[Momaw Nadon]

FYI and discussion

[Conservative Chicagoan]

These atheists can look all they want but they are going to find any UFOs. They don't exist.

[Oldeconomybuyer]

[ItsTheMediaStupid]

I don't get it. Why are people traveling from the future to theach our kids this crap? Are there no conservatives in the future?

[ItsTheMediaStupid]

I don't get it. Why are people traveling from the future to theach our kids this crap? Are there no conservatives in the future?

[Momaw Nadon]

[Valin]

Astronomers Hope to Find E.T. in Next 25 Years

And I hope to spend a week with Jamie Lee Curtis and a large jar of chocolate syrup.

[Frank_Discussion]

Ok, I'll bite:

Please don't reach for the Tinfoil just yet!

In general I support the SETI Project, because it actually runs on a cheap budget while sincerely working on looking for ET signals. And in the radio spectrum, I'm betting that someday we'll find something that'll knock our socks off.

However, having said the above, I think Shostak is blinded by his crusade and too close association to Carl Sagan and his expectation of how alien life should be characterized. Both men have espoused that alien life will be so different that we will have a hard time recognizing it, and that its technology will challenge us too greatly. This view leads folks down the path that we are so very backward technologically that finding signals will be very hard and, in addition, we certainly aren't being visited by anyone. "Even at the speed of light interstellar travel is too slow..." that sort of thing.

There have been some very recent advances in technology here on Earth that have shown that practical teleportation of light (and hence, information) has been achieved. Why is this important? Two things:

1. Faster-than-Light communication is achievable. The galaxy just got a lot smaller.
2. We humans, y'know, we primatives in the universe, have found this technology and are ably poised to exploit it.

Those two factors show that Shostak's view is biased and ultimately flawed. He and and the other SETI "priests" think the only way to communicate is via slow radio waves, so any chance of galactic travel or community is pretty much impossible. I take a contrary view: Radio is a phenomenon that is found in nature, and all technological species stumble upon it and use it for remote communication to start out. Perhaps the next step is to devise an artificial but much more useful transmission technique that is faster than radio. The upshot of this stuff is that the real communication in the universe may actually be happening with this "next-step" technology. When we begin using such techniques ourselves, we may find we're on a galactic "party-lne".

Alright y'all, I promised no tinfoil required, so hang with me here on the next point, then I'll go back to conservative political stuff. There has been another breakthrough in technology as of late, through the virtual creation of matter. Artificial atoms, if you will, used to control incredibly small computer circuits. The application beyond electronics, however, may not be apparent to you. Basically, to create the artificial atoms, the researchers had to have information available to describe the atoms. If you join this idea with the transporter technology I described above, the implications are that there may be a "Star-Trek-Scotty-Type" in reality sometime in the future. Commucating in and travelling around the cosmos doesn't appear to be nearly as impossible as SETI may have you thinking.

[Billthedrill]

Well, we don't know what they look like, how to find them, or how to communicate with them when we do, but (1) we can make categorical statements about whether they exist or not, and (2) we can put a timeline of 25 years out there for finding them.

A whole lotta smoke gettin' blown here...

Patience, Commander Zebronk. We must lull the Earthlings into a sense of security before the invasion fleet arrives.

[Virginia-American]

Any thing to add?

[Physicist]

Paging Dr. BEM, Dr. BEM, please pick up the white courtesy phone...

[TADSLOS]

Astronomers Hope to Find E.T. in Next 25 Years

Translation: "Federal funding has dried up and we need more taxpayer $$$$ to turn on the lights."

[VOR78]

Now as for SETI, it is a waste of time in its current form. Now I do believe an alien civilizations are out there, possibly within our own galactic neighborhood ( within 100 LY). Unfortunately, I do not believe we are advanced enough to detect them . I doubt they are using radio waves (in fact, I doubt we will be in another 100 years). Also, there is the big problem of background noise. These earth based dishes pick up a whole lot of static in the form of earth-bound radio transmissions as well as satellite interference. They need to get a reciever up into space and away from all of the trash. Visual astronomy took a giant leap forward with the Hubble; now they need to do the same with radio astronomy. Once they do that, it MIGHT have a chance, but it goes back to my first point; they must also be using radio waves for communication.

[The Duke]

And let me guess...they can do this if we'll just fund them X number of dollars for the next 25 years(?)

The headline could just as easily, and credibly, have said "Cancer researchers expect to find cancer cure within the next 25 years".

[Caipirabob]

Why are they looking so far away? I thought E.T. was having an "Ethics Hearing" in congress today.

[CaptRon]

If I had known this earlier I'd have taken better care of myself!

[sphinx]

Perhaps we are alone in the universe; perhaps not. If not, one of these days ET will disembark and promptly give thanks to the Creator of the Universe.

He will then humbly present us with a copy of his scriptures, which will begin "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth ...." It will differ thereafter in minor tribal particularities.

A few will be converted. A majority of our atheist friends, however, will announce that this powerfully substantiates the theory of interstellar colonization, as two species independently hitting upon congruent creation myths is highly unlikely.

[galt-jw]

when it is the dark of the moon, and you are away from the lights of the city, go out and look at the night sky...See the milky way alone? How about everything else?

To say that there is no other life but man is to say all of these billions of systems are sterile, and devoid of life.

Look at the mars photos. There are straight lines, and all sorts of anomolous structures. Any scientist will tell you straight lines are man made and do not occur naturally, but here they are.

It is more likely than not that something besides nature created it. Well, it was alive, and had consciousness.

[Don Corleone]

E.T. went home.

[goldbux]

Three weeks ago we went to the planetarium in SF to hear a talk by Jill Tarter, the head of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project. She was knowledgeable, but the whole enterprise is really a joke.

I used to be fascinated w/all this science fiction stuff; no more. Glad that Congress finally cut off their funding. Now they have to beg Microsoft billionaires (Allen, Myhrvold) for $, which they are glad to front, in return for slapping their names on the project.

After her talk, after 2 hours of absorbing all this intense, well-presented information, the guy in front of us asked her a question. He was inarticulate, couldn't string a coherent sentence together, let alone ask a reasonable question in parsible English. She went around w/him for 10 minutes, still couldn't understand his point (to the extent he had one), nor could I, nor anyone else in the audience.

So they are going to beg for $300 million to build these super radio-telescope farms to span the galaxy for subtle pulse patterns emitted/broadcast by alien super-civilizations, then somehow decode their messages (solving all decryption schemes & filtering out all deliberate disinformation) so we can find out what the uber-creatures are trying to tell us, but the head of the project herself cannot communicate at all, in the same native tongue, with a supposedly intelligent audience member not 20 feet away, who has been keenly following her every word for 2 hours!

Hopeless.

[apochromat]

Seems that if there is advanced life elsewhere in our solar system, it probably began before ours, farther away from the Sun. Who knows? Much of life on Earth could be extra-terrestrial in orgin, including man. Perhaps both Venus and Mars have subterranean caves. Maybe that's the best place for the gov to test those new X-Ray Spex.