ANN and OT: Calling All SETI Enthusiasts

Roger Guay irog at mac.com
Mon Mar 26 16:32:09 EDT 2012


No flames, Bob. I wouldn't argue with any one of your points except to say that we do in fact have a SETI project looking for other civilizations, and it makes extremely numerous assumptions, as you say. But, the bottom line is that it's a numbers game based on the vast numbers of stars and scale of our galaxy. Better minds than mine have felt it worthwhile to look/listen for alien technologies that may be a very small subset of the spectrum you speak of.

If we come to believe that this is a fool's errand which I gather is your position, then any technologies like ours will soon come to the same conclusion, thereby shortening the radio active phase of their technologies, and thus dramatically decreasing chance encounters of civilization as my simulation dramatizes!

Thanks for your help!

Cheers,
Roger



On Mar 26, 2012, at 2:03 PM, use-livecode-request at lists.runrev.com wrote:

> Message: 12
> Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2012 11:28:29 -0700
> From: Bob Sneidar <bobs at twft.com>
> To: How to use LiveCode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com>
> Subject: Re: ANN and OT: Calling All SETI Enthusiasts
> Message-ID: <2B937175-9284-4C54-9232-AC35C1BDD8F6 at twft.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> 
> The assumptions in discussions like these are extremely numerous, approaching the very number of stars themselves. Why for instance, should we suppose that any alien life form is similar to us? What if an intelligent life form was aquatic, and lived on a planet where the atmosphere was deadly to them? What possible motive could they have to develop radio technology in the first place, and who can assume that our radio technology would even work in their atmosphere? What if the magnetic flux field of their planet was so strong, or the chemical makeup so different that radio transmissions of our kind would never even penetrate it, never mind be something they would deploy? 
> 
> What if their great superior reasoning led them to conclude that the time, efforts and resources to even attempt to travel at or near light speeds, or else attempt to bend space-time was so vast, and the probability of failure to find a race like enough to themselves so great, and the time dilation that would occur so devastating to any hope of communicating or traveling back to where they came from, that it became a common child's joke amongst the great races of the universe without them even knowing it between them? So many "what if's", so little time-space. 
> 
> Our minds are so small that they cannot comprehend how many factors go into making our planet exactly the planet it is. There are so many balances, both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial, which if unbalanced by so much as 5% or less would render human life on this planet absolutely impossible. And we hope to find a planet so like ours, and then hope that life on that planet has evolved (the greatest begging of a question that ever there was) so like us as to allow any communication at all? This discussion can happen at all because of the human mind's inability to focus on and balance very many things at one time and measure a thesis against all other things that could weigh upon it. We simply do not possess the wisdom and mental faculty to treat such a subject. 
> 
> No, my friends, I think all conversation along these lines is so incredibly presumptuous, it is staggering when you really begin to think of everything we take as a given or gloss over when discussing such things. Sorry all you Star Trek fans, and anyone else I have likely offended. I love science fiction as much as the next person, but I think any race of beings wise enough to comprehend the real logistics of space travel or communication across such great distances would conclude right away that it was a total waste of their limited resources, better spent on improving their own state of affairs. 
> 
> (Let the flames begin!;-)
> 
> Bob





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