[X] My Assistant

[djellison]

I am not against the actual process of hunting for life 'out there' far far FAR from it, but I fail to see the potential benefits in basically, standing in the solar system with a hand cupped behind one ear.

Call it CIOESPFH (arguably the greatest acronym ever made )- Catalogue and investigation of extra solar planets for habitability. That's what I think is the sensible course of action if we're going to realistically find out who our neigbours are, or if we even have any. Maybe that's still 'Seti' - but just a different way of doing it.

It's an embarrasment that we don't know what numbers to put into Drake's equation...you can quite comfortably get anything from 10^-10 to 10^10 without even touching the boundries of feasability. Let's spend money filling out the blanks.

Doug

[ljk4-1]

Okay, but when they land on that hill one night, carry you off and start sticking that long pointed thing into you, don't say I didn't warn you...

Actually, I've always had a gigantic soft spot for SETI. It seems to me that, where space-related research is concerned, its ratio of cost to potential benefit is almost unmatchable, and the stupefying scientific ignorance shown by the Congressmen who keep slapping it down (most of them Democrats, alas) is simply infuriating. Given that the program could be more than adequately funded for just a few tens of millions of dollars out of NASA's annual budget, this is one space project I definitely feel the government should get back into. (To quote Woody Allen: "It should be kept in mind that when scientists talk about 'life in outer space' they are frequently only referring to amino acids, which are never very gregarious, even at parties.")

Oh, Bruce, that is such a cliche. I'm waiting for the ship full of aliens
that just happen to look like Playmates from the late 1970s-early 1980s
who have come to Earth because all the males on their home planet
are either sterile or dead and they need my personal help in repopulating.

Not that it will convince those who think otherwise, but you are quite right
that what has been put into SETI is so inexpensive compared to what we
may get out of it. But when you've got a species that lives maybe 80 years
and comes from a civilization only a few millennia old, it's hard to make
them truly appreciate long-term investments.

Thanks for the Woody Allen quote. I hadn't heard that one before. Of the
few other science-related comments from his films, the man is clearly not
pro-science. One is from Sleeper (1973):

"Science is an intellectual dead end, you know? It's a lot of little guys in
tweed suits cutting up frogs on foundation grants."

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070707/quotes

And here's one from Manhattan (1979) with Woody at a planetarium with a
woman. He clearly never reads UMSF:

"How many of the satellites of Saturn can you name? There's
Mimas, Titan, Dione, Hyperion, of course, err..."

"No, I can't name any of them, and fortunately they never come
up in conversation."

http://mythic-beasts.com/~mark/random/manhattan-quotes/

As for great ETI-related quotes, there is the one of the Pogo comic strip
from 1959 (reproduced near the front of the 1966 book Intelligent Life in
the Universe by Sagan and Shklovsky) where two of the characters are
musing about intelligent extraterrestrial life. One says how scientists
claim that there are either other beings out there with advanced brains,
or that we humans have the most advanced brains in the Universe.

"Either way, it's a mighty soberin' thought."

And then, as a capper, my other favorite quote, this one from the
classic 1968 original The Planet of the Apes:

George Taylor: "I'm a seeker too. But my dreams aren't like yours.
I can't help thinking that somewhere in the Universe there has to be
something better than man. Has to be."

http://www.garnersclassics.com/qapes.htm

[ljk4-1]

I am not against the actual process of hunting for life 'out there' far far FAR from it, but I fail to see the potential benefits in basically, standing in the solar system with a hand cupped behind one ear.

Call it CIOESPFH (arguably the greatest acronym ever made )- Catalogue and investigation of extra solar planets for habitability. That's what I think is the sensible course of action if we're going to realistically find out who our neigbours are, or if we even have any. Maybe that's still 'Seti' - but just a different way of doing it.

It's an embarrasment that we don't know what numbers to put into Drake's equation...you can quite comfortably get anything from 10^-10 to 10^10 without even touching the boundries of feasability. Let's spend money filling out the blanks.

Doug

Why are astronomers listening and looking for signals from the vantage point of
Earth rather than going out into the galaxy and finding them directly? Cause it's
cheaper and easier at the moment. NASA doesn't seem very interested in interstellar
probes outside of lip service and vague comments about the "Moon, Mars, and
Beyond."

Plus you can cover a lot more sky with telescopes than sending out a few probes,
which will take a long time to reach even the nearby stars. SETI is certainly not
ideal, but it beats doing nothing.

There has been recent talk of ETI sending probes to our Sol system, which is hardly
illogical since we do plan on doing that to other star systems someday. But most
mainstream SETI folk are still wary of such ideas, as they smack of the UFO curse.

A shame, because what is so wrong/crazy about an advanced ETI sending probes
to study star systems which may have life? Our prejudices and preconceived notions
may cause us to miss a vital opportunity.

http://www.interstellar-probes.org/

Of course it is certainly sensible to look for Earth-type worlds, as we know for certain
in one case that they do tend to spawn life and something resembling intelligent beings.

But if we want to find beings who may actually have the capability to communicate
with us across the galaxy or at least have the kind of technology we could pick up
on, we might want to aim our telescopes at areas that are more desirable to beings
who are no longer confined to single worlds and suns:

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0506/0506110.pdf

As for being "embarassed" about the vagueness of numerous numbers in the
Drake Equation, I find no reason to be so. We've actually filled in a few of the
important ones since the DE came out in 1961, and you can't expect such a
young society as ours that has barely left its planet to know some of the more
esoteric factors in the equation. Be glad we have enough going for our species
that such questions have been asked and such an equation has even been made.

This link goes to a discussion on the elements of the Drake Equation, plus an
article with images of the new Optical SETI Observatory from The Planetary
Society (TPS):

http://skyandtelescope.com/resources/seti/

[djellison]

I wasnt advocating the dispatching of probes to other stars, I was suggesting it's better to do a systematic study of them from here, to find out what sort of planets there are, how many there are, getting some spectra of them - find out how many habitable places there might be...hell, find out how many habitable places there in our own back yard might be a good start. We don't even know how many times life started here...and we're trying to find it out there?

Doug

[ljk4-1]

I wasnt advocating the dispatching of probes to other stars, I was suggesting it's better to do a systematic study of them from here, to find out what sort of planets there are, how many there are, getting some spectra of them - find out how many habitable places there might be...hell, find out how many habitable places there in our own back yard might be a good start. We don't even know how many times life started here...and we're trying to find it out there?

Doug

I think we are more in agreement in many areas of this field than not.

And judging by the very recent news on exoplanets in habitable zones
we are certainly making real progress on that front.

Now if someone could just develop a method of space transportation in
the next decade that could send a probe to the nearest stars in something
less than 500 to 1,000 years.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Oh, Bruce, that is such a cliche. I'm waiting for the ship full of aliens
that just happen to look like Playmates from the late 1970s-early 1980s
who have come to Earth because all the males on their home planet
are either sterile or dead and they need my personal help in repopulating.

Just wait until it turns out that they only look like nubile human females, and inside they're H.R. Giger types who pretend to have sex with you just so that they can implant their eggs in you to eat you away from the inside...

As for Woody Allen, he wasn't fond of the natural world, either: "I find that I am at two with Nature." I'll have to reprint some more of his essay on UFOs, though -- he wrote it and a lot of other pieces for the "New Yorker" back in the 1970s, when he was notorious for nothing other than being one of the funniest people in America. How the mighty have fallen...

[Toymaker]

Now if someone could just develop a method of space transportation in
the next decade that could send a probe to the nearest stars in something
less than 500 to 1,000 years.

The proposed studies of probes in Project Longshot involved timeframe of 100 years If I am not mistaken.

[dvandorn]

I wasnt advocating the dispatching of probes to other stars, I was suggesting it's better to do a systematic study of them from here...

So, instead of metaphorically cupping our ears, we ought to metaphorically squint our eyes?

Why not do both?

-the other Doug

[edstrick]

The British Interplanetary Society's "Daedelus" interstellar probe study project, published around 1980-82, clearly establishes interstellar travel is possible. They basically did an engineering-requirements study of a two stage electron-beam-inertial-fusion powered unmanned flyby of the Barnard's star "system", being the second closest extrasolar star system. The vehicle would travel at 0.15 the speed of light, arriving without slowing down, in about 40 years. Payload was a hubble-sized telescope with a comprehensive package of planet search and study instruments.

Basically, it requires an early but expanding solar-system based civilization to be able to afford and do it. It's very "not trivial" but clearly within the reach of plausible and physically permissable engineering.

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

Hi all,

thank you for this interesting confrontation between opinions.

Personally, I don't believe that we MUST engage into a method and MUST not into another. SETI shows much more difficult than expected 50 years ago, but should it provide only one result, this result would be about intelligent life, not just about amino acids which we know are nearby everywhere.

What you propose, Doug, making a statistical and exhaustive study of all the planets we can detect, is very interesting too. In doing so, we work at the begining of the evolution chain, but we work on the same evolution chain than SETI. Filling the blanks in the first terms of the Drake equation will certainly help to understand what happen to the last term, and perhaps solve the Fermi paradox. So why not to undertake a search on this subject rather than on SETI? Simply because SETI we know to do, and the search of extrasolar planets we are just beginners. We are still unable to find earth-sized planets into the inhabitable zone, and all the more to make a statistics of planets. Of course we must increase the effort on the search of planets, as only a statistics of complete solar systems (not just large freak planets) will allow us to really understand the formation of planets and predict the first terms of the Drake equation.

At a pinch, SETI could lead to unexpected results, even in the case it never detects any ET signal. For instance its constantly improved sensitivity could allow us to detect planets by their natural radio emissions (magnetic activity, MASERs) and thus obtain irreplaceable infos on their atmospheres and chemistry.

What we could try, for instance, would be to observe a given star with the mask methods used into gamma ray telescopes, or the reverse of the spectrum-speading methods used to hide a radio channel into noise. This would (perhaps) lead to a several magnitude increase into the sensitivity of radio receivers.





At last, when speaking of ET life, inevitably come the jokes on UFOs and abduction. I don't want to start a discution on these subjects (that I consider seriously, of course after filtering all the rubbish) but I would like to say that I more and more disagree with the idea of these phenomenon being the activity of ET spaceships. My opinion is rather that those phenomenon (especially abduction) are something else. Especially most abduction reports seem in fact experiences of sleep paralysis, a curious phenomenon experienced by some 10% of people, which show us characters or other feelings, often sexual. But sleep paralysis seems closer to a dream experience than to anything else... Sleep paralysis (nightmare in our grandparent's language) don't explains everything, and especially scientists studying UFOs will not admit that a dream experience can produce the physical effects they demonstrated. What I want to say here is that these phenomenon are certainly curious, but I think they belong to the exploration of human consciousness rather than of space. Interesting, but another topic. I just feel incredible that, in our science age, there is still a large majority of people as naïve as in the Middle Age, when their sleep paralysis showed them "demons" (that they called incubus and succubus) and they believed they were real!! There is nothing to be afraid in the affair, and especially there is no kind of conclusion to draw about real ETs, what they could be or what they could do. To summarize into a science paper language, UFO and abduction reports, even considered as sincere testimonies, don't pose any kind of constrain on ET life or ET behaviours.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Regarding Doug Ellison's fondness for TPF: keep in mind that it will be an EXTREMELY long time before humanity ever manged to send probes to even the nearest stars -- if we ever do -- which means that virtually all we'll be able to learn about any life-bearing planets circling other stars for centuries or more will be (if we're lucky) a little bit about the general biochemistry of their dominant photosynthetic organisms. And this, by itself, will cost billions --or tens of billions -- of dollars. Now consider the fact that even the most elaborate SETI networks proposed cost only a few hundred million -- and consider the impact on humanity of discovering proof of another intelligent race, as opposed to just discovering the existence of photosynthetic life on another world. Which is more scientifically an culturally 'cost-effective"? One guess. Moreover, the same reasoning applies to the very expensive search for evidence of past ormpresent microbial life elsewhere in our own Solar System.

I think we should be spending money on all three of these things -- but if it came down to a choice, I would unhesitatingly go with SETI as the best of the three searches.

[djellison]

Here's a thought. How much energy and time have we spent sending out signals that would be detectable by the same equipment with which we listen for signals, and at what range would they be detectable, and what statistical chance would an observer looking at a random part of the sky have of hearing them.

i.e. if there was another 'us' out there...would they be able to hear us and would we hear them.

Doupg

[climber]

[quote name='djellison' date='May 19 2006, 01:41 PM' post='54905']
Here's a thought. How much energy and time have we spent sending out signals that would be detectable by the same equipment with which we listen for signals, and at what range would they be detectable, and what statistical chance would an observer looking at a random part of the sky have of hearing them.

i.e. if there was another 'us' out there...would they be able to hear us and would we hear them.

Doupg you mean "doubt", don't you ?

[Bob Shaw]

Here's a thought. How much energy and time have we spent sending out signals that would be detectable by the same equipment with which we listen for signals, and at what range would they be detectable, and what statistical chance would an observer looking at a random part of the sky have of hearing them.

Doupg

Doug:

Well, the first spark-gap transmissions began about a hundred years ago - so there's your upper limit - a sphere 200 light years across. But the signal strengths were very low indeed. I'd say that the easiest signals to detect would be from military RADAR installations, so you're really looking at the 1940s onward - 130 light years. Even then, it's the carrier you'd see, not the signal as such, and you'd have to be looking in the right direction, as such transmissions were pretty directional. The oft-quoted case is that of TV transmissions, where we're looking a generalised hum from the 1950s on - 110 light years. Somebody can, I'm sure, figure out the distances for detection purposes with, say, an Arecibo-class dish. It's been suggested that we may already have peaked in terms of inadvertant signals, as so much modern signalling is highly directional both to and from satellites or via cable, and optical transmission is on the horizon. Perhaps optical 'spill' would be detectable at quite a long distance (when it starts), and one strategy for detecting such would be to look for the rotation plane of other star systems and search along it (assuming that any civilisation might be communicating across a local interplanetary network).

It all pales into insignificance, though, when compared to life detection, where (in principle) you just have to collect enough light to look for the signals of life-chemistry. The Drake equation isn't cheery in terms of looking for intelligence, but life itself is another matter. All we need is a really big TPF facility at a LaGrange point, with a veritable farm of mirrors, and we should be able to detect life itself over vast distances.

Bob Shaw

[ljk4-1]

This online article, "Detectability of Extraterrestrial Technological Activities"
by Guillermo A. Lemarchand, worked out the details of how far various
electromagnetic signals could be detected over interstellar distances:

http://www.coseti.org/lemarch1.htm

Lemarchand also examined optical, x-ray, and neutrino radiation, among
other concepts.

As for finding terrestrial-type exoplanets in a fashion that may be less
complex than the TPF, see the New Worlds Imager (NWI) concept:

http://casa.colorado.edu/~wcash/Planets/new_worlds.pdf

http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1226.html

One method for finding ETI could involve astronomical objects that just
about any society which practices astronomy and has at least our level
of technology could detect and utilize: The powerful natural beacons
known as supernovae (pulsars and GRBs may also work in this idea).

See here for the details:

http://www.iar.unlp.edu.ar/SETI/GAL-Scient-Ame.pdf

http://www.iar.unlp.edu.ar/SETI/seti-boston.htm