By Seth Shostak
SETI Institute
posted: 01 December 2005
06:37 am ET
Posted on 12/02/2005 8:35:59 AM PST by ckilmer
| SETI and Intelligent Design By Seth Shostak SETI Institute posted: 01 December 2005 06:37 am ET |
If you’re an inveterate tube-o-phile, you may remember the episode of "Cheers" in which Cliff, the postman who’s stayed by neither snow, nor rain, nor gloom of night from his appointed rounds of beer, exclaims to Norm that he’s found a potato that looks like Richard Nixon’s head.
This could be an astonishing attempt by taters to express their political views, but Norm is unimpressed. Finding evidence of complexity (the Nixon physiognomy) in a natural setting (the spud), and inferring some deliberate, magical mechanism behind it all, would be a leap from the doubtful to the divine, and in this case, Norm feels, unwarranted.
Cliff, however, would have some sympathizers among the proponents of Intelligent Design (ID), whose efforts to influence school science curricula continue to swill large quantities of newspaper ink. As just about everyone is aware, these folks use similar logic to infer a "designer" behind such biological constructions as DNA or the human eye. The apparent complexity of the product is offered as proof of deliberate blueprinting by an unknown creator—conscious action, presumably from outside the universe itself.
What many readers will not know is that SETI research has been offered up in support of Intelligent Design.
The way this happens is as follows. When ID advocates posit that DNA—which is a complicated, molecular blueprint—is solid evidence for a designer, most scientists are unconvinced. They counter that the structure of this biological building block is the result of self-organization via evolution, and not a proof of deliberate engineering. DNA, the researchers will protest, is no more a consciously constructed system than Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. Organized complexity, in other words, is not enough to infer design.
But the adherents of Intelligent Design protest the protest. They point to SETI and say, "upon receiving a complex radio signal from space, SETI researchers will claim it as proof that intelligent life resides in the neighborhood of a distant star. Thus, isn’t their search completely analogous to our own line of reasoning—a clear case of complexity implying intelligence and deliberate design?" And SETI, they would note, enjoys widespread scientific acceptance.
If we as SETI researchers admit this is so, it sounds as if we’re guilty of promoting a logical double standard. If the ID folks aren’t allowed to claim intelligent design when pointing to DNA, how can we hope to claim intelligent design on the basis of a complex radio signal? It’s true that SETI is well regarded by the scientific community, but is that simply because we don’t suggest that the voice behind the microphone could be God?
Simple Signals
In fact, the signals actually sought by today’s SETI searches are not complex, as the ID advocates assume. We’re not looking for intricately coded messages, mathematical series, or even the aliens’ version of "I Love Lucy." Our instruments are largely insensitive to the modulation—or message—that might be conveyed by an extraterrestrial broadcast. A SETI radio signal of the type we could actually find would be a persistent, narrow-band whistle. Such a simple phenomenon appears to lack just about any degree of structure, although if it originates on a planet, we should see periodic Doppler effects as the world bearing the transmitter rotates and orbits.
And yet we still advertise that, were we to find such a signal, we could reasonably conclude that there was intelligence behind it. It sounds as if this strengthens the argument made by the ID proponents. Our sought-after signal is hardly complex, and yet we’re still going to say that we’ve found extraterrestrials. If we can get away with that, why can’t they?
Well, it’s because the credibility of the evidence is not predicated on its complexity. If SETI were to announce that we’re not alone because it had detected a signal, it would be on the basis of artificiality. An endless, sinusoidal signal – a dead simple tone – is not complex; it’s artificial. Such a tone just doesn’t seem to be generated by natural astrophysical processes. In addition, and unlike other radio emissions produced by the cosmos, such a signal is devoid of the appendages and inefficiencies nature always seems to add – for example, DNA’s junk and redundancy.
Consider pulsars – stellar objects that flash light and radio waves into space with impressive regularity. Pulsars were briefly tagged with the moniker LGM (Little Green Men) upon their discovery in 1967. Of course, these little men didn’t have much to say. Regular pulses don’t convey any information—no more than the ticking of a clock. But the real kicker is something else: inefficiency. Pulsars flash over the entire spectrum. No matter where you tune your radio telescope, the pulsar can be heard. That’s bad design, because if the pulses were intended to convey some sort of message, it would be enormously more efficient (in terms of energy costs) to confine the signal to a very narrow band. Even the most efficient natural radio emitters, interstellar clouds of gas known as masers, are profligate. Their steady signals splash over hundreds of times more radio band than the type of transmissions sought by SETI.
Imagine bright reflections of the Sun flashing off Lake Victoria, and seen from great distance. These would be similar to pulsar signals: highly regular (once ever 24 hours), and visible in preferred directions, but occupying a wide chunk of the optical spectrum. It’s not a very good hailing-signal or communications device. Lightning bolts are another example. They produce pulses of both light and radio, but the broadcast extends over just about the whole electromagnetic spectrum. That sort of bad engineering is easily recognized and laid at nature’s door. Nature, for its part, seems unoffended.
Junk, redundancy, and inefficiency characterize astrophysical signals. It seems they characterize cells and sea lions, too. These biological constructions have lots of superfluous and redundant parts, and are a long way from being optimally built or operated. They also resemble lots of other things that may be either contemporaries or historical precedents.
So that’s one point: the signals SETI seeks are really not like other examples drawn from the bestiary of complex astrophysical phenomena. That speaks to their artificiality.
The Importance of Setting
There’s another hallmark of artificiality we consider in SETI, and it’s context. Where is the signal found? Our searches often concentrate on nearby Sun-like star systems – the very type of astronomical locale we believe most likely to harbor Earth-size planets awash in liquid water. That’s where we hope to find a signal. The physics of solar systems is that of hot plasmas (stars), cool hydrocarbon gasses (big planets), and cold rock (small planets). These do not produce, so far as we can either theorize or observe, monochromatic radio signals belched into space with powers of ten billion watts or more—the type of signal we look for in SETI experiments. It’s hard to imagine how they would do this, and observations confirm that it just doesn’t seem to be their thing.
Context is important, crucially important. Imagine that we should espy a giant, green square in one of these neighboring solar systems. That would surely meet our criteria for artificiality. But a square is not overly complex. Only in the context of finding it in someone’s solar system does its minimum complexity become indicative of intelligence.
In archaeology, context is the basis of many discoveries that are imputed to the deliberate workings of intelligence. If I find a rock chipped in such a way as to give it a sharp edge, and the discovery is made in a cave, I am seduced into ascribing this to tool use by distant, fetid and furry ancestors. It is the context of the cave that makes this assumption far more likely then an alternative scenario in which I assume that the random grinding and splitting of rock has resulted in this useful geometry.
In short, the champions of Intelligent Design make two mistakes when they claim that the SETI enterprise is logically similar to their own: First, they assume that we are looking for messages, and judging our discovery on the basis of message content, whether understood or not. In fact, we’re on the lookout for very simple signals. That’s mostly a technical misunderstanding. But their second assumption, derived from the first, that complexity would imply intelligence, is also wrong. We seek artificiality, which is an organized and optimized signal coming from an astronomical environment from which neither it nor anything like it is either expected or observed: Very modest complexity, found out of context. This is clearly nothing like looking at DNA’s chemical makeup and deducing the work of a supernatural biochemist.
Although your bunk has been properly debunked by a number of others I just have to put my 2cents worth in, lest anyone think I've gone missing.
For any lurkers out there that do not understand what the point of this post is, here is my interpretation.
The universe developed from the big bang which was not, contrary to what some believe, an explosion but a rapid expansion of space itself. It has been referred to as an inflation, where, much like dots on the surface of a balloon during the process of being inflated, the fabric of space is expanding, increasing the distance between cosmic objects.
If this all there was to the concept all we should see is a red shift in the hydrogen spectral line (a Doppler shift toward the red end of the spectrum) as all cosmic objects speed away from us. In this case a blue shift (a Doppler shift toward the blue end of the spectrum) would signify an object approaching us rather than receding from us.
It's obvious that the OP has forgotten that within expanding space, movement is possible and in fact all objects in space are doing just that, moving in observable and predicable patterns, including moving toward us more quickly than space itself is expanding. This gives us a blue shift.
"ID is just as valid as any conceptual theory and probably fits the current, factual information better than other more traditionally held theories. SETI is probably worried that their funding might be cut if they do not support the politically correct version of reporting.
Except ID starts from the false premise that only intelligence can produce what appears to be specified complexity, but SETI instead of relying on some shot in the dark premise of complexity, uses artificiality (in other words something we have yet to see nature produce).
Dr. Shostak was very clear that they are not using complexity as a measure of intelligence. They have no need to assign some outside intelligence to something that is obviously natural and follows the natural laws as we know them. We do not observe any natural process that could produce a cosmic symmetrical cube so we can safely infer if we observe such that it was produced by an intelligence. This is artificiality. In other words, artificial with respect to nature.
Only if you are willing to mentally squint really hard.
"He claims that SETI is seeking narrow, organized signals, much in the same way we can discern if an object if fabricated by the unnatural appearance and shape.
Nothing was said about 'organized', unless you consider a simple basic signal to be 'organized'. If this is your idea of organized it contradicts other IDist's concepts.
"Well, life is an organization of chemicals and elements that exist everywhere, but when assembled properly----life.
Said, well said!
"ID purports that such organization is evidence of design at work rather than random chance.
ID claims that 'specified' complexity is the basis of intelligence. Complexity as defined by Dembski is analogous to low probability but high compressibility, where Behe defines it as low compressibility.
"The radio signals sought by SETI are those organized and not those emanating from random chance.
Emanating from random chance? What exactly does that mean?
That would be news to Behe, Dembski and the rest of the Discovery Institute fellows.
About time you got up off your butt and did some real work. ;-)
This is in direct contradiction to the fellows at DI.
You IDists might want to get your story straight.
Not so much "lack of pattern" as occurence of all patterns with the proper frequency.
The book (and derivatively, the movie) "Contact" was a cheap ripoff of an earlier book (serialized in Analog?) called "The Siren Stars."
What evidence do you have that complexity, specified or not, is 'only' a product of intelligence? How is the difference between true specificity and pseudo specificity brought about by natural processes determined?
The most useful definition that I have run across is:
An inability to predict future outcomes based on previous results.
Not really. It's only 1 chance in 10**111 that the first digits of Pi are 3. 1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679 8214808651. A sequence of 111 zeros would have the same probability (as would a sequence of 111 ones.)
Easily done. Just force them to grow within a box. They'll conform to the shape of the box as they grow.
Hardly. All it needs is a little help from the second law of thermodynamics and a bit of applied energy.
If he doesn't, the Moon may not have the correct phases next week.
As far as I know, SETI is privately funded.
Outcomes of indivudual events, of course. Averages of future outcomes (and variances, etc.) may be easily predicable. One cannot predict which radioactive atoms will decay, but one can predict how many will decay in a given time.
Likewise, an English actuary can predict how many people will die during the next year, but not which ones; that would take a Sicilian actuary.
Unfair. I clean toilets and he gets to play with the moon.
I hear that the Russian actuaries aim to displace the Sicilians in that field. (Sorry, that one sank as if it was wearing cement boots)
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