SETI telescope array produces first science results | Hacker News Reader

SETI telescope array produces first science results

newscientist.com

17 pointsmalvosenior5 comments

One question the ATA aims to answer is a mystery of missing gas. Star-forming regions don't seem to have enough molecular gas to keep up the star-formation rates we observe.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=763661

It's the jellyfish.

"..Even at 42 it's interesting..."

Somehow I find that hard to believe its just a co-incidence.

And we already know that the population of the universe is 0.

After all, there can only be a finite number of populated worlds in an infinite universe of worlds, and any finite number divided into infinity is effectively 0.

(And yes, I appreciate the fallacy of assuming an infinite universe while assuming finite anything within it.)

Personally I think we should stop SETI on its tracks.

If we find intelligent life in the universe (we let them find us) chances are they will come, if they are more advanced than us, and exterminate us for their consumption.

As we would do if we found inferior species in the universe.

If we find monkeys on mars, rest assured we will use them for experiments and take everything they have for our use.

So, if I were a monkey on mars I wouldn't be flashing that light to us in this very moment.

It seems safe to assume that, if there are any other civilizations out there who would care (either enough to try to visit or enough to look), they'll know that we're here - after all, we've been sending bunches of stuff out into space for a while, mostly radio and television signals, and it would be hard to miss it constantly (even with telescopes which only look at a very small area of the sky, they would have a window of many decades to look at us and notice).
So, why bother not looking for them? At least this way we'll have a potential warning.

Secondly, unless they've found a way around the issues with long-distance travel (hugely energy intensive if you're sending actual bodies, takes forever, generation ships have space for errors / cultural shifts), it's unlikely that they'll come to visit unless they have to (for example, if they've ruined their home planet and decided to set out in generation ships).

Also, you seem to have the misconception that SETI is going to allow other things to find us. It won't; the fact that we're using radio waves so much will. It will just give us a warning that there's someone else out there.

Not considering the possibility that they've move on from radio to something else, existed thousands of years ago and then all died out because they ruined their planet (and the light from the thousands of years ago when they were alive is only just reaching us), never discovered radio, or all the other things which would prevent us from noticing them / them from noticing us.

Though if they've got uploading and assemblers, they might visit - send a tiny probe with some number of minds is stasis on it, and configured to assemble whatever they need to communicate / destroy us all.

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