[X] My Assistant

[deglr6328]

What is going on with SETI@home? I have in the past, (like many of the other users of this board I suspect!) run the SETI@home screensaver on my computer. I ran it for about 4 years and then uninstalled it. Not because I was fed up with not having an ET directly send to me personally a big "HELLO THERE" message, but rather because I saw little in the way of actual science being done with the SETI results we volunteers were all producing and because there seemed to be no plan for any kind of endpoint of the project in the future.

I recall seeing in a 2000 edition of Scientific American a plot of the already searched parameter space by SETI@home and it looked like most of our galaxy was searched and found empty obviously, of "type I civilizations" and higher. (ah. found it) Now, its been 6 years since then and we've since viewed ~97% of the observable sky from Arecibo at least once since the start of the project (~86% at least twice). Why are there no papers published on this result? It IS a significant result even if its negative one. Were there SETI papers published that I've just not seen? The SETI and SETI@home web sites are of very little help when looking for actual peer reviewed published papers that the projects have produced.

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

It is false to say that the SETI results are negative!! They simply found that scifi-like or starwar-like scenarios are not true: there are no giant technologies and galactic dictature, no Independance Day to fear. That is reassuring in a way.

SETI operating from Proxima centauri (the closest star) would not have detected Earth!!!!! Even if Earth-like civilizations are common, SETI still needs an increase in 1000 in sensitivity to have some chance to find a close one.


This result weakens only very little the odds to find intelligent life. But not very much yet, it is not like finding 460°C at the surface of Venus, a simple figure which definitively and dramatically ousted all the dreams of finding luxurient jungles on Venus.


The SETI result still lefts many possibilities open. It just tells us that what we imagined was wrong. If there is life out there, it is just not like we imagined. And it is very interesting to guess what could be their motives, their purposes, their values, even if, of course, this is still untestable in a scientific meaning. This is the process of thinking, and perhaps one day one of these speculations will prove useful or even true.

I do not understand the pessimism of many science-minded people about finding life out there. In the beginning of the 19th century, it was understandable, as the mainstream hypothesis was that the planets formed at time of a close encounter of the Sun with another star, a much rare event which condemned the planet sytems to be only some in a galaxy. But today astrophysics and biology all show that the odds are hight to find life on many planets. So there is many reasons to be optimistic and few to be pessimistic.


I think this pessimism has philosophical reasons more than science reasons. Life elsewhere is felt as threatening, its attitude and even its very existence are felt like a threat to our values, our ego or something of this kind. Or are we so afraid of being considered hoaglandites that we do not consider the possibility of another life form? Be reassured, the SETI institute does not deal with UFOs and abduction...