuum cleaner's emissions that are distinctive as opposed to a natural source, much as those Fermilab researches can pick a few top quarks out of the background noise? I think they could.
SETI is still looking for the serial number on the snake scale to prove intelligence, despite not having found any. It's pretty clear that ID has moved past the serial number phase, not finding any, and has moved into the realm of picking out a top quark or vacuum cleaner buzz from the background noise. SETI is looking for a needle on a white sheet. ID didn't find their needle on a white sheet so they've moved on to looking in the haystack.
If SETI fails to find it's needle on a white sheet or it's serial number on a snake scale, should it abandon the search to find ET intelligence? Would it be irrational for them to shift to looking for more subtle clues such as possible incidental emissions of technology in the absence of more obvious evidence? Would it still be science? I think it would be, and what it would share with ID is a belief, without any hard evidence, that something is out there worth looking for. A fool's errand? Maybe. Irrational or unscientific? I don't think so.
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.
I think that, ultimately, both SETI and ID are driven by the same thing -- a gut assessment of odds with respect to a situation with a lot of undefined variables. In the case of SETI, it's the Drake Equation. A lot of the variables are guesses but given certain guesses, it seems highly probable that ET intelligence exists (depite the Fermi Paradox) thus they are looking at it. In the case of ID, it's developing an assessment that chance mutations and natural selection and so on could produce the complexity we see in human beings. In many cases, this is probably colored by a personal experience of God or the divine. But in both cases, the default assumtion depends on one being an optimist or a pessimist, not on any particular evidence. It's a matter of speculation and faith that both God or ET intelligence exists, not evidence. And in the case of ID, at least some ID critics seem to cite this problem as a reason to call ID "not science".
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).
To start with your characterizatoin of ID, outside of Biblical literalists, there are certainly people who believe that life could be a combination of evolution and creation (i.e., "guided evolution"). There are also those who believe that God set the universe in motion from a beginning point with a specific end point in mind, much as we might launch a ballistic projectile at a specific target, confident that it will reach a certain destination even though we exert no control after the launch. My point is that I think the range of opinions about the hand of God in the creation of humans is much broader than it's being characterized as by ID critics. Just because some of the noisiest ID proponents may be loons does not mean that those are the only opinions on the subject. As for your other point...
SETI has potentially unambiguous examples of both designed and natural signals. It would be difficult to argue that their sample size isn't limited and not exhaustive. That known created signals and known natural signals behave in certain ways does not mean that any or all such signals will be created or natural if detected. How such a signal is interpreted will depend on whether one starts out as a skeptic or true believer, a point made pretty strongly in the Contact movie.
ID proposes that if we can find a complex system that can't be explained via gradual evolution because the component parts have no reason to evolve unless all of the components are present, we should consider that evidence of God. SETI proposes that if we find a narrow band EM emission that has no natural explanation, we should consider that evidence of ET intelligence. The ID skeptic assumes that we simply haven't figure out the evolutionary precursors yet. The SETI skeptic assumes that we simply haven't figured out how such a signal could be naturally produced yet. If naturalistic skepticism is demanded of both ID and SETI, both will fail because, ultimately, naturalistic skepticism is asking both to prove a negative -- that the observed "evidence" has no natural explanation.
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..."
This is another example of a favorable characterization and a straw man. SETI doesn't really have a quantitative, testable method of separating the natural from the designed. It has a quantitative, testable method of separating narrow band signals from broad band signals. What they don't have is a way of proving that narrow band signals are created and not natural if one applies the same sort of natural cause skepticism that ID critics apply to ID. Even if SETI finds a narrow-band transmission, it doesn't prove ET intelligence. It simply proves that they've found a narrow band transmission. And why is SETI even looking for ET intelligence? Because their gut assessment of the odds suggests to them that ET intelligence is probable.
In fact, SETI, just like ID, does say the same sorts of subjective things when they say, "I don't believe we are alone in the universe" or "the universe is so big that intelligenct life must have evolved elsewhere". Ultimately this does tie back to the evolution vs. creation debate because the belief that life is a lucky coincidence on Earth makes one assess the odds of such a lucky coincidence having happened as being high enough to have happened elsewhere while the belief that life on Earth isn't a lucky coincidence doesn't oblige someone to believe such a lucky coincidence had to happen anywhere else. When SETI advocates toss out the Drake equation, they are doing the exact same thing that ID advocates are doing when they point to complexity. They are looking at an big equation with a lot of unknown variables and saying "Look at the odds!" That's the only evidence that either one has.
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.
The problem is that the skepticism not only produced the wrong answer before all the facts where known but it also made people unreasonably skeptical of the correct answer long after they should have been persuaded. My point was that skepticism doesn't always produce the right answer, nor does Occam's Razor. They may be decent default positions but they are often wrong. And ultimately it's the dreamers and those who pose challenges to the established scientific orthodoxy that find the truth. And even when such dreamers and challengers fail, we inevitably learn more about the established theories in the process.
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 that's certainly a fair criticism. But there are other alternatives between "God wants you to find Him" and "God doesn't want to be found." Among them are "God want's people to struggle to find Him." There is also a matter of default assumptions at work here.
And if the aliens are really tech-savvy and intent on hiding, we won't ever find them, either.
Not everyone who doesn't want to be found can't be found. And, yes, I know that raises all sorts of thorny theological issues with respect to ID even though it should be fairly obvious with respect to SETI.