Random SETI Comments & Questions

[Jeff V]

I caught a program on The History Channel about SETI.

They said that litening, and looking power is 100 trillion times greater than when they began in the 60's. They also said computers measure and read patterns in sound, and light down to one billionth of a second in duration looking for signs of intelligence. And new technology that will see much larger areas in great detail-can't remember the stats here.

To date-nothing.

Regardless of religious beliefs-doesn't it take a tremendous amount of faith to keep looking? What basis is there to keep believing? Is the vastness of space reason enough to keep looking? Would I be out of line in saying that it's ok for these "scientists" to be taken seriously, but one that believes in God can't/shouldn't?

Jeff likes using -'s and to a lesser extent /'s and an even lesser extent third person vagueries. /images/graemlins/cool.gif

[BigSoonerFan]

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I caught a program on The History Channel about SETI.

They said that litening, and looking power is 100 trillion times greater than when they began in the 60's. They also said computers measure and read patterns in sound, and light down to one billionth of a second in duration looking for signs of intelligence. And new technology that will see much larger areas in great detail-can't remember the stats here.

To date-nothing.

Regardless of religious beliefs-doesn't it take a tremendous amount of faith to keep looking? What basis is there to keep believing? Is the vastness of space reason enough to keep looking? Would I be out of line in saying that it's ok for these "scientists" to be taken seriously, but one that believes in God can't/shouldn't?

Jeff likes using -'s and to a lesser extent /'s and an even lesser extent third person vagueries. /images/graemlins/cool.gif

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There is so much to listen to, we have barely started. With space growing quickly the farther you look out and the span of wavelengths to look at, it may take two or three more days to catch it all! :-)

[Bork]

Its a scientific endeavor. They are observing the universe looking for evidence. So far it looks like there isnt anything out there but the universe is far more vast than could ever be searched by humans. I dont see where faith comes in. Many people involved in SETI believe there probably isnt any life out there but it doesnt hurt to look. People who are doing things based on faith usually dont want to observe the world because they feel it is a waste of time, since they know the truth already.

[chezlaw]

It doesn't require any faith to keep looking, although you could argue the money could be spent better elsewhere.

It would take faith to insist that they know they will find what they are looking for.

I don't see why it bothers you, its interesting and it would be awesome if the did find something.

chez

SETI is pseudo science. The arguments used to support continuing to fund it (usually a variation on a formula first written down by Francis Drake) involve so much guess work and approximation that you can get any answer you want. Personally, I believe it's likely there is life on other planets - but there's no scientific basis for that belief. As you say - it's a matter of faith.

[chezlaw]

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SETI is pseudo science. The arguments used to support continuing to fund it (usually a variation on a formula first written down by Francis Drake) involve so much guess work and approximation that you can get any answer you want. Personally, I believe it's likely there is life on other planets - but there's no scientific basis for that belief. As you say - it's a matter of faith.

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Seti is just an experiment. The idea that there is life out there is a hyopothesis. These are parts of science and are nothing to do with faith.

chez

[chezlaw]

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SETI is pseudo science. The arguments used to support continuing to fund it (usually a variation on a formula first written down by Francis Drake) involve so much guess work and approximation that you can get any answer you want. Personally, I believe it's likely there is life on other planets - but there's no scientific basis for that belief. As you say - it's a matter of faith.

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Seti is just an experiment. The idea that there is life out there is a hyopothesis. These are parts of science and are nothing to do with faith.

[The bit that's a bit different is they are looking for evidence rather than trying to disprove anything, so its more of an exploration than an experiment]

chez

That's my point. It's not science. It's saying "Hey this would be cool if we found it, though we have no good reason to believe we will...let's go look"

[chezlaw]

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That's my point. It's not science. It's saying "Hey this would be cool if we found it, though we have no good reason to believe we will...let's go look"

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First you look for data based on some weakish hypothesis. If they find some interesting data then they will form a strong hypothesis that the data is evidence of intelligence and then they will rigourously test this hypothesis - if they fail then they start to believe they have found ET.

This is science.

chez

[imported_luckyme]

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That's my point. It's not science. It's saying "Hey this would be cool if we found it, though we have no good reason to believe we will...let's go look"

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Having found one planet with at least moderately intelligent life forms on it doesn't rule out that there could be others, it's the other way around. It's not like they're looking for something that we have no idea whether it can exist..life forms exist.

Let's see, there are other suns similar to ours, there are other planets similar to ours, why would we assume the similarity stops there, that'd be perverse.

Sounds like basic science - similar conditions should/could lead to similar results...let's look. In this case, there's no reason to believe the conditions need be all that similar, just certain parameters increase the likelihood.

[maurile]

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Regardless of religious beliefs-doesn't it take a tremendous amount of faith to keep looking?

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Of course not.

It takes faith to believe the results will be positive. But it doesn't take any faith just to look.

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What basis is there to keep believing?

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1. It is very likely that life exists elsewhere in the universe.

2. If such life exists, it may realize #1 and try to communicate with life elsewhere.

3. If it does try to communicate with life elsewhere, we may as well be on the lookout.

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Would I be out of line in saying that it's ok for these "scientists" to be taken seriously, but one that believes in God can't/shouldn't?

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No, that'd be fine.

[chezlaw]

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Having found one planet with at least moderately intelligent life forms on it doesn't rule out that there could be others, it's the other way around. It's not like they're looking for something that we have no idea whether it can exist..life forms exist.

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'... lets hope and pray there's intelligent life somewehere out in space, coz there's bugger all down here on earth' - meaning of life

chez

[maurile]

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That's my point. It's not science.

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Neither is love-making. So what?

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It's saying "Hey this would be cool if we found it, though we have no good reason to believe we will...let's go look"

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And?

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That's my point. It's not science.

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Neither is love-making. So what?


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Well - we dont divert scientific funding to love-making. The point is not that SETI has no place, it's just not science. For what it's worth I dont think love-making is science either but that doesnt seem relevant to the original post.

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It's saying "Hey this would be cool if we found it, though we have no good reason to believe we will...let's go look"

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And?

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And - this is not a good reason to spend millions of dollars, anymore than a few homeopaths telling me they have noticed good results is a good reason to invest millions on producing "medicinal" water.

[Jeff V]

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I don't see why it bothers you

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Who said that? I just asked some questions.

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it would be awesome if the did find something.


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We agree.

[Jeff V]

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1. It is very likely that life exists elsewhere in the universe.

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I'm interested to know how you come up with this, and how you justify it.

[chezlaw]

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I don't see why it bothers you

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Who said that? I just asked some questions.

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it would be awesome if the did find something.


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We agree.

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Ok so whether you want to call looking for data part of science or exploration is a really minor point. Its clearly nothing to do with faith (maybe a bit of hope)

chez

[Jeff V]

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And - this is not a good reason to spend millions of dollars,


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This is probably why NASA pulled their funding so quickly.

[maurile]

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That's my point. It's not science.

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Neither is love-making. So what?


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Well - we dont divert scientific funding to love-making.

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We don't divert sceintific funding to SETI either. For the brief time that SETI was publicly funded, it was through NASA, wasn't it? Well, NASA isn't science, either. So the funding for SETI wasn't scientific funding. Like I said, so what?

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The point is not that SETI has no place, it's just not science. For what it's worth I dont think love-making is science either but that doesnt seem relevant to the original post.

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The point is that lots of worthwhile things aren't science.

I'm not saying that SETI is worthwhile. But the fact that it isn't science is not much of an argument that it isn't worthwhile.

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It's saying "Hey this would be cool if we found it, though we have no good reason to believe we will...let's go look"

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And?

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And - this is not a good reason to spend millions of dollars, anymore than a few homeopaths telling me they have noticed good results is a good reason to invest millions on producing "medicinal" water.

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Who said it was?

The obvious difference, though, is that homeopathy can be falsified for $10, so there's no need to spend millions.

[maurile]

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1. It is very likely that life exists elsewhere in the universe.

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I'm interested to know how you come up with this, and how you justify it.

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The universe is big, and the conditions necessary to produce replicators don't seem all that restrictive.

Err I dont quite get where you're coming from. As I understood the original question it was regarding why is SETI deemed scientific whereas religion is deemed faith-based. My response to that was that SETI is not science (and still does receive support from public funding bodies who would otherwise spend the money on science). I didnt claim it was unimportant nor that science is all that should be funded.

By the way, the homeopathy comparison doesnt die so easily (being another example of pseudo-science). Of course scientific studies have been undertaken disproving homeopathy - being pseudo science the homeopath can follow the same path as the SETI enthusiast. "Oh we just havent found anything yet - we need more time to keep looking"

[maurile]

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As I understood the original question it was regarding why is SETI deemed scientific whereas religion is deemed faith-based.

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I don't get that from the original post.

In any event, here's a good article on SETI and Intelligent Design (http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_intelligentdesign_051201.html) by someone from the SETI Institute. Maybe it will help answer whatever question the original poster was asking.

[Jeff V]

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The universe is big, and the conditions necessary to produce replicators don't seem all that restrictive.

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This equals very likely? I don't even think this equals probably. But maybe maybe.

[chezlaw]

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Err I dont quite get where you're coming from. As I understood the original question it was regarding why is SETI deemed scientific whereas religion is deemed faith-based. My response to that was that SETI is not science (and still does receive support from public funding bodies who would otherwise spend the money on science). I didnt claim it was unimportant nor that science is all that should be funded.

By the way, the homeopathy comparison doesnt die so easily (being another example of pseudo-science). Of course scientific studies have been undertaken disproving homeopathy - being pseudo science the homeopath can follow the same path as the SETI enthusiast. "Oh we just havent found anything yet - we need more time to keep looking"

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Nothing wrong with scientific investigation into homeopathy if someone wants to fund it. However they should have scientific results that support it before they start claiming it works. The same with SETI.

It seems the only real question is should it be funded by public money. I'm not sure, it seems more like a hobbyiest thing to me but I don't know how much it costs or whether there are other tangible benefits such as improvements in technology, better data anlysis techniques, or other uses for the collected data.

chez

[benkahuna]

[ QUOTE ]
I caught a program on The History Channel about SETI.

They said that litening, and looking power is 100 trillion times greater than when they began in the 60's. They also said computers measure and read patterns in sound, and light down to one billionth of a second in duration looking for signs of intelligence. And new technology that will see much larger areas in great detail-can't remember the stats here.

To date-nothing.

Regardless of religious beliefs-doesn't it take a tremendous amount of faith to keep looking? What basis is there to keep believing? Is the vastness of space reason enough to keep looking? Would I be out of line in saying that it's ok for these "scientists" to be taken seriously, but one that believes in God can't/shouldn't?

Jeff likes using -'s and to a lesser extent /'s and an even lesser extent third person vagueries. /images/graemlins/cool.gif

[/ QUOTE ]


You're being too results oriented. If you look at the setiathome web site, there is an interesting interview with some of the PIs running the project. There are a number of points you miss with the implication of your post being that if we haven't found something, we probably are not going to do so.

1. Only some 35 percent of the sky gets searched.
2. Even at significantly higher resolutions, there is still plenty of data that we can miss.
3. You've installed some implicit faith regarding looking that doesn't need to be there. The whole point of SETI isn't to discover incontrivertable evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence that we know are there. It's an exploration to see if we can find something which, even given the analogies to earch, may or may not be there. As you pointed out, the terms in the Drake's equation have a great deal of uncertainty.

If you want to deal with the science of SETI, it's more about the search procedures, whether they work, and the ability to process the data. They can produce articles of a scientific and computer engineering nature that make original and useful contibutions to intellectual endeavor. It's much like how many DARPA projects have resulted, accidentally, in very useful contributions to society, one of the key example being ARPAnet that resulted in how we are now communicated, the internet. It is true that such work is not necessarily science.

It does back to the whole thing with going on a search or trying to discover or create new knowledge, part of the beauty and randomness is that you'll never know what you'll find.

I don't believe SETI is that expensive of a project, especially compared to the entire scientific budget of the US, NASA, or the research institutions that are deeply involved in the project (most notably UC Berkeley). It's a lot like drawing to a 2-outer in a gigantic 500 bet pot. You're odds of winning may be small, but making a small contribution could pay significant dividends.

If you don't consider SETI worthwhile once you've put it all in a fair perspective, it's understandable and I wouldn't hold it against you. Until you do (and I don't think you have), I'll probably consider you biased and misguided.