Why searching for alien signals is a waste of time

originally posted by: VoidHawk
Concerning the radio signals. The inverse law may only apply to us because we dont yet have the ability to overcome it.

Not so much. It's basic radio physics.

originally posted by: Bedlam

originally posted by: VoidHawk
Concerning the radio signals. The inverse law may only apply to us because we dont yet have the ability to overcome it.

Not so much. It's basic radio physics.

from our perspective!

Consider what the laser did for light transmission!

What a very apathetic post! Since the dawning of inteligent man there has been numerous times this could have been applied.
What impetous did the first homo have to leave Africa? Curiousity, the need to expand living space? In reality he had all that he needed where he was, so why move into the unknown?
This need to move forward is what led man to colonise this planet.
Did the Romans say "it's a waste of time expanding the empire as there's already people there"?
Did Columbus say "it's a waste of time crossing the Atlantic, there's nothing there"?
History is littered with people going into the unknown to expand civilisation, they didn't say "it's a waste of time". Just because it's the universe we're talking about makes no difference. For ancient peoples without boats crossing the oceans was like crossing the galaxy(an impossibility) til the technology came along to make it possible.
Your're using todays mindset and coming up lacking. Every one knows for man to survive and prosper we MUST eventually move among the stars and knowing what's there before we get there is common sense.

I think it's a great idea. Especially when you consider it's privately funded. More billionaires should undertake these types of efforts. My guess is that Mars One or Elon Musk will get humans to Mars before any of our government's do.

Seti guys will tell you themselves that they don't have enough resources to scan all possible signals. This will be a huge boost.

Even if the availiable number is 30,000 Stars to search. Seti has only scanned a fraction and of those no for any good ammount of time.

Then you have the additional prospect of robotic or satallite space exploration from another alien civilization that we might pick up.

As for the comment that either we'll never find them or they are already here. I disagree.

What if there is another civilization about equal in evolution to us in this section of the Galaxy. We just might find each other with these kinds of searches.

Keep in mind that there is the possibility of Trillions of evolved civilizations in the Universe that could be billions of years more advanced than us. The Universe that we've seen with Hubble is only one small part. We have no idea how big the Universe is. Not really.

Let's not be negative nancy here. This is good.

originally posted by: ChaoticOrder
I'm sure by now most people have heard of the renewed search for ET intelligence. Essentially some billionaire seems to be funding a much more powerful version of the SETI program. While I don't think it's a total waste of money because it will yield important scientific data, I do think it's a waste of time to look for intelligent signals. This isn't just due to my personal opinion on the matter, there are many scientific reasons why the search is doomed to fail. To begin with radio signals will degrade as they propagate through space due to the inverse square law (the same reason a light bulb looks dimmer from a distance). After only a couple of hundred light years at most, any radio signals sent from Earth become indistinguishable from background noise. Even if there was intelligent life on one of the closest stars to us it would still be extremely difficult to detect any signal coming from their planet.

The chances of any other intelligent life existing within that small zone around our own planet is very small because obviously there aren't many planets like Earth which allow evolution to occur for billions of years and the initial conditions required for chemicals to randomly assemble into a reproducing organism is absolutely minuscule. In fact I wouldn't find it surprising if we were the only intelligent life form in this galaxy. Which leads me to the absolutely ridiculous size of our milky way galaxy. The diameter of our galaxy is about 100,000 light years across, but we've only been sending radio signals into space for about 100 years, which means our radio signals have only covered a diameter of 200 light years. Assuming we can get around the problem of signal degradation, any signal we do detect will most likely be from a planet several thousand light years away from Earth, meaning the civilization that sent the signal invented radio technology thousands of years ago.


Full Picture

Talk about a waste of time to do any real research...all this thread is doing is reposting that you are here picture of the Milky Way Galaxy? Give me a break...

The chances of any other intelligent life existing within that small zone around our own planet is very small because obviously there aren't many planets like Earth which allow evolution to occur for billions of years and the initial conditions required for chemicals to randomly assemble into a reproducing organism is absolutely minuscule.

Obviously? Why is it so obvious? This thread is like a UFO rehash thread of some old story without any new evidence. You have no new evidence to show we are the only intelligent life in the Milky Way Galaxy, waste of time.

a reply to: ChaoticOrder

N = R* . fp . ne . fl . fi . fc . L

Perhaps, also, Columbus shouldn't have gone off in ships. We all know how THAT turned out!

originally posted by: VoidHawk

originally posted by: Bedlam

originally posted by: VoidHawk
Concerning the radio signals. The inverse law may only apply to us because we dont yet have the ability to overcome it.

Not so much. It's basic radio physics.

from our perspective!

Consider what the laser did for light transmission!

You still have the same problem with lasers. You just have to crank in a really big "antenna gain".

After reading up in the Artificial Intelligence topics, I'm really beginning to think that the Fermi Paradox is a result of there being no other intelligence but us in the local universe, and that our reality is being manipulated by artificial superintelligences created by us, from just a few hundred years (if that) into our own future. They (IT) are so massively intelligent that they are actually modifying spacetime to its own ends, and we are bits of information in its mind.

We're like a tiny shadow of what reality used to be before we invented the superintelligence. They're the UFOs and aliens and ghosts in our dreams, and we're all basically already "dead."

So you can see that when it comes to looking for alien intelligence, we don't have to look any farther than our own back yard, or into our own skulls.

originally posted by: chr0naut
Perhaps, also, Columbus shouldn't have gone off in ships. We all know how THAT turned out!

How exactly did it "turn out?" What was the ultimate end result?

originally posted by: game over man
You have no new evidence to show we are the only intelligent life in the Milky Way Galaxy, waste of time.

Nor does anyone have any evidence that we are not the only life, intelligent or otherwise, in the Milky Way...

a reply to: AdmireTheDistance

You don't think we have evidence for extremophiles in numerous places in our Solar System?

We don't have any technology to look for intelligent life in the Milky Way yet...the only thing we can do is to see if we have any visitors.

originally posted by: game over man
You don't think we have evidence for extremophiles in numerous places in our Solar System?

Nope. Just on Earth. Nowhere else.

a reply to: Blue Shift

We have proof of extremophiles on Earth...a little beyond evidence...

Why don't you think we will find extremophiles in our Solar System?

originally posted by: Blue Shift

originally posted by: chr0naut
Perhaps, also, Columbus shouldn't have gone off in ships. We all know how THAT turned out!

How exactly did it "turn out?" What was the ultimate end result?

I was, of course, being sarcastic.

In that light, the consequences of Columbus's voyages were that people believe Nicola Tesla was a scientist who had knowledge of quantum mechanical principles.

The ultimate point of my sarcasm was that the explorer spirit, expressed in Columbus, is essential to our human reshaped world.

(The equation at the top of my other post is the Drake equation which suggests that there may be validity to SETI).

originally posted by: game over man
a reply to: AdmireTheDistance

You don't think we have evidence for extremophiles in numerous places in our Solar System?

It doesn't matter what I think, we have no evidence of any life beyond Earth.

We have proof of extremophiles on Earth...a little beyond evidence...

Why don't you think we will find extremophiles in our Solar System?

Yes, we have evidence of extremophiles on Earth, but nowhere else. I don't rule out the possibility of some form of simple life existing elsewhere in our solar system, though I think it's highly unlikely.

a reply to: ChaoticOrder

If we have not heard their broadcasts yet, which we have not, then its fair to assume that is not, the way they communicate. We are assuming that the way to communicate between, self aware intelligent people, is via radio signals, just because we happen to have developed that type of tech, we might be missing the point that their are probably are a myriad of ways that communication can be made. If their was a Galactic civilisation, radio signals would not
cut it anyway, it would be to slow across the Galaxy, it would have to be instant like some quantum spin thing. Which means the original receiving set would have to be transported to a place physically. This would also be a non starter, because unless they had faster than light travel, they would be still be based around their originating star.

If they have faster than light travel, then they would have time travel as well, because you cant have one without the other. The only way that can be done, is by exiting the physical laws of this reality , so by that argument to our way of thinking they are probably the dead. So the hypothetical Galactic Federation probably exists as the Kingdom of Heaven, which as far as geological time is concerned we will be finding out if that's the case, in no time at all.

originally posted by: Mastronaut

On the other side, an advanced civilization that could have technology millennias ahead of us would probably not use such signals, imagine trying to use morse code to comunicate with a cellphone... and it's a comparison of less than 100 years of techonological advance.

You got that wrong ... advanced technology makes communication easy with old stuff, with a cell phone you could detect/transmit morse code almost anywhere on earth! Morse code can be decoded and transmitted in millions of ways.

I wouldn't be surprised if an advanced civilization uses some form of morse code or binary signal for contact, a little QRP exchange ... The tricky part is not missing the signal or mistaking it for something else.

originally posted by: imitator
You got that wrong ... advanced technology makes communication easy with old stuff, with a cell phone you could detect/transmit morse code almost anywhere on earth! Morse code can be decoded and transmitted in millions of ways.

I wouldn't be surprised if an advanced civilization uses some form of morse code or binary signal for contact, a little QRP exchange ... The tricky part is not missing the signal or mistaking it for something else.

My bad I did a bad example. Imagine to transmit signals with some kind of warped gravity waves.

originally posted by: game over man
Why don't you think we will find extremophiles in our Solar System?

We might, but we haven't yet, and we've already covered a lot of territory. This is one of those deals where there either is ET life in the Solar System, or there isn't. And the only way to prove it exists is to find it. Conjecture doesn't count. So far, we haven't found any, and it's not looking good.

originally posted by: chr0naut
(The equation at the top of my other post is the Drake equation which suggests that there may be validity to SETI).

Never been a big fan of the Drake Equation. It's an interesting attempt to identify the factors that might contribute to there being an ET civilization capable of interacting with us, but I personally think it's way too short. and that there are quite a few other unknown factors that need to be added to it that drive the probability so close to zero that it essentially becomes zero.

I think it would be cool for us to find some kind of signal from another whatever (?) out there in space. I'm not sure what practical value it would have, but it would definitely be cool. But until it's found, it appears that there is a good chance that we're the only things of our kind in the entire universe.