Why I think SETI will not find advanced civilizations

I was discussing deep space communications with a colleague today and we both agree that a truly advanced and space fairing world will not likely use radio communications. The radio noise is one reason not to use radio for communications between star systems. The other is obviously the time involved in the communications lag.

We both feel that space fairing worlds likely develop a type of quantum entangled communications system such as is discussed in this paper: 742KB PDF Long-Distance Quantum Communication With Entangled Photons Using Satellites

It is likely that radio is abandoned very early on in the technology development of space fairing worlds. Laser communications is also a great possible long distance communications system mainly because it is very secure for point to point communications. A satellite that can detect coherent light might be useful for SETI type investigations since communications using lasers would have nothing to slow it down in the vacuum of space.

Either way we are unlikely going to receive radio communications from any civilization that is very far in advance of us at this point. What do you think?

I think it might have more to do with the fact that their budget got cut

You make a good point, but the real reason SETI will not find advanced civilizations is

MONEY

.

Recently the large array was shutdown due to lack of funds, it may even be the whole program...looking for a link.


EDIT to add: above poster beat me to it! Sigh....always a bridesmaid....

I think you're probably right. That'd be pretty sweet to be able to talk to someone on the other side of the galaxy, or universe depending on exactly how it works, instantly.

SETI wont find them because SETI is "turned off"

Jody Foster is PO'd

I read a thread on ATS a few days ago that suggested extraterrestrials could be using cosmic rays to try to communicate with us... thoughts/??

reply to post by mudbeed


SETI funding being cut off aside I think that looking for intelligent radio signals is unlikely to reap the reward of finding intelligent life.

Originally posted by wayouttheredude
Either way we are unlikely going to receive radio communications from any civilization that is very far in advance of us at this point. What do you think?

I've also read that even if the advanced civilisations dont use radio to communicate between long distances, it would still be true that they would have gone through a "radio" phase of technology as we are doing now. And since it is such a very simple medium to create and detect, would still be using it forever after.
But whatever faster than light technology is invented, it wont use entanglement as we know it now. Because although the "untangling" of the particles is apparrently instant, you still have to physically move the particles to the separate places before you do any work on them... so eliminating the possibility of "communication" at faster than light speeds.

Uh when your blasting a radio signal out into space, its gonna take just a little while for that signal to travel far away. And just the fact that your expecting SETI to provide you with proof of advanced civilization tells me you don't get it and your going to be sorely disappointed.

reply to post by alfa1


I don't think we are even certain at this point that our tiny powered little radio waves can even cross through our sun's heliopause and out into interstellar space.

This made me think of the Chilbolton 2000-2001 crop-circle "response" to the Drake/Sagan Arecibo Message. If you'll recall, there was a set of 3 pictograms. There was the "Chilbolton Man" pictogram, which consisted of a large-ish alien head (not the cartoony one--the other one); then there was the glyph that used the same graphic format as our original message, showing a comparison of their DNA, the occupied planets of their solar system, size and basic shape of the alien body, and on and on.

But then there was their "communication device." Although they received and decoded the original message by radio, they chose not to respond by radio; to the contrary, one of the crop-circle glyphs was an elaborate representation of their "communication device"--obviously the very device they used to make the crop circles. (We know this because there's a pixelated representation of it in the Arecibo "answer" glyph, clearly a counterpart of the radio tower that we used to send the original.) And the schematic of this device was placed directly next to the radio tower in the field where the crop circles were put down, as if to push our noses in it.

I'm not trying to make the point that this particular ET culture communicates with one another by crop circle! My point is that they chose not to respond by radio, even though they obviously were scanning the radio spectrum themselves; and that they apparently considered radio an inferior enough form of communication that they didn't even bother to build the alien equivalent of a "crystal set" to answer us with.

I think what I'm trying to say is that they didn't bother to try to communicate with us using whatever tech they normally communicate with, because we obviously don't have a receiver for it. Because of that, and because the method they had already established to communicate with us was the crop circle, then that was what they used. But not radio! For whatever reason, most emphatically not radio....

Originally posted by wayouttheredude
reply to post by alfa1

 

I don't think we are even certain at this point that our tiny powered little radio waves can even cross through our sun's heliopause and out into interstellar space.

Very good point...

Never really thought about that!

reply to post by Signals


That sounds like a subject for another thread of its own. Can our tiny human made radio waves make it beyond our sun's heliopause? We know that our own Earth's ionosphere bounces back a great deal of our radio energy to us. Perhaps the heliopause of our Sun does much the same but on a much larger scale since it is interacting with the particle energy streaming from the galaxy core. The energy from this region was felt by voyager 1 when it entered the inner boundary layer of the heliopause not long ago. It will take 5 years to cross into interstellar space so perhaps we will have some answers to this question then.

Based on the report of the Voyager 1 spacecraft entering the inner boundary layer of the sun's heliopause and requiring 5 years to cross into interstellar space and given the craft's speed is 38100 miles per hour. It will have traveled

1,668,780,000 miles.

That is the thickness of this charged particle field by my quick estimation. The Earth's tiny ionosphere and proton belts no doubt reflect or attenuate much of our Earth generated RF energy. Imagine how much of our human generated RF energy is reflected or attenuated by our Sun's 1,668,780,000 miles thick heliopause region.

Imagine a civilization say only 1000 years more advanced than us. In this short time we wont be using radio in the manner we currently use it. So are we likely to use in 1000 years an old fashioned radio to raise some interest. No I think not no more than we would use a spark generator now.

The window of opportunity is always narrow and so its completely useless looking. Additionally I think that eventually we wont be interested in finding intelligence it will come naturally and so it should.