Posted on 03/17/2018 4:21:03 PM PDT by Kaslin
In the scientific community, there is still a great deal of energy devoted to “listening” for evidence or hints of intelligent, extraterrestrial civilizations out among the stars. Most of you are probably familiar with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and their decades of work in this field. They’re still at it and, in fact, are upping their game with a new generation of laser sensors. These projects drew fresh attention after the discovery of Tabby’s Star and the frantic speculation over whether or not some ancient civilization had built a Dyson Sphere around their own sun. This has led one team to train all of their listening sensors directly on the star in hopes of picking up some indication of advanced technology there.
So what is it they’re listening for? Radio waves, for the most part. We’ve been producing them for more than a century ourselves so the traditional thinking is that advanced, potentially space-faring civilizations would as well. But radio wave transmission has a host of problems and challenges which come with it, both for using it ourselves and listening for it from others. First of all, while these waves travel at an impressive clip (the speed of light, actually) that’s still sort of slow in terms of space travel. When we were sending radio commands to New Horizons as it approached the planet Pluto it took 4 hours and 25 minutes for the signal to reach the craft and an equal amount of time for the response to get back to us so we knew if it had worked. That doesn’t exactly allow you to turn on a dime.
Also, since waves propagate outward as well as forward, they weaken over distance. The signal strength coming back from New Horizons was barely above the background static levels. Listening to Tabby’s star means that we’re hoping to “hear” a signal which has been traveling through space for roughly 1,300 years and has faded to nearly nothing.
That’s what got me to thinking about all of these “listening” projects. I’ve been mulling this over for a while now while reading various opinions from experts and, while I find such research projects perpetually exciting, I’ve slowly been coming to the conclusion that there’s one significant downside to all this listening. It’s probably not going to work.
We’ve had technology in the form of being able to at least work metals for barely 3,000 years. That’s a long time in terms of human lifespan, but less than the blink of an eye in galactic or even geological timeframes. We only developed the ability to directly communicate further than line of sight would allow less than two centuries ago. In the relatively short timespan since then, we’ve arrived on the verge of being able to employ faster than light communication using direct counterfactual quantum communication. Using a system such as that, no interception or random discovery of the communications would be possible since you have to be on one end or the other of the conversation. There are no particles or waves being transmitted to intercept and the communications happen instantly no matter how after the participants are.
Despite having come this far in a couple of hundred years, how much further do you think we’d have to advance before we could build a
Dyson Sphere or a ship capable of interstellar travel? If other hypothetical, alien civilizations have mastered such feats, don’t you suppose they’d have figured out quantum communications (or something even more mind-bogglingly advanced) long before now?
The point is, once you are able to conceive of the idea of instantaneous communications over the vastness of space, the idea of sending antiquated old radio waves, laser beams or particle streams of any sort which are clunking along at only the speed of light seems preposterous. If we’re listening for the aliens we suspect might be building Star Wars type empires out there closer to the bustling center of the Milky Way or buzzing our Navy ships when they get bored, we’re probably not going to pick them up because they’re almost certainly using some form of communication beyond our comprehension.
If we are somehow lucky enough to intercept some radio waves from another star which wind up being an interstellar greeting, their version of reality television programming or the latest crossover pop music hit, who do you suppose sent it? Odds are that we’re listening in on some other schmucks who are barely past the point of figuring out how to start a fire without waiting for a lightning storm, and they won’t be sending any ships to deliver the secrets of unlimited, free, clean energy or the secret of anti-gravity to us any time soon.
Does that mean we should give up on SETI and related programs entirely? Not at all. They’re almost entirely privately funded these days
anyway and you never know what sort of fascinating signal they might pick up which could deliver some new scientific breakthrough. Or, if nothing else, we can watch the Alpha Centauri version of the Kardashians.
I mean that you cannot infer that He created only the earth and nothing else on the basis of the statement that He created the heaven and the earth.
I might say, "I built a house and a garage," which does not prove that I didn't also build a shed.
The common assumption that there are “billions and billions” of civilizations out there was deftly skewered by the brilliant physicist Enrico Fermi, who in what has come to be known as the “Fermi Paradox,” posed the question: “If the universe is indeed permeated with intelligent life - then where is everybody?”
Point being: Given the presumed age of the Universe, a large number of supposed extraterrestrial civilizations would necessarily be vastly more developed than our own, and millions of years ago would have mastered time travel (look how far we humans have come in a half-century or so. We already have probes reaching towards Pluto - what will be possible in another century, a thousand years - yea a million years!)
That was Fermi’s “paradox” that he posed to his colleagues over lunch so many years ago. Any extraterrestrial civilization millions of years advanced beyond our own would long ago have possessed technology that we can no more grasp than a pigmy from the darkest jungle comprehending a supercomputer, a smart phone, space travel, and thousands of other aspects of life in the 21st century.
Multiply that “gulf” by a million and you can imagine perhaps how incapable we are of even conceiving of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization.
So Fermi was saying that if such extraterrestrials exist, they would have long ago visited our planet, communicated with us ( not these indistinct streaks across the night sky), and very likely have colonized us and mined the planet of any resources of value to them.
So where is everybody? Carl Sagan said as much when he wondered why these supposed “aliens” dont make their presence known by, e.g., taking over the television channels to send a.message to earthlings - or appearing before the UN General Assembly - heck, even a spectacular landing in a football stadium?
Instead, what do we get? Fleeting, indistinct, photos and film
. Lots of 1st person accounts which cannot be corroborated.
Besides Fermi there is one other idea which is called the “Dark Forest” theory, which basically posits that the Universe is a very hostile and dangerous place. The reason why any supposed intelligent civilisations do not make themselves known is out of fear, much like species in a dark jungle conceal themselves out of fear of predators.
Anyway - One prescient book that explains all this and much more is: Paranormal Conspiracy: the Truth about Ghosts, Aliens, and Mysterious Beings
Try any bar the liberal millenials haunt on weekends in the DC Metro area. Then you’ll know that there is alien life on earth. More like “Spaced Invaders” than “Space Invaders”.
Also have a few cryptocurrency wallets always running. I do notice a slight computing slow down since installing the later.
In all of your musings, you've completely underplayed the importance of those other civilizations existing at the same time as ours if we are to be able to contact them. Possibly, advanced (e.g., space-faring) civilizations might have a life-expectancy of only, say, a thousand years. Advanced civilizations might routinely destroy themselves due to warfare, experimenting with artificial Black Holes - or they may simply become totally decadent, fail to reproduce, or turn inwards ("Virtual Reality").
Regards,
Hubble is wavelength limited, not sensitivity limited. Due to the expansion of the universe, and cosmological red shift (as opposed to Doppler) the most distant galaxies are redder than Hubble's instruments can see. The new James Webb Telescope will not produce the awesome color images that Hubble did, but it will be much more sensitive and tuned to much longer wavelengths.
Meanwhile, we still can’t understand the communications of Apis mellifera and their societies are right here on earth
drivel, totally unsubstantiated drivel
>> We’re probably not going to find anything by “listening” for extraterrestrials
Of course not. We communicate by smell. - E.T.
Because there is life here.
Post of the month... +1
The recently departed Dr. Hawking said a last year that we should be careful in trying to invite aliens to our planet. He said there is absolutely no reason to believe they will be friendly or try to help us.
Uhura regularly picked up AM broadcasts....
#64 Astronuts Abbot & Costello found some as did others.
http://belladonna.org/Gynotopia/venusneedsmen.html
i agree. the Drivel of ET is 100% unsubstantiated.
Most active and retired astronauts disagree.
“you’ve completely underplayed the importance of those other civilizations existing at the same time as ours if we are to be able to contact them. Possibly, advanced (e.g., space-faring) civilizations might have a life-expectancy of only, say, a thousand years. Advanced civilizations might routinely destroy themselves due to warfare, experimenting with artificial Black Holes - or they may simply become totally decadent, fail to reproduce, or turn inwards (”Virtual Reality”).”
Extremely important point. Intelligent life elsewhere may be content in their habitat and not care to communicate or use methods we cannot detect. Some alien civilizations may have not ever developed radio as a means of communications.
Sure we do...
But we say “we are smart” for what, 8-9 thousand centuries now?
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