/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.4868324]

Looking for aliens sounds cool and all, but here are some major problems I have with SETI.

1. Would aliens use radio transmission to communicate with other planets?
2. Would aliens even give a shit about communicating with other planets?
3. Aren't the distances just too big to be worth communicating across?
4. Which planets do they send the messages to? The ones with water? Does having water necessarily mean life lives there?

Can /sci/ convince me that SETI isn't a waste of time?

[Anonymous No.4868329]

You're trying to rationale the actions of intelligent life forms that we don't yet have evidence for.

[Anonymous No.4868335]

>>4868329
Au contraire, that's exactly what I have a problem with. That these hypothetical aliens would behave like us, hence why I'm skeptical about SETI.

[Anonymous No.4868348]

1) They don't *only* use radio telescopes, that's just the most famous program.

2) We don't know because we have no non-terrestrial life forms to compare whatever we're searching for to.

3) Even if it fails it's goal of finding extraterrestrial life, humanity may reap tangential benefits from research and development. Much like space travel, even if we are no where near actually going anywhere particularly useful.

i4) Most important, It very well may be a waste of time but it's privately funded so we're not "losing" anything like possible healthcare funding. It's certainly no less useful than a church or bingo group for example.

[Anonymous No.4868352]

A better question is: if aliens are out there, do we really want to let them we're here?

[Anonymous No.4868364]

>>4868352
Yeah some people say that if aliens come to visit it will all go down the same way as Europeans meeting the Native Americans, but this assumes they'd be interested in us at all. If they're loads smarter, they might just ignore us altogether. Like humans might ignore an anthill.

[Anonymous No.4868374]

humanity has plenty of problems of its own, we don't need to get involved in another species's business as well.

[Anonymous No.4868391]

>>4868364
except an anthill sitting on a nice pretty life-supporting planet where they can send large numbers of alien people from their already over populated world

[Anonymous No.4868404]

>>4868364
i don't think we give ourselfs enough credit...if there's anything we do well it's murder shit. at worst, we'd deploy all our nukes and die alongside them.

[Anonymous No.4868425]

>>4868391
Why would you automatically assume that an extremely advanced civilization would have an overpopulation problem?

[Anonymous No.4868432]

>>4868425
because if they were extremely advanced they'd be able to make the fullest use of the resources they could

[Anonymous No.4868473]

>>4868432
Wouldn't the most efficient use of resources be attained through limitation of population and a focus on quality of life and technology?

[Anonymous No.4868491]

The joint probability of two life forms on different sides of the planet that at the exact same time have evolved to seek similar cosmological goals is too high to even consider ever coming in contact with a civilized alien race.

We have a hard time understanding the intelligence of dolphins and crows who share about 3 billion years of evolution with us and we think on another galaxy aliens will be able to understand human intelligence?

The ego, my god the ego

Sorry /sci/, alien contact is about as absurd as an invisible pink unicorn

[Anonymous No.4868497]

>>4868491
>different sides of the planet
>planet

lmao meant universe obv

[Anonymous No.4868500]

>>4868473
yes, but when you see new space and land the limit changes and now you have to justify your old limit and prevent people from having larger families for no reason except that some stupid ants are already living on the rock.

[Anonymous No.4868506]

SETI is a waste of time and money.

[Anonymous No.4868522]

>>4868491
Isn't it FAR more egotistic to think that we're the only beings in the universe capable of such aspirations? Do you understand the vastness of the Universe?

[Anonymous No.4868530]

>>4868522
The universe is a spheroid region, 705 meters in diameter

[Anonymous No.4868535]

>>4868324
>>4868491
Why do you care about SETI being a waste of time and money (in your eyes, although it really isn't)? It's funded by private sources, volunteers.

Anyways, I'm sure neither of you have ever read a Carl Sagan book (inb4 pop sci, he formulates convincing arguments).

SETI is the testing of the hypothesis, "there are intelligent life forms that communicate with radio waves at certain frequencies somewhere else in the galaxy". If you have a different hypothesis, that's good and fine, but don't fucking criticize the scientific process just because yours isn't the one being tested, or even testable.

[Anonymous No.4868556]

>>4868506

SETI costs less than your down syndrome

[Anonymous No.4868586]

There's also this, although I'm not sure how valid it is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow_signal

[Anonymous No.4868713]

>>4868364

Even if the extraterrestrials don't care about us, going down like Europe->America would still kill us.

SPACE PLAGUES, MAN. What if their crazy spaceweeds and spaceworms demolish Earth's ecosystem?

[Anonymous No.4868762]

>He later recanted his skepticism somewhat, after further research showed an Earth-borne signal to be very unlikely, due to the requirements of a space-borne reflector being bound to certain unrealistic requirements to sufficiently explain the nature of the signal.[10] Also, the 1420 MHz signal is problematic in itself in that it is "protected spectrum": it is bandwidth in which terrestrial transmitters are forbidden to transmit due to it being reserved for astronomical purposes.

So we picked up the WoW signal, with a piece of tech made for listening to such signal through a program designed to search for the signal that's also something we know to be close to the resonance of Hydrogen and it's a signal we reserve for using in astronomy.

The more I think about it, the more it sounds like the supposed transmission came from humans. But not contemporary humans. We're going to find out that that the only nearby intelligent life is futuristic space faring humans.

We sent the signal to ourselves because we knew we were listening and what to send.

[Anonymous No.4868835]

>>4868522
im not saying there haven't in the past, will ever be in the future, or there arne't forms of intelligent beings out there, but to think they can communicate with humans when we can't even communicate with chimps is ludicrous

it will be an entirely different form of intelligence

[Anonymous No.4868863]

it its implausible to think we will ever be in contact with an alien life form

many scientists are kidding themselves when investing in such an institution as SETI

[Anonymous No.4869271]

>The day comes, an alien signal is heard starting with prime numbers and then alien speech
>Everyone at SETI freaking out, high-fiving
>Call the government
>Nobody can reveal what they saw, just like Roswell

Just another day in freedomstan.

[Anonymous No.4869280]

>>4869271

Fucking 5-star post mang.

[Anonymous No.4869373]

Pascal's wager:

SETI is fruitless: We have dramatically improved our signal processing techniques
SETI is successful: We have discovered aliens

Take your bitching elsewhere.

[Anonymous No.4869395]

Lem wrote a very boring book on contact where they discover a particle stream permeating the universe that can just about PROBABLY nudge organic stuff into abiogenesis. Scientists get together and discover a bunch of useless stuff and the protagonist has philosophical internal monologues lasting for 15 pages.

In the end they don't know if it was even aliens

The point was what if they send a signal and how are we supposed to know if it is that and how to understand it.

I like that guy for his anti sci-fi utterly anti-climactic pessimistic endings

[Anonymous No.4869396]

>>4868364
If it wasn't for a plague wiping out 95% of the native population America would still be owned by the Natives.

[Anonymous No.4869428]

My understanding of reality is that it's no different from a game.

Earth is like a shitty server full of faggots and trolls.

Nobody wants to play with us.

If there was extraterrestrial life on at least one planet for EVERY solar system in the universe, we still would never know. Not with our shitty propulsion systems.


As for the SETI radio argument, there's only a finite set of physical laws that define exactly what we can use as power sources that can be exploited as communication tools.

just because we have broadband and wifi doesnt mean smoke signals don't work.

[Anonymous No.4869431]

Let me start out by saying I really, really dislike SETI and would like for it to be shut down. That said:


1. Would aliens use radio transmission to communicate with other planets?

There's only so many wireless communication schemes that are efficient and workable, we have no reason to suspect that there's anything superior to electromagnetic modulation for communication and no reason to think that that will change.


2. Would aliens even give a shit about communicating with other planets?

It seems very, very reasonable to assume that intelligent life will be curious, as curiosity is an easy way to stimulate development of the sort of tool-users that would find an advantage in evolving intelligence in the first place.

3. Aren't the distances just too big to be worth communicating across?

Yes, but that doesn't rule out either accidental communication or futile gestures, like what humanity has already done. That's not the answer SETI fans usually give (usually theirs is based on the idea that there's some undiscovered physics that both enables the communication and gives them a reason to send it), though that answer seems silly to me.
4. Which planets do they send the messages to? The ones with water? Does having water necessarily mean life lives there?

If it is directed, that seems like a reasonable criteria- water is one of the two components most likely to be found in most if not all life throughout the universe, and is easy to detect.

[Anonymous No.4869447]

>>4869431
I like Star Trek Enterprise where they show us going from walking, to domesticated animals, to wheels, to boats, to planes, to space ships, and tada fuckin warp

I think technological breakthroughs are no accident. SURE, it takes tons of independent research to create ground breaking discoveries, but it's always up to one guy who's just gifted and makes the correlation between different fields and bodies of work to create new technology. We're still basically using 1900s technology