Comments on: Looking for aliens in all the right places

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 10:29:24 +0000

It doesn’t really matter whether they find us or whether we find them it could really go either way. Space is so big that it doesn’t bear thinking about. When you look at dark energy and dark matter you just realise that we don’t know anything at all about what’s out there, perhaps any signals sent are sped up by something or other. You must admit that all we have done is look at the universe and we haven’t touched it beyond the solar system so we really should do the best we can even if it’s just so that we can say that we are!

By: Aliens? Yes. UFOs? No. « Alice’s Astro Info

Aliens? Yes. UFOs? No. « Alice’s Astro Info — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 23:02:25 +0000

[...] out what Phil has said about SETI and about [...]

By: Jaysun

Jaysun — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 00:42:39 +0000

I believe Neil deGrasse Tyson said it best (when describing the difficulty of sending a signal deep into space in the hopes it will be picked up somewhere) when he said it was like throwing a dart into space and trying to hit the bulls-eye on a target many light years away. Kind of put it into perspective for a layman such as myself.

By: Buzz Parsec

Buzz Parsec — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 06:11:28 +0000

Mark -

You *believe* it is easy to set some criteria for when it would be time to give up on SETI, but you haven’t proposed any such criteria. Instead, you demand that the rest of us do so. Sounds like religion to me.

Why don’t you propose something, and the rest of us can shoot it down?

By: Gary Ansorge

Gary Ansorge — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 03:40:31 +0000

I expect it will be time to give up the search when we’re no longer human, for searching is one of the hallmarks of humanity.

Gary 7

By: Kevin Conod

Kevin Conod — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 02:06:52 +0000

Arguments plus and minus on SETI aside – us finding them seems cool but I’m not sure about them finding us.

It would really suck if the response to our signals is a massive intergalactic armada – or worse a Vogon construction fleet!

By: Joe Meils

Joe Meils — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:29:34 +0000

Perhaps Mark Martin is correct. Perhaps searching for signs of intelligent life in the universe is tantamount to a religion. But then, religions are there to help people relate themselves to the universe. (The root latin word, relios, means “in relation to.”) Most religions are there to relate ourselves to some imagined God or Gods…

SETI, it seems, is a religion based around a single, scientifically based question: Are we the only ones?

As others have noted, SETI is privately funded, and privately operated. For decades, they have been making use of discarded systems and passive “piggyback” signal searches. (I run SETI@home on my machines at home and work myself.)

It seems to me that what we have in SETI is a huge mystery. A problem that anyone can sit back, think about, and add their $0.02 to the debate, and possibly even catch the imagination of the scientific community that dabbles in it. It’s not so much a religion, then, as the biggest puzzle of “Where’s Waldo?” possible.

Yes, it requires a tiny bit of imagination backed up with statistical probability, to become a SETI supporter. And maybe just a tiny bit of faith too. Other intelligent civilizations in the universe are something I can believe in far more easily than I can God. Their existence, at least, is no more improbable than our own.

Even if we search for 1000 years, and never find so much as a single *beep*, the search will have been worth it. Because if we don’t find evidence of anyone/anything else out there… then that tells us something about the rarity of creatures like ourselves.