There are good reasons to try to make earth look as quiet and insignificant as possible for our own safety. But there's also making contact.
I'm not sure myself, for a number of reasons. It might not be safe. We might be alone in our level of intelligence in our galaxy and wasting our time. We might also gain great benefit from making contact with a friendly space-faring race.
Our radio transmissions on the planet will do the job for us, without having to actively trying to send a message.
I'm not sure myself, for a number of reasons. It might not be safe. We might be alone in our level of intelligence in our galaxy and wasting our time. We might also gain great benefit from making contact with a friendly space-faring race.
Unless they're within spitting distance (in which case they've already seen our radio transmissions), even if there were a world eating alien menace out there, it's too far away to do anything. By the time our messages reach them and they reach us, likely mankind is already extinct. Light speed limitation is a *****.
We gain no benefit from contacting another race, for the same reason. Yes, they're there, we're here, information takes centuries to get from point A to point B.
SETI, per se, is a waste of time. However, the technologies that go into SETI aren't. Kinda like space exploration at large.
There are good reasons to try to make earth look as quiet and insignificant as possible for our own safety. But there's also making contact.
If an alien race is technologically advanced enough to detect our message and travel to earth, it's safe to assume they're technologically advanced enough to locate us even if we try to "make earth look as quiet and insignificant as possible." As Mondu noted, we have passive radio signals leaking out in every direction from countless sources.
Also, no message we send will be received in any sort of reasonable time-frame unless the aliens live right in our neighborhood. If we send a message now, by the time it's received we'll probably be so technologically advanced that we can hold our own (assuming we even still exist).
I always thought the idea that Aliens with faster-than-light travel giving two *****s about destroying us was a little far-fetched. If you can travel anywhere in the infinite beach of the universe, why would you go over and knock down someones sandcastle? You have all the sand you want elsewhere. If you can travel faster than light, you can probably synthesis whatever you need out of asteroids. The elements on Earth aren't really unique in the vast expanse of everything.
Of course, this is assuming that aliens have rational human sensibilities. They could all be ideological/xenophobic zealots because they evolved that way and want to wipe out all other life "just cuz." Being smart enough to master logic/math/science doesn't mean you have to have rational motivations.
Logic doesn't give you motivations, it just tells you how best to fulfill them.
I actually think there is a reasonable chance we are the first, or at least the only intelligent life within hundreds or even thousands of light years.
Let's face it, if we are going to discover alien life, what we really mean is discovering alien life within a close range. There's no way an alien civilization living in the triangulum galaxy millions of light years away is going to receive our transmission. Our transmissions will not even make it to the other side of the galaxy (which is only a hundred thousand light years away) Thus, what we really mean then when we are looking for intelligent life is whether there are signs of intelligent life within, lets say a 200 light year radius.
From the only empirical evidence we have regarding intelligent life, namely ourselves, we can deduce one thing: Intelligent life is very very very rare.
Let's look at what we know about ourselves. There are 8.7 million species of life on this planet. There is ONE with sufficient intelligence to have established a civilization.
As far as we know, we are the first intelligent life on planet earth and it took the earth 4.6 BILLION years of molecular biological experimentation to evolve us. In other words, it took about 2/5 the age of the UNIVERSE to create ONE intelligent species of life.
Since we are trying to contact another alien species, the alien species cannot be living in huts. They would need at LEAST radio transmissions to respond to us. The human race, our one data point, has had the technology of radio transmission for 100 years, or a whopping .00000217% of the life of the earth. Humans civilization has only been around for 10000 years as far as we know.
Thus if aliens visited the earth dozens of times in the past, there was a 99.9999% of the time they found nothing of merit. We simply were not here yet.
In order for us to make successful radio transmission contact with alien life, we need a few things:
1) we need TWO intelligent lifeforms
2) that have developed civilization that
3) have reached radio transmission technology that
4) did not evolve millions of years apart, but reached it at the same time (from a geologic timescale)
5) are within a 200 light year distance of each other
6) we will end up making contact before SETI's budget runs out.
To me, the implicit conditions necessary for us to meet other alien life are ridiculously narrow and demanding.
TomCat's assessment pretty well matches my own. I would add that radio signaling is not merely a function of time - signal strength at 200 light-years is weak to the point of nonexistent. Put it this way: if your radio is 100 miles from the tower, it's receiving about 1026 times more signal than one 200 light-years away. That's a billion... then you take a billion of those... then you take a hundred million of those. Aliens would have to build a dish the size of the orbit of Jupiter to get the same signal.
But I'll also say that while I expect intelligent life to be very rare, I also expect life to be quite common. As TomCat notes, it took the 4.6-billion-year geological and evolutionary history of the Earth to get to humanity - and as far as we know, if it hadn't happened to us, it might have taken another 4.6 billion years for some other clade to do it. But life itself started very soon after the Earth cooled. Indeed, new discoveries keep pushing the date further back. And there some suggestions that it may have happened independently multiple times.
So what I expect will happen in the next two to five decades, as the technology for observing exoplanets gets better and better, is that astronomers will be able to start taking spectrographic observations of exoplanet atmospheres, which leads to discoveries of atmospheric compositions that tentatively at first, then with greater and greater confidence, are taken as evidence of Earthlike life. It won't be dramatic. It won't make the front page of the Times. It will be the greatest discovery in human history, and it will sneak up on us.
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I'm not sure myself, for a number of reasons. It might not be safe. We might be alone in our level of intelligence in our galaxy and wasting our time. We might also gain great benefit from making contact with a friendly space-faring race.
What do you think?
Unless they're within spitting distance (in which case they've already seen our radio transmissions), even if there were a world eating alien menace out there, it's too far away to do anything. By the time our messages reach them and they reach us, likely mankind is already extinct. Light speed limitation is a *****.
We gain no benefit from contacting another race, for the same reason. Yes, they're there, we're here, information takes centuries to get from point A to point B.
SETI, per se, is a waste of time. However, the technologies that go into SETI aren't. Kinda like space exploration at large.
"Sometimes, the situation is outracing a threat, sometimes it's ignoring it, and sometimes it involves sideboarding in 4x Hope//Pray." --Doug Linn
If an alien race is technologically advanced enough to detect our message and travel to earth, it's safe to assume they're technologically advanced enough to locate us even if we try to "make earth look as quiet and insignificant as possible." As Mondu noted, we have passive radio signals leaking out in every direction from countless sources.
Also, no message we send will be received in any sort of reasonable time-frame unless the aliens live right in our neighborhood. If we send a message now, by the time it's received we'll probably be so technologically advanced that we can hold our own (assuming we even still exist).
WBB/W TokensWB
WUBAd NauseamWUB
- Commander
WG Captain Sisay's LegendsWG
Of course, this is assuming that aliens have rational human sensibilities. They could all be ideological/xenophobic zealots because they evolved that way and want to wipe out all other life "just cuz." Being smart enough to master logic/math/science doesn't mean you have to have rational motivations.
Logic doesn't give you motivations, it just tells you how best to fulfill them.
Let's face it, if we are going to discover alien life, what we really mean is discovering alien life within a close range. There's no way an alien civilization living in the triangulum galaxy millions of light years away is going to receive our transmission. Our transmissions will not even make it to the other side of the galaxy (which is only a hundred thousand light years away) Thus, what we really mean then when we are looking for intelligent life is whether there are signs of intelligent life within, lets say a 200 light year radius.
From the only empirical evidence we have regarding intelligent life, namely ourselves, we can deduce one thing: Intelligent life is very very very rare.
Let's look at what we know about ourselves. There are 8.7 million species of life on this planet. There is ONE with sufficient intelligence to have established a civilization.
As far as we know, we are the first intelligent life on planet earth and it took the earth 4.6 BILLION years of molecular biological experimentation to evolve us. In other words, it took about 2/5 the age of the UNIVERSE to create ONE intelligent species of life.
Since we are trying to contact another alien species, the alien species cannot be living in huts. They would need at LEAST radio transmissions to respond to us. The human race, our one data point, has had the technology of radio transmission for 100 years, or a whopping .00000217% of the life of the earth. Humans civilization has only been around for 10000 years as far as we know.
Thus if aliens visited the earth dozens of times in the past, there was a 99.9999% of the time they found nothing of merit. We simply were not here yet.
In order for us to make successful radio transmission contact with alien life, we need a few things:
1) we need TWO intelligent lifeforms
2) that have developed civilization that
3) have reached radio transmission technology that
4) did not evolve millions of years apart, but reached it at the same time (from a geologic timescale)
5) are within a 200 light year distance of each other
6) we will end up making contact before SETI's budget runs out.
To me, the implicit conditions necessary for us to meet other alien life are ridiculously narrow and demanding.
But I'll also say that while I expect intelligent life to be very rare, I also expect life to be quite common. As TomCat notes, it took the 4.6-billion-year geological and evolutionary history of the Earth to get to humanity - and as far as we know, if it hadn't happened to us, it might have taken another 4.6 billion years for some other clade to do it. But life itself started very soon after the Earth cooled. Indeed, new discoveries keep pushing the date further back. And there some suggestions that it may have happened independently multiple times.
So what I expect will happen in the next two to five decades, as the technology for observing exoplanets gets better and better, is that astronomers will be able to start taking spectrographic observations of exoplanet atmospheres, which leads to discoveries of atmospheric compositions that tentatively at first, then with greater and greater confidence, are taken as evidence of Earthlike life. It won't be dramatic. It won't make the front page of the Times. It will be the greatest discovery in human history, and it will sneak up on us.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.