Wealthy Tech Billionaires Seek Alien Civilizations For Long-Term Relationship

In the past I've linked to a couple of the famous TED talks, part of a series of lectures given at the annual TED Conference. The conference is basically a hipper version of the Bohemian Grove or the old Ivy League alumni clubs -- a way to put smart people together with rich people and powerful people to accomplish vaguely benevolent goals. The TED conference replaces the older groups' secrecy and ritual with high-tech glitz, but the underlying mission is unchanged. Now that our society is more diverse and spread out, one can't depend on people simply bumping into each other at Jock Whitney's house or during the intermission at the Met.

Anyway. In addition to the conference, the TED group gives an annual prize. It's not just money -- the winner basically gets the support of the TED community, and that's some pretty major mojo. This year's winner is Jill Tarter, the tenacious advocate of SETI research. For years, scientists looking for extraterrestrial life have had to scrabble for observing time on radio telescopes, or come up with clever workarounds like the SETI@home project.

Now, with people like Paul Allen writing the checks and a dedicated telescope array, SETI is finally big-time science. Of course that does pose a unique dilemma. Up to now, the answer to the Fermi Paradox ("Where are they?") has been, "we haven't really looked." But now that won't wash. It's put up or shut up time for extraterrestrial life. SETI will either find them, or establish that they aren't there to be found.

As Walt Kelly famously put it, either way it's a mighty soberin' thought.

Comments

[Mr. Cavin]

Whenever the Fermi Paradox comes up I always want someone to tell me exactly how likely it would be for some other culture to see us. Is is likely that the nearest Earth-type planets, given our own level technological achievement or less, would be able to locate us in space? Does it get exponentially more difficult to detect a cosmic footprint the size our our own for each x light years remove? For each decade of lesser technological achievement? For each decade of greater achievement? For each element of alienation from what we've managed to imagine?

This threatens to become theological--a faith-based comment. Since extraterrestrial life can never be disproved--and yet remains unproven--we are forced to decide what we believe based on what we hope for. I don't want this comment to stray over there.

And I know that a planet of space dobermans and bigfoots isn't exactly what everybody fantasizes about while searching for "intelligent alien life", but it would be pretty damn exciting anyway. It'd technically be intelligent, complex life for sure. And it would be pretty well nigh undetectable by SETI (though its plausible habitats might be identified).

So the Fermi Paradox. Is it not fair to have been answering "our ability to search is limited to an astronomical coincidence of technological parity along an infinite string of free parameters" all along? That's what I've been saying.

[Cambias]

SETI researchers don't expect aliens to be sending us messages directly. What they're looking for are:

1. "Hello There!" type messages beamed out at large from a given world -- like the ones we've occasionally sent out to the cosmos. Those would be likely hard to catch, but quite informative.

2. Random electromagnetic emissions given off as byproducts of a technological civilization. A sufficiently powerful radio signal might be detectable over interstellar ranges. A million-watt AM station might show up several light-years away.

3. Signs of large-scale engineering works.

Obviously, all of them require a technological civilization. That's why it's called the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, not just life.

[Mr. Cavin]

Yes I understand. I'm sorry if I wasn't clear, somehow. I’m not messing with the search for intelligent extraterrestrial societies, I’m annoyed with Fermi’s Paradox. The paradox certainly assumes that aliens are looking for us directly. I’m asking question I want to ask people who take that paradox seriously.

The paradox puts a lot of weight on the fact that we haven’t seen these supposed aliens yet--and your post, tongue in cheek as it was, does also. My point was: We consider ourselves "intelligent life" right? What are the chances that our own footprint would be detectable by an alien race, one with our very own level of technology? How far away from here would another civilization have to be for detecting us to become an impossibility? How many decades ago did our civilization become measurable in this way?

Or: how easy will it be for us to spot them if they are just like us, or possibly smaller. Or possibly weirder. I am only using "looking for us" as an example because I'm already certain we are actually here, and have some ideas how to imagine our measurable output.

But it seems highly likely that what we are testing for, when we are testing the universe for "extraterrestrial intelligence, not just life," are societies that are actually more advanced than us, with a footprint much larger and of a type we've come to expect. But if we don't find a civilization like that, it hardly proves anything about the universe or its population. Well, it hardly proves much beyond weeding out the likelihood of civilizations just like ours within a certain light radius.

I hate to go all sci-fi, but I will. Do you think a colony of ant people, acting the way we've come to expect ant people to act, might not build detectable engineering works? Or will these be detectable underground? Will their hive mind really need radio signals? Not if they are only as intelligent as Jane Austin, frankly. I mean, would a race of Jane Austins even be detectable?

Anyway, my point isn't that SETI's goal, or even its fairly--and necessarily--narrow methodology, is somehow amiss. Frustrating the only available questions for us to ask isn't all that useful. But neither is this stupid "paradox".

[Dave*]

If they're that different, then we couldn't communicate with them. So you can see the Fermi Paradox as limited it to "For all practical purposes, there are no other life forms in the universe."

Of course, even if SETI did find something, we still almost certainly couldn't communicate with them, for reasons of both culture and distance.

-D*