The scientific hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence is now into its fifth decade, and we still haven't uncovered a confirmed peep from any cosmic company. Could this mean that finding aliens, even if they exist, is a project for the ages -- one that might take centuries or longer?
New technologies for use in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) suggest that, despite the continued dearth of signals from other societies, there is good reason to expect that success might not be far off -- that we might find evidence of sophisticated civilizations within a few decades.
Why this is so, what contact would tell us, and what such a discovery would mean, are the subject of this talk on the continuing efforts to establish our place in the universe of thinking beings. -YT
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dannym3141I was a firm believer in aliens... impossible, thought i, that in the infinite reaches of space, we are the only life forms to exist. Surely these UFO sightings must have a genuine root.
Then i realised that time is also a factor. Yes, space may be on the magnitude of the infinite, but the furthest objects from us in space may as well be in our imagination, or a different dimension; they're intangible to us. We'll never see it, we'll never reach it.
So then the question is limited, what are the odds of us being the only sentient life form within an area of space around us, existing at the same point in time as us?
And even then it's worse - let's say you recieve a set of prime number pulses that were broadcasted by another species, how long did they take to get to us? A thousand years? 2? 3? Did they live long enough for us to recieve it? Will they live long enough to recieve a reply? Will we?
That's why i love astronomy. It's amazing, mind blowing.
(Didn't have time to watch this yet, just rambling on)
budzosI can't stand the way the question "do you believe in aliens?" is so entangled with "do you believe that UFOs are alien spacecraft visiting the Earth?"
Those are two different questions!
Even at sublight speeds, a civilization that is millions of years old would have spread throughout the galaxy by now. So the question that always plagues me is "are we the first technological civilization?" or "do most civilizations that reach our stage end up destroying themselves before colonizing space?" Because a yes to either of those questions makes it quite unlikely that we'll ever see evidence of an ancient civilization.
Plus I think some of the crazier sci-fi concepts like Von Neumann machines, generation ships, etc. make perfect sense when you think about the nature of an ancient, growing technological species in any way similar to humanity. If they've existed much longer than us, even just a couple thousand years, it's perfectly possible that some UFOs are indeed alien spacecraft.
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