Seth Shostak From SETI: We WILL Find Aliens In Space
singularityhub.com
singularityhub.com
This argument irritates me every time I hear it. Let me make an equivalent substitution:
"Do Americans really believe the same government that increasingly and permanently collects everything that they say and do while bathing them in propagada without them ever realizing it is covering up alien life?"
Government is people, and people pay a lot more attention when money or power are involved. In fact, it's such a straw man argument that always have to wonder if the purveyor actually believes the opposite.
Kinda makes me want to adjust my tin foil hat and pay more attention to the night sky.
People literally ship gold through the US Mail: it's that secure.
> Whatever the case may be, Shostak is on guard and ready for any signal should/when it comes in. In the meantime, we’ve got some work to do if we’d like to prove to our cosmic-brothers that were any smarter than the dinosaurs. Aside from a few stints on the moon, mankind has barely left the rock we arose from.
Why is the assumption that travel through space is the litmus test of intelligence? That's making a pretty broad assumption about an alien intelligence whose motivations, as they say in the previous paragraph, may well be literally inconceivable.
Maybe they'd be more impressed with us figuring out how to co-exist without warfare, or how to understand our own minds, or how to master our physical bodies so that disease isn't a problem, or some other criteria.
I would be more impressed by us if we treated each other well, and all were fed, clothed, sheltered, healthy, and free of existential anxiety.
"Look, I can see the wars from up here."
The best model we have for them is that they are like us. This may not be right, but we have more examples of "us" (1) than "not us" (0).
But you're right, my argument is a bit of a cop-out, but I think it's better to assume that our first contact is going to be baffling, rather than smugly reassure a reporter that Space Men From Beyond are just decades away from shaking our hands.
Edit: it may be reasonable to assume that a civilization's radio footprint does not expand much from our current level, since point-to-point optical (or higher) communication has vastly better bandwidth options. Even on our Earth, the vast quantity of information flows through ground-based wires rather than wirelessly.
What's the rationalization for this? Is our radio footprint really so powerful as to not be drowned out by 1000 ly worth of background radiation?
The satellites and other technology that SETI uses is pretty interesting though and I imagine they make enough (non-alien-life) discoveries to make it worthwhile.
Space is big, sure, but time is even more vast.
Whoops, missed them by that much...