Alien Civilizations will be found within 20 years!

[Chuck]

Well, maybe, if there are any.

ET first contact 'within 20 years'

[Candy]

Keep dreaming, Chuck!

[Chip]

"It would be nice to think we know something about the existence, distribution, technology and motivation of our potential communications partners in space, but in fact, we don't." - Paul Shuch, executive director of the SETI League, (a separate organisation.)

I think this points to the possibility that if they are there, they may not be thinking as "communications partners" at all. If they are there, they may be putting out signals as an unconscious side-effect of their technology. But that's OK for us, because any form of coherent patterns or signals would point to some kind of alien intelligence.

[kucharek]

Another of these things which are due to happen in 20 years since 50 years, like fusion reactors and cheap space travel

[R.A.F.]

I agree, Kucharek...I'm still waiting for my flying car.

[TriangleMan]

When I was kid, I was told we'd be vacationing on the Moon by 2000.

[Chuck]

I haven't cleaned my apartment in five years because I'm waiting for the robot servants that we were supposed to have by the 21st century.

[RBG]

I think this points to the possibility that if they are there, they may not be thinking as "communications partners" at all. If they are there, they may be putting out signals as an unconscious side-effect of their technology.

My opinion: I doubt it because I would think an advanced technological society would be so efficient that nothing that didn't need to get out, would. Look at our own nascent technologies as we move from random area TV broadcasting to cable networks.

RBG

[gzhpcu]

I don't seem to understand this thread. Hope someone can explain it to me.

The title of the article seems to be misleading.

At the start of the article:

If intelligent life exists elsewhere in our galaxy, advances in computer processing power and radio telescope technology will ensure we detect their transmissions within two decades.

I see an "if" in the prediction. It seems to me to be a conditional statement. Not an absolute statement.

[Chuck]

I guess it means that if we don't detect them within 20 years then we can be certain that they aren't there.

[Manchurian Taikonaut]

You want to find life using SETI and send out the maximum info and use the net feature to the most ?


Tell you what to do ask some people to download seti
and for every one in China to get an old PC let's say under ten yrs old like 95 or 97 computer. Yes I know there are many planets out there and some say these planets could have life, and there are billions of stars in out in the galaxy but get Chinese on Seti and
that's about 1.3 billion machines working on finding ET that should help speed you up a little, plus I've seen some internet cafe in Germany very high tech ( why not ask for internet shops around the globe to get Seti ). That is the failure in Seti it hasn't advertised itself to all global users around the web to think on this.


I'm sorry to say I don't have total faith in seti, will everyone use raidowaves would aliens really use radio to send info..think about what we did back in the past like smoke signals, carrier pigeons, lantern signals to other ships, radio waves is here but will this last? Maybe advanced aliens could use a type of lazer technology and might go to twist light or maybe quantum entanglements or worm holes might be used to send signals over huge distances?

[R.A.F.]

I find myself disagreeing with Seth Shostak. IMO, he is baseing his conclusions on too many assumptions.

[toolazytotypemyname]

I don't seem to understand this thread. Hope someone can explain it to me.

The title of the article seems to be misleading.

At the start of the article:

If intelligent life exists elsewhere in our galaxy, advances in computer processing power and radio telescope technology will ensure we detect their transmissions within two decades.

I see an "if" in the prediction. It seems to me to be a conditional statement. Not an absolute statement.

Putting a time limit on when an unknown will happen is something my boss would do when making a project schedule.

Boss: When will you find all the bugs in the system?
Me: How the hell do I know?
Boss: ok, I'll put down two months.

My point is, we don't know if there are other civilizations or not. How can anyone possibly say that we will find them in 20 years when we don't even know what we are looking for.

And yes my job is a combination of Office Space and Dilbert.

[Quartermain]

It doesn't matter how fast our computers are. Faster computers will allow us to scan more frequencies and transform more signals more quickly. But this is irrelevant if the signal comes from a portion of the sky that is not being scanned... which I might point is the majority. And of course there's always the possibility that radio signals from civilizations simply haven't reached us yet. Even if they were our next door neighbors we wouldn't know they were if they only invented radio a couple of years ago. So his prediction seems a little dubious.

[Maksutov]

I don't seem to understand this thread. Hope someone can explain it to me.

The title of the article seems to be misleading.

At the start of the article:

If intelligent life exists elsewhere in our galaxy, advances in computer processing power and radio telescope technology will ensure we detect their transmissions within two decades.

I see an "if" in the prediction. It seems to me to be a conditional statement. Not an absolute statement.

Putting a time limit on when an unknown will happen is something my boss would do when making a project schedule.

Boss: When will you find all the bugs in the system?
Me: How the hell do I know?
Boss: ok, I'll put down two months.

My point is, we don't know if there are other civilizations or not. How can anyone possibly say that we will find them in 20 years when we don't even know what we are looking for.

And yes my job is a combination of Office Space and Dilbert.

Are you the one who submitted that idea to Scott Adams?

Although a supporter and member of SETI, I think Seth went out on a limb with this one. Giving an "exact" date for something that could happen 10,000 years from now, or tomorrow is just bad statistics. At least he generated some media notice.

:wink:

[Tim_t7]

Even if they were our next door neighbors we wouldn't know they were if they only invented radio a couple of years ago.

Why does popular culture assume that if we find intelligent life that it will be more advanced than us?
What if we turned out to be the most intelligent life in our local universe?
What if it was us who will be buzzing planets in UFOs?

If we are the most advanced life in the local systems then we will not find evidence of life for a long while yet. Say they are 1000 years behind us, they will still be burning witches. Difficult to detect from any real distance...

[mid]

Why does popular culture assume that if we find intelligent life that it will be more advanced than us?

There are a couple of 'good' reasons for doing this, in various contexts:

1) By popular culture you probably mean popular fiction. Advanced intelligent life is a dramatically interesting prospect, more so than finding some particularly unusual algae. Apart from anything else, there is the possibility of speculating that the advanced intelligence has a way of getting here to say 'hi' directly.

2) Any 'intelligent' life has three basic possibilities: (a) they are less advanced than us, (b) about the same, or (c) more advanced. In order to be able to detect them, they really can't be that much less advanced, as our best shot would be radio or other EM emissions, and we've only had them for a short while in our history. We'd all like to think that humanity will be around for a fair while yet, and if that's the case then (c) is by far the most statistically probable.

[milli360]

Tim_t7:
Why does popular culture assume that if we find intelligent life that it will be more advanced than us?

What do you mean by popular culture? Isn't Star Trek part of popular culture, or is it not popular enough?

What if we turned out to be the most intelligent life in our local universe?
What if it was us who will be buzzing planets in UFOs?

Like in Star Trek?

[CuttleFishOfDoom]

Well, maybe, if there are any.

ET first contact 'within 20 years'

I'd love to believe that we'll discover intelligence out there in the near future, but the universe is a big place and the window of opportunity is small, in my humble opinion.

I believe it really comes down to whether we're going to be using a form of communication remotely related to what we currently use. With the fog on some of this groovy quantum stuff lifting, I'd be pretty surprised if we're still using radio communications (of any sorts) or light/laser communication in a hundred years from now.

This means that the window during which the planet earth radiated give-away signals would be around 200-250 years. If (and this is of course a big if) there are other intelligent species out there, then unless they were listening when the 250 year range of transmissions passed over them, they'd miss us.

And the same applies to intelligent species transmitting. If they follow our rough route of discovery in physics, then it wouldn't be unreasonable to say the same applied to them.

The bottom line is that I think that no-one is listening. At least, no-one is listening or transmitting using technology we can understand unless by some miracle there is someone else hanging in the same 250 year window of opportunity within 250 light-years of us. Which given percentages of percentages and the insignificance of 250 years in the "great scheme of things" strikes me as mighty unlikely (if humans are a fluke, we could have evolved at any time over the past half a billion years or so). I think this is sort-of supported in looking at what we do with communications now -- I doubt that the person who first built a radio could have recognised modern encrypted compressed complex-modulated radio signals from the year 2004 as anything but static, and I don't think it is unreasonable to extrapolate that further.

I know I've clocked up a vast number of ifs and buts here, but if the future of communications is fiddling around with quantum particles, then that window might be broader (if you've got instantaneous communcation and effectively infinite bandwidth, why invent anything else?). We might be bathed in alien TV as we speak but just unable to detect it. If I was an alien intelligent species out looking for other intelligence, I wouldn't bother with radio stuff, the probability of picking anything up or being picked up just seems too amazingly small to make it worthwhile.

Still, I hope I'm wrong. There are many things that could rewrite our understanding of the universe and discovering intelligent life out there is one of them.

PufferFish.

[genebujold]

I quite work altogether because Star Trek's utopian society where everyone has something to contribute and money is a thing of the past is right around the corner.

Oh, waitaminute, that's not for a few hundred years from now... #-o

[kanon14]

Oh, waitaminute, that's not for a few hundred years from now... #-o

i thought it's a few thousand years from now :-?

[milli360]

Oh, waitaminute, that's not for a few hundred years from now... #-o

i thought it's a few thousand years from now :-?

hundreds

[iFire]

If the alien culture were to have used Radio communication in the past, they don't nessisarly (sp) use it now... Signals could take years to thousands of years to get here...