Astronomers want public funds for intelligent life search
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Plus, for those of us that have read Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu (2), we understand that SETI research is the biggest gamble in scientific research. High risk with the highest reward. What could fundamentally change humanity more than definitively finding intelligent life out there?
Lastly, some commenters need to go read Carl Sagan's Contact. He goes over all of this nay-saying!
[1] https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/ [2] https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-Liu/dp/07653...
“Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
― Douglas Adams
Many of the other commenters seem to believe the research would fail. .... something we obviously cannot possibly know without doing the research.
The only thing prior SETI research has demonstrated is that no one is purposely beaming a signal right at us. ...which is actually pretty informative. ...after all, being totally alone in the universe seems somewhat less plausible than the opposite.
I would use “biggest” to remove the ambiguity. The impact wouldn’t necessarily be positive; we’ve had enough movies to remind us that. I can’t think of another area of research where there’s a significant chance that the eventual outcome is completely uncontrollable.
Btw, I’m a high energy physicist and I totally believe there are other intelligent beings in the universe, simply because I don’t think we’re special. We’re just dusts in the who happen to be able t peek a little into the laws of the universe, that’s all. (As a aside, despite all the particle accelerator generating black hole nonsense, my field is pretty safe for humanity.)
If the closest ETs are 20,000 light years away, would we ever find out about them? Space is vast and time is deep. We could have missed the most recent civilization in range of detection by a million years.
We have no idea what those probabilities are. Planets where often assumed to be rare until we started looking for them.
That's kind of ridiculous when you look at the odds. It's like saying playing the lottery every single day is a good investment because it's potentially high reward when in fact you are just basically fooling yourself.
There is probably close to zero chances that there is any kind of intelligent life living in our proximity (i.e. anything that could be reachable by human means), and even if there is any kind of life out there, what do we do with it if we can't travel there and directly observe it? Also, the reason the odds are against it is that galaxies are violent places and the Earth has been lucky to have been relatively stable climate for a very long time, enabling the development of life. I would bet that Earth-like planets may have the seeds for life elsewhere but get routinely massively disrupted in some fashion by external factors.
In any case, resources are limited, and there's sufficient abundance of projects with more tangible real-world applications that will be prioritized for good reasons.
> Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu
Science-Fiction is just that: Fiction. I hope we don't make investments or bets based on fantasy novels.
SETI particularly has this extra humbleness benefit, because it reminds us as a society that the journey that began from earth at the center of the universe, and is currently halted at, humans are unique in this universe, is not over. If we stop doing SETI, as a society, our egos will flare. If don't stop, we will forever be in the shadows of possible alien intelligences who could be far more intellectually advanced than us.
By doing SETI, we also are reminded that our science, and our viewpoint of the world is from a very human point of view, a very limited view, that could bear expanding.
Trying to rank the sciences by "hardness" is silly and counterproductive.
Biology gets blown off as "stamp collecting", but it turns out to be frightfully hard in its own way. Look at this "map" of biochemical pathways from Roche: http://biochemical-pathways.com/#/map/1 It's a stupendously complicated dynamical system! This is just part of it, and measuring each arrow requires clever ideas and a heroic amount of work. Imagine how tricky psychology, which deals with the aggregate result of billions of these systems in the body and brain, must be--and the poor sociologists!
There are many other fields with problems as difficult as math/physics, but those like biology are economically useful. Which is why public+private funding for biology is, rightfully, many times that of fundamental (not applied) physics/math.
"Soft" science is fuzzier with more qualitative elements. It doesn't necessarily mean less difficult.
Another distinction is that the level of tools limits things. Say studying color before and after the ability to analyze wavelengths.
From my perspective, it's a term, coined by a 19th century philosopher, that gets dragged out by people with physics envy.
Modern biology, for example, is incredibly quantitative: molecular biologists collect massive genomics datasets, neuroscientists record from hundreds of sites in the brain, and ecologists, whom everyone thinks of as flannel-clad outdoorsmen, fit sophisticated statistical models. Psychology is getting there too, especially if you're willing to lump in related industries like advertising: Google and Facebook have massive datasets on people's activities and preferences.
It's true that these fields have had less success with mathematical modeling, but you also have to look at the sheer number of interacting variables vs the ~10 terms in Maxwell's equations. It's possible that the underlying phenomena might often just be irreducibly complex, as this perspective argues: (preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/764258v3 and was just published in Neuron).
I actually believe that fundamental physic research is a more effective SETI programm, as with a better understanding of the universe we can also eventually understand potential technologies, that might enable interstellar travel and communication. And than actually communicate and meet with aliens.
Because we have so far not seen a trace of traditional radio or light communication in space, so I guess the odds of finding one are very small.
Or we get more and more disappointed that the bounds are indeed the speed of light. And if that is the case, establishing a contact with an alien race will be very hard, if merely pinging them takes several years.
I don’t understand people who think this way. Let’s imagine there is definitely an alien and we find it. Assume it follows a similar tech trajectory as humans.
If we find it in the millions of years of pre-civilization we got nothing. Probably don’t even notice it. If we get it the thousands of years before communication tech, we also get squat. If we get it in the couple hundred years between comm tech and the present, we maybe can do something? If we go beyond the present either they have killed themselves, or they’re inconceivably more advanced than us and the idea that we found them before they found us is kind of laughable. The probability that we’re the first civilization to have “found” them is laughable.
By all means, space and communication tech is interesting. Go make it. If finding aliens would have some philosophical value to you, go look for them. But to think that they’re likely to change society seems weird.
Achieving "relative" immortality
This will probably get dismissed as "optimistic futurism" but I find the argument compelling that the future of any civilization is a Dyson Swarm for many reasons such as:
- Planets are inefficient uses of mass to create living area. IIRC 1% of the mass of Mercury could make enough living area from habitats to house at least a million times as many people as we have now.
- Gravity is a tyrant. Spinning a habitat achieves much the same thing without the negatives (as in the cost of launch).
- This is entirely feasible on solar power alone. The importance of this is that practical fusion power is not a prerequisite.
- This requires no new science. It's largely an engineering problem (albeit a significant one).
I deliberately use the term "Swarm" here not "Sphere", which is true to the original concept. "Sphere" suggests this is a solid shell. That was never the intent. No known or theorized material could support a solid shell around the Sun.
If you accept this premise then it's about the most un-subtle thing you could do and should be easily detectable millions of light years away in the IR spectrum. Why? Simple:
- Stars generate heat
- If the habitats hit by the energy from the star will heat up
- In space you can only radiate heat away
- If you don't remove that heat you'll ultimately fry
- The wavelength from radiating heat is determined by the temperature of that object
The standard counter to this is:
Q: What if you recycle the heat instead?
A: You can improve the efficiency but you can never perfectly consume all that heat. To do so would be to violate thermodynamics. If that's possible, well then all bets are off.
A thousand years ago we were stabbing each others with swords. In a thousand years the above scenario is far from overly optimistic (IMHO). So in a cosmic blink of an eye we go from undetectable (from a SETI perspective) to being detectable from tens or hundreds of millions of light years away.
So that's why I think SETI is pointless.
Some say "you never know what fruit science will bear". While true, taken further this means it doesn't matter what science you invest in so why is SETI special?
And if you wonder if the Swarm uses all the light such that little escapes, that's the whole point. Think of it like a fog. A fog can block light with a sufficiently large number of tiny water droplets but it isn't strictly "solid".
IR radiation is bound by the same laws as all other forms of radiation, most namely the inverse square law.
You would have to be radiating monumental amounts of energy, more than say a red dwarf, to be detectable from "millions of light years" away without fading into the cosmic background as noise.
Think about it this way. With the naked eye you can see a bunch of individual distinguishable stars around ~4000 light years away. These stars produce more energy in a second than mankind has ever produced.
But our closest neighbor, Proxima Centuari, you can't see with the naked eye. Its a red dwarf. And while it still produces unfathomable amounts of energy AND is the closest star to our own. You can't see it.
TLDR: No, a Dyson swarm would not be detectable from "Millions of lightyears away"
What's more, the ratio of visible light to IR would be... highly abnormal.
> You would have to be radiating monumental amounts of energy,
You mean like the energy output of, you know, a star?
They are literally synonymous and only vary in the instrument we are using to detect it. Your eye versus, say, an antenna.
Visible light is also on the electromagnetic spectrum, it also abides by the inverse square law.
> What's more, the ratio of visible light to IR would be... highly abnormal.
No, it wouldn't. The sun radiates across the entire EM spectrum including IR and Visible light.
It would take ~6200 structures that have the same area as the United States including Alaska (3.8 million square miles) to block out 1% of the EM radiation that the sun produces.
>You mean like the energy output of, you know, a star?
IF a sufficiently advanced civilization could magically conjure up enough materials in the solar system strip mining the solar system AND we had 100% efficiency in collecting then radiating 1% of the energy the sun gives off.....
Yeah isn't gonna happen.
I know this is an unpopular view here but I just don't get why the public has to fund this using tax dollars. We all have views on what tax money should be spent on but can we not agree that the public should benefit from it with some guarantee of success.even if they succeed there is no guarantee it will benefit anyone. scifi aside, known physics does not permit anything to travel to our solar system faster than a few million years. Maybe aliens left some useful information in a format humans can somehow decode, is this very very small chance of succeess worth considering the pursuit beneficial to the public?
There are many very urgent things that need funding. Even wild ideals like universal basic income or a CO2 cleaning factory can be useful to the public in the foreseeable future. I get that this will not neccesarily take away from other projects,but heck, I would rather see it go to pay off 0.0001% of national debt than this. People can donate,billionaires exist.
What is the radius within which SETI can exclude the existence of a civilization currently using Earth-like electromagnetic communications technology and how many star systems are believed to lie within that radius ? How will proposed SETI efforts expand that radius ?
I think this is kind of a key metric that could tell us a lot about how widespread technological civilizations might be in the galaxy.
Our own communications aren't distinguishable from the cosmic background radiation even at our closest neighbor.
The only way we would find something is if they pointed a VERY powerful noise source directly at us, or us at them. And even then, we are looking at maybe a 100 lightyear bubble (~600 main sequence stars).
Do you mean we could detect ordinary technological EM radiation if we pointed a sufficiently high-gain antenna at the transmitting planet ?
Otherwise if SETI assumes someone is sending an interstellar signal on purpose, I would question its value, because there's no strong reason to think anyone is doing that. I realize we did it once, but an argument can be made (and has been) that it was a fairly stupid thing to do.
The only problem is we don't know how to tune in to join the conversation.
I still think we should keep trying to find them, though.
I like to imagine, for the science fiction that I might write, a hypothetical phenomenon that allows instantaneous communication between two points (objects/particles/portals) but only after they have been "synced" or "bound" with each other, which must be done during physical contact.
So, you might construct two such "hyperspace modems", bind them with each other, then incur the initial cost of physically transporting one of them to another star system however many light years away, which may take years or decades but once it's there, communication between the two points would be instantaneous.
This feels more feasible than SETI's hypothesis. Space was much smaller and was probably at just the right temperature to support life at a very early stage of the Universe.
The downside trade-off is that transmissions become more and more strictly line-of-sight at higher frequencies.
It makes sense to increased research funding now that they have a long list of newly discovered planets to target, but what other scientific endeavors do they retire to open up any meaningful government funding?
With trillion dollar deficits in the forecast, earmarking new money does not sound like an easy task to achieve.
Note that deficit could be (or not) inflationary, but debt is the accumulate of money already spent in the economy.
The US deficit is over $1 trillion a year. The debt is over $23 trillion.
Your knee-jerk reaction was half right, by the way: I'm somewhere in Europe where billions and trillions have different meaning.
What I told people was that Seti@Home was a waste of time, but Mersenne Prime finding was a useful idea:
"GIMPS, founded in 1996, has discovered the last 17 Mersenne primes."
We live in a financial world where banks magic up funds all the time and nobody bats an eye, but governments can’t do it for projects?
Further, imagine trying to calculate the added GDP for all of a nations infrastructure over the years its existed and been in use for free or near free. Yes, there are taxes levied in fuel transactions, but clearly that’s not the entire value added.
Edit-Deficit hawks are really arguing against deficits in the secret search for forcing the economy to be zero-sum and punitive. Governments job is to create and reinforce property rights, amongst other things. They do that by creating a resource allocation system - thankfully capitalistic for the most part. Capitalism only exists at this scale with currency - that only the government authenticates. Etc etc. The governments debt is a reflection and indicator of the value its left in the market. Back to nap time.
You could probably sum up much of your statement as self-sabotage, since that seems like all the rage nowadays (politically and monetarily speaking).
Personally I suspect that while we may discover interesting details of radio-astronomy but I highly doubt we will discover anything of worth related to alien life through it.
Right here on this very same planet:
Dinosaurs.
We would have never even known about their existence if we had not chanced upon their remains.
So it's not just the vast distances of space that separates species from each other, it's also incomprehensible stretches of time.
Just from the amount of variables involved and their ranges (the number of planets, the extreme environments in which we have already observed life), it's obvious that we are not alone.
BUT we may never meet anyone.
Just like how there's billions of people on Earth but millions die alone, to use a topical metaphor given Valentine's Day. :)
The point was that even if we could physically visit planets or reach them with communications, we would have to do it in the right time bracket. Any life (of interest) on them may have long since passed on, or not capable of interaction yet.
Mars may have once had life, and we may never know of it.
Dinosaurs and Humans share a common ancestor. We evolved from the same origin. We both have DNA. We are literally cousins.
SETI is searching for life that originated from dead matter independently from earthlings. Those extra terrestrial beings may not necessarily have the same basic structure (DNA) as us.
There might be a reason for that, other than them simple not existing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings...
For now, it's "cool event we don't know how to explain". Good enough. Life is full of that and if we try to force label on it, we miss the fun of figuring out what's going on seriously.
1. Detected object moves erratically at high speeds, with exceptionally high acceleration. Controlled translational and angular acceleration of the object occur in the footage.
2. Navy pilots in both encounters reported that the object was not visible at close range but only showed up on radar, in particular only on radar that was recently updated from a version released in the 1980s.
3. Testimonies were confirmed by multiple independent pilots, cleared by the U.S. Navy, and pilots were deemed to be mentally fit as they were later deployed to active duty in the Middle East.
Those are just facts from the case. Feel free to draw your own hypotheses or conclusions. I certainly had fun doing so. :)
It's not bad to say "we don't know".
Is there anything that has those characteristics and is not an object ? Yes, plasma phenomena are one example.
So we go actively looking for other living species which exhibit that precise characteristic which we admire so much in ourselves. Using catch-phrases like "are we alone?" - Guys, take a look around you. Just observing the millions of bacteria on your hand should suffice to answer that question in the negative.
But apparently, we knew that as a species we are not actually alone. Yet we felt lonely because nobody else here matches up to our self-serving criteria of significance; intelligence.
So within a few decades of having as a species learned how to control radio waves ourselves, Frank Drake comes up with the idea that of course any species worthy of our interest would be controlling radio waves too.
Perhaps this characterisation is too harsh. But the alternative is surely that we are just looking under the lamp-post for our keys, because that's where the light is. We want to find extraterrestrial life. Very good, fully approve. But there's no realistic way to do this outside of the solar system. So we make some preposterous assumptions and hope to get funding based solely on human vanity.
How do you think we should be searching? It’s fine to say we’re not looking for the right thing, but do you have an alternative?
Or use it to get us to mars. At least that fits with a "plan B" since humans existing "only on earth" is still a bad idea. Same goes for moon exploration / asteroid mining. Good ideas. Raw resources shouldn't be so rare as they currently are.
But sending a message to aliens? We've already done this. For decades. More than a century. Ever since we started transmitting Tv/radio.
They either know we're here or they will. Or we're off limits. Or we're too far away. Or we're too scary. "They live in what kind of atmosphere?"
USA spends more on healthcare than (prob) anyone else. Basic needs will never be solved, as the yardstick will also move.
>>Money for finding extra-terrestrial life would be better spent on earth fixing the mess.
Let's say that USA decides to spend $100-$500 Million a year on extra-terrestrial stuff...that's a rounding error in a $4.746 trillion budget.
Agree, in a privatised healthcare system the fee-for-service problem will indeed prevent basic needs from ever being met.
The average quality of life in the US has never been higher.
Life expectancy for the US is dropping. Multiple modern issues of maladjustment are likely causes. Spending searching-for-aliens money on schools, education etc instead would be actually beneficial. Schools have active shooter drills now. That is NOT an indicator of increasing quality of life. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/09/us-life-expectancy-has-been-...
Plenty of cracks in society. Pure research might actually help. We actually know far less about nutrition than we could - thats just one example.
We're much better off going to the moon, mining asteroids and living in space rather than searching for aliens. Plenty of the tech, knowledge and experience from even attempting to live in space has already had tangible benefits for those on earth.
If you won't do this stuff until other important problems X & Y are solved, you will never do the interesting things and progress will stall for the species.
So weird. I've stated quite clearly in that post in favor of space travel. Yet that apparently means I'm against anything interesting and you assert that I suggest we must wait. Nonsense. I just think we should spend money on plenty of other things before searching for aliens. Eg space travel!
And the mess is fixable. Yes, the mess of healthcare, environment etc. Fixable.
Let's cut those in half and talk again about SETI, which I would be happy to fund a hundred times over if it meant less killing, fewer unjust incarcerations for victimless crimes, more economic equality, and less concentration of money and power in the hands of the elites.
Eg imagine if Iran just decided to stop oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz with their military. How would you deal with this without a sizable military yourself?
Edit: or imagine that some country decides that they don't like goods related to the US going through Panama so they decide to occupy it. It's not US territory, but the loss of that will harm the US economy.
Seriously, the USA aren't the only armed forces that patrol the area.
The UK has a significantly smaller defence budget than the USA does. Which kinda proves my point.
Elsewhere the UK assists the US in Syria and Afghanistan. It's not the other way around.
But feel free to tell me how great the american way of doing things is. What with fantastic provision of basic healthcare for its citizens, and sensible gun control oh yes and affordable education.
Look at Crimea if you want an example of what can happen if there's no force that can back you up.
In my opinion, these money are better spent on any other applied or fundamental research.