Posted on 06/05/2006 7:10:53 PM PDT by KevinDavis
Is SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—a religion? This is one of the topics that Jill Tarter, Director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute, and I discussed on "Are We Alone?", the SETI Institute's weekly radio program on Wednesday May 17.
The discussion by Jill and I was in response to a claim made by George Basalla (professor emeritus of history at the University of Delaware) in his book Civilized Life in the Universe (Oxford University Press: 2006) that SETI is more of a faith-based enterprise than a genuine science. He points to SETI's failure to make "contact" after more than forty years of trying and its continuing efforts in the absence of any positive evidence as a sign that it relies more on a kind of religious zeal than anything else. (Incidentally, Basalla was invited to appear on the show but declined.)
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
I can't speak for SETI but I have faith that there's life out there but I wouldn't call it a religion. I just happen to have no problem with the idea of God creating life across the universe.
Well, if 40 years of trying without success pushes a scientific endeavour into the category of faith, I guess the liberal version of the First Amendment will require pulling all federal funding of string theory.
That's kind of stupid. It's like saying manned flight is a religion because Leonardo da Vinci envisioned it, but it didn't become reality for 500 years.
You get no argument from me...
Well, really advanced sapient life forms would be too busy and important to waste their time on trash like us. What forms of communication they might be using is anybody's guess. Backward life forms, even if sapient, might be undetectable due to their being primitive [how to detect from astronomical distances a post rider from, say, 15th century? And the 15th century is rather recent one].
ET won't show up as long as we are a species bent on self destruction.
I too, am in the crowd that believe that God has a plan for the universe and to be naive to think we are alone is to put your head in the sand to the power and possibilities the power of God would have across the universe.
I agree with Basalla; however, I'd quibble about interstellar conquest. We've had radio for about a century (Tesla demonstrated radio controlled mini-subs in 1893's exposition in Chicago) and have been broadcasting commercially and militarily since the 1920s -- and haven't worried about whose ears our signals might reach.
If SETI were to succeed in finding a signal which is both generally accepted as the product of an intelligence, and its location could be determined, we'd have no way to achieve interstellar flight to go check 'em out. :') I'm not deterministic when it comes to technological and scientific developments, but I'd hazard a guess that radio etc precedes interstellar capability in any ET civilizations (if any are out there).
Frankly if ET shows up, I want faster spaceships and bigger guns than he has, otherwise we are in big trouble.
Why? They probably just want us to turn down the volume on all those old Desi and Lucy reruns.
> What forms of communication they might be using is
> anybody's guess.
Marconi wouldn't have been able to detect ETs on the moon,
if they were using GSM, TDMA or GPRS. Nonetheless, our
culture, 100 years later, is still using some AM that even
Marconi could detect. But will we in 200 years? 500? 1000?
Our signal encodings on earth are increasingly looking
more and more like low power noise, and are often
deliberately encyrpted to prevent casual receivers
from extracting information. What will our wireless look
like a few centuries hence? Will it even be EM?
If ETs Out There are still using some legacy comms,we
just might detect one. As long as the funding for looking
is voluntary, or a trivial fraction of NASA's budget,
I have no problem with it. We'd really feel silly if we
didn't look, and later discovered that latent value was
there all along had we bothered.
But the odds, distances, noise, and time suggest no joy.
And the results to date are consistent with the estimated
odds.
Don't care as long as they don't run around beheading folks or molesting children. No more room here for another ROP. Besides, it's healthy for you stay outside a lot and breath in that night air, and have weenie roasts and stuff like that with your friends. And who is to say that the first space alien would not be looking for someone who is looking for them to make first contact? Beats landing at the UN in my book.
;>
SETI a religion? I never thought of it that way, but there are characteristics they share.
As a side note, I had a professor who once worked for SETI, and he was very sensible, practical, leaned toward conservative views, believe it or not. And he was my Environmental Science professor.
Why not, do you think they are satisfied to wait until we blow each other into oblivion so they don't have to get their tentacles dirty slaughtering us? :)
I guess Europeans could have waited until the American Indians went the way of the Mayans, but it is a trait of advanced societies to explore and conquer. Logically an advanced ET would also be impatient and just invade as soon as they felt that they could get away with it.
It is not our being able to check them out that would be the problem. It is their ability to check us out that we should be concerned about.
Change the paradigm to submarine warfare. Rarely do you use active sonar, as the element of surprise can greatly determine the winner of an engagement.
If you broadcast your weakness and inability to bring the fight to your opponent, he will exploit your vulnerability to suit his goals. To assume that he would do otherwise is illogical.
"But I am not really willing to accept your premise, because it may well be that the means of communications they have are of a kind that we do not know how to receive, and that they would not have the means of communicating with sufficiently powerful radio or optical signals. That is something which, technologically, is too difficult for them but they would have some other means we would not recognize." -- Thomas J. Gold (Communication with Extraterrestial Intelligence)
Reminds me of the sample size of the global warming worshippers, most of whom, at least those that existed for
a score of years, were worshipping global cooling, and the lesser god, nuclear winter, thirty years ago.
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