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No one will EVER contact us, SETI is our special human version of vanity
There are three things basically wrong with our rather primitive scientific 'assumptions'.
1. deterministic processes -as a biological species such as ours- may be extremely unique/RARE in the cosmos. Thus, many different life forms MAY exist, - true?- but it is impossible to detect any similarity between us, (the lowly carbon forms) vs. silica and/or perhaps the &^%**F#4^^ species. Perhaps we cannot recognize their time scale, this alien physiognomy, their natural laws, or even physical manifestation. If Ray Kurzweil is correct, we become digital and quickly all signals disappear. The time span of - say- 100 years of 'radio waves' broadcasting is minutae on a cosmic time clock.
2. What if (?) Drake's equation is overly optimistic, as in way off, and assumptively factually wrong. No Goldilocks planets, too many estimated optimistic probabilities, too much of a similar 'likeness' equated that does not exist, and too short of an evolutionary timescale which evolves where we (life in general) expose those ubiquitous radio waves to the rest of the universe. Looking "back in time" by distance was just too slow, or, -way too fast in each segment investigated. Ooops, no one IS out there. No one.
3. More of a personal supposition of mine: Technological evolution is so pervasively dangerous that this -conclusively- must end in a rapidly developed inextractible, inescapable extinction law, one that is on a very short timescale. My explanation, we just dream and envision incorrectly: Every species that evolves, eventually evolves on a logarhythmic advancing scale that accelerates the possibility of multiple, massively numerous potential venues of extinction. This possibility is so large, that it is absolutely improbable that anything other than this extinction event MUST occur. Hence all intelligence universe-wide is a brief blip in a nanosecond of the cosmic clocks. Thermodynamic laws have one constant: Everything always changes.
We are looking, they aren't.
Quentin Parker
Tied in as temporal beings, the thresholds we address are not clearly understood. See Kurzweil, Singularity stuff, Brian Greene, The Universe is NOT elegant, it just is... no multiverses, total NONSENSE.. We know WHAT we look for. That is what's wrong with all our theories. We are still overwhelmingly defined by ignorance on our sciences..
The universe is intelligent, by its mechanism. however we cannot understand this because of our limitations of current knowledge and technological development. We'll never get the time 'concept' right because we are dimensionally defined by this. Broadening our understanding for curiosity sake does NOT justify certain expenditures. We do "have concepts" of what is needed to be addressed, and this- morally- should NOT be one of the criteria for selection to pursue.
Joshua Sisk
TIME is the accumulative association of mass amount of data to a single point in three-dimensional space that can be navigated with two longitudinal positions to evaluate future or past events. In-order to tell the current time using this definition we must use our first known planetary verifiable data point and calculate up to our current longitudinal position using its mathematical equation.
Time = (the circumference of the of the object measured x the distance between two longitudes) + or - ((the circumference of the of the object measured / 360) x inert longitudinal distance you desire to travel)..... NOTE: that the distance between the two longitudes must result in a positive number and the inert longitudinal distance assumes 360 degrees equals a full day.This remedial equation can easily be expanded to the point of accuracy that the observer wants to express his data point connection to the universe.
Two things pop into my mind: first our understanding of the universe is limited by the accuracy of our measurement, second without a universal explanation of the function of time and space full understanding space and time we have know right to pollute the universe.
Finally I do understand that many items were discovered by chance but the vast amount of data that is interpreted and the fact that we truly do not know or understand what we need to look for. Economy blah blah blah, Poverty should come first I understand; But hey if you could have your cake and eat it too would you?
Walter Lietz
Laurin Patience
Stewart Gault 30+
Jake Grissom
But with the limited understanding available to humanity, speaking in absolutes as you are surpasses vanity and heads into arrogance. There have been amazing advances in knowledge, technology, etc... people my grandparents' age (70) were pretty much born in a completely different world than exists today, and advancements are snowballing at exponentially increasing speed. This is at once terrifying and exciting--but it's all going to happen regardless of one's outlook. So the best we can do is watch it happen with wonder. ;)
Obey No1kinobe 50+
There needs to life on other planets.
It needs to be sufficiently intelligence with the necessary technology
They need to be listening with the right technology in our direction at the same time our transmissions arrive.
They need to be in the right place at the right time to receive the transmissions
The transmissions need to remain coherent.
They need to still exist and not died out
They need to be in the places we transmitted, in our galaxy (1 of 100 Billion)
They need to want to communicate back
And need to send this in the right direction and then we need to meet all the above to receive the response.
Maybe they are looking and so are we but the impracticalities rule out contact.
peter lindsay 30+
Barry Palmer 50+
peter lindsay 30+
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peter lindsay 30+
Eben Rose
Those of us who study this sort of thing may appreciate that some steps of molecular evolution are easy and robust while others are quite difficult and still enigmatic. Ribose, for example, is difficult to synthesize and stabilize in a ring shape under plausible prebiotic conditions such that it can serve as a building block for RNA. More centrally, the problem of rendering properly folded proteins from a racemic mix of amino acids, such as those produced by the M-U experiment, bring to mind the Levinthal Paradox and remains a huge stumbling block in understanding prebiotic chemistry. Similarly, the emergence of metabolic networks that would allow synthesis of substrates from small molecules while flexibly producing useful innovations is still the subject of intense scrutiny and great scientific speculation. What is known, though, is that these are not simple straightforward evolutionary steps as we once naively thought.
Your use of the term 'convergent evolution' seems to serve an explanatory purpose. Perhaps you could articulate the restrictive "Earthlike" evolutionary conditions, e.g., selective pressures, under which recognizable EM transmissions encoding human-like intelligent messages emerge as an evolutionary outcome in a world with a different history from our own. Perhaps you can appreciate that such conditions are not chemical, but historical, and as such are more stochastic than deterministic.
Eben Rose
There is a huge evolutionary leap between elemental building blocks and functional proteins, and even more layers of complexity beyond that. Small deviations at any step along this evolutionary path will result in a large propagation of errors and wildly unpredictable outcomes. This epitomizes a stochastic process.
A related TED conversation attached to this talk asks the TED community for any basis, other than hope or habit, for which we may ascribe deterministic processes to evolution such that we can expect a certain attribute like intelligence to emerge on any other (accessible) world. So far I have only seen hope and habit, as well as some deceptively appealing statistics that pit mind-bending astronomical numbers (e.g., of possible habitable worlds) against possible evolutionary trajectories which, it turns out, are infinite, or at least are represented by a vastly larger mind-bending number than habitable worlds in the accessible universe.
Matthew F
Thank you for the interesting topic. I regret that I must disagree with your three problems that you find with SETI's methodology.
1. It does not matter for the purposes of electronic signal detection what physical or chemical make up extra terrestrial life takes on. The only factors pertinent to the search are if an advanced civilization develops and uses radio technology. And if they do develop into a "digital bodies" super race as the futurist Kuzweil suggests then they most certainly are capable of sending signals.
2. For this point we only need address the recent findings that most stars have many planets orbiting them to see that our new most pessimistic factors are many times better than the old equation. And remember, SETI was started before these new findings were made. So in essence, the odds are ever more in favour of finding intelligent life as we have slowly been able to discover what certain factors in the Drake equation are. To suppose that the Drake equation is too optimistic based on these new findings is simply no longer possible.
3. This is indeed a supposition that flies in the face of evidence. Our civilization has developed the means to utterly destroy itself and yet still we persist. Your argument is based not on facts, but rather on your feelings. And if Kurzweil is indeed correct (I think he is perhaps too optimistic as most futurists tend to be) then our continued advances in technology will lead to the immortality of the mind, and not our civilizations ruin.
I personally view the SETI project as the opposite of vanity, instead of supposing that we are unique and special they are trying to prove that intelligent life can evolve in other places.
Colin South
However, it might not be. If we don't bother with SETI, vanity or not, we'd be prize chumps to miss it.
Eben Rose
"….We have not observed many cases of what is possible and what is not. Until we have had such an experience--or detected extraterrestrial intelligence--we will of course be enveloped in uncertainty."
He goes on to suggest, however, that thinking that we are the only "us-like" intelligence in the accessible cosmos echoes "…the long string of human conceits that held us to be at the center of the universe…" and that, "Beginning with Copernicus, every one of these conceits has been shown to be without merit." SETIans have since adopted the Copernican secular high ground as if skeptics like Mayr (and you and me) are backward-looking and dogmatic.
But I agree that the truer conceit is in SETI projecting "us-like" characteristics into the cosmos as if the SETIan self-image is a determined outcome of evolution on other worlds.
Indeed, I think the SETI should continue but not with the conceit exhibited by Sagan and Shostak. Rather, each successive year of SETI's empirically derived negative results should reinforce the sober and timely message the we are alone in our life raft in the accessible cosmos. The quicker we jettison the specter of Star Trek or Avatar as bearing the imprimatur of science, the quicker we can focus on the pressing task of how to survive on this "pale blue dot" of a planet (in Sagan's words) without hope of rescue from, or refuge to, another planet.
*A pdf of the debate is available here: www.planetary.brown.edu/planetary/geo016/mayr_sagan.pdf
Stewart Gault 30+