Big Sky Debate Page
SOLVENCY: NO ONE WILL RESPOND
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- SETI ADVOCATES TEND TO OVERLOOK THE COSTS THAT COULD PREVENT ADVANCED CIVILIZATIONS FROM BROADCASTING-Benford ‘10
- EVEN ALTRUISTIC SENDERS WILL FACE COMPETING ALTRUISTIC INTERESTS AND THE SAME ARGUMENTS ADVANCED ON EARTH TO DEFUND SETI-Benford ‘10
- EARTH’S HISTORY EMPIRICALLY PROVES THAT MASSIVE PROJECTS ARE OFTEN CONSTRAINED BY ECONOMY AND POLITICS- Benford ‘10
- SOLVENCY: THE PROGRAM DOESN’T WORK SETI IS STUCK IN AN ANTHROPOCENTRIC RUT WHICH LIMITS THE CHANCES OF FINDING SIGNALS-Davies ‘10
- SETI HAS BECOME TOO CONSERVATIVE, TOO FOCUSED ON ANTHROPOCENTRIC VISION-Davies ‘10
- SETI IS LOOKING FOR THE WRONG KIND OF INFORMATION-Benford ‘10
SOLVENCY: NO ONE WILL RESPOND THE HISTORY OF THE SETI PROGRAM DEMONSTRATES THAT IT IS HIGHLY UNLIKELY THAT CONTACT WILL EVER BE MADE-Schenkel ‘06 [Peter; retired political scientist; SETI requires a skeptical reappraisal; Skeptical Inquirer; May-June 2006; pg. 26] First of all, since project OZMA I in 1959 by Frank Drake, about a hundred radio-magnetic and other searches were conducted in the U.S. and in other countries, and a considerable part of our sky was scanned thoroughly and repeatedly, but it remained disappointingly silent. In forty-six years not a single artificial intelligent signal or message from outer space was received. Some specialists try to downplay this negative result, arguing that so far only a small part of the entire spectrum has been covered, and that more time and more sophisticated equipment is required for arriving at a definite conclusion. Technological and economic criteria may thwart the possibility of extraterrestrial civilizations beaming signals into space over long stretches of time, without knowing where to direct their signals. Or, they may use communication methods unknown to us. Another explanation is that advanced ETI may lack interest in contacting other intelligences, especially those less developed. The argument of the Russian rocket expert Konstantin Tsiolkovski is often quoted: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." But neither of these arguments, which attempt to explain why we have not received a single intelligent signal from space--is convincing. True, future search projects may strike pay dirt and register the reception of a signal of verified artificial origin. But as long as no such evidence is forthcoming, the possibility of achieving success must be considered remote. If a hundred searches were unsuccessful, it is fair to deduce that estimates of a million or many thousands ETI are unsustainable propositions. As long as no breakthrough occurs, the probability of contact with ETI is near to zero. The argument that advanced extraterrestrials may not be interested in contact with other intelligences is also--as I will show--highly implausible. SETI ADVOCATES TEND TO OVERLOOK THE COSTS THAT COULD PREVENT ADVANCED CIVILIZATIONS FROM BROADCASTING-Benford ‘10 [Gregory, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, UC-Irvine; James, and Dominic, NASA Scientist; Searching for Cost-Optimized Interstellar Beacons; Astrobiology Volume 10, No. 5, 2010; pgs 491-498] Traditional SETI research takes the point of view of receivers, not transmitters. This neglects the implications for what signals should look like in general, and especially the high emitting costs, which a receiver does not pay. We shall assume, like conventional SETI, that microwaves are simpler for planetary societies, since they can easily outshine their star in microwaves. Microwaves are probably better for beacons (Tarter, 2001). Literature from various different scientific fields supports our approach of thinking of extraterrestrial intelligence in economic terms. Whatever the life-form, evolution will select for economy of resources, an established principle in evolutionary theory (Williams, 1966). Further, Minsky (1985) argued that a general feature of intelligence is that it will select for economy of effort, whatever the life-form. Tullock (1994) argued that social species evolve to an equilibrium in which each species unconsciously carries out ‘‘environmental coordination,’’ which can follow rules like those of a market, especially among plants. He gives many such examples. Economics will matter. A SETI broadcaster will face competing claims on resources. Some will come from direct economic competition. Standing outside this, SETI beaming will be essentially altruistic, that is, that extraterrestrial intelligence might broadcast for the benefit of younger civilizations, since replies replies will take centuries if not millennia. SETI need not tax an advanced society’s resources. The power demands in our companion paper are for average powers !GW, far less than the 17TW now produced globally (Hoffert et al., 2002). EVEN ALTRUISTIC SENDERS WILL FACE COMPETING ALTRUISTIC INTERESTS AND THE SAME ARGUMENTS ADVANCED ON EARTH TO DEFUND SETI-Benford ‘10 [Gregory, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, UC-Irvine; James, and Dominic, NASA Scientist; Searching for Cost-Optimized Interstellar Beacons; Astrobiology Volume 10, No. 5, 2010; pgs 491-498] But even altruistic beacon builders will have to contend with other competing altruistic causes, just as humans do (Lemarchand and Lomberg, 1996). They will confront arguments that the response time for SETI is millennia and that, anyway, advanced societies leak plenty of microwaves, and so on, into deep space already. We take up these issues below. It seems clear that, for a beacon builder, only by minimizing cost/benefit will their effort succeed. This is parsimony, meaning ‘‘less is better,’’ a concept of frugality, economy. Philosophers use this term for Occam’s Razor, but here we mean the press of economic demands in any society that contemplates long-term projects like SETI. On Earth, advocates of Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) will also face economic constraints (Benford et al., 2010). Note that parsimony directly contradicts the Altruistic Alien Argument that the beacon builders will be vastly wealthy and make everything easy for us. An omnidirectional beacon, radiating at the entire galactic plane, for example, would have to be enormously powerful and expensive, and so not be parsimonious. One of the SETI pioneers, B. Oliver, calculated a cost minimization for both sender and receiver together, but Oliver’s conceived sender and receiver were not part of the same economic system, and indeed did not know each other, so there is no reason for cost to be minimized between them. EARTH’S HISTORY EMPIRICALLY PROVES THAT MASSIVE PROJECTS ARE OFTEN CONSTRAINED BY ECONOMY AND POLITICS- Benford ‘10 [Gregory, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, UC-Irvine; James, and Dominic, NASA Scientist; Searching for Cost-Optimized Interstellar Beacons; Astrobiology Volume 10, No. 5, 2010; pgs 491-498] Finally, even if economics such as is characteristic of Earth work similarly in other technological societies, why should it apply to their transmitting beacons? Even on Earth, larger goals often override economic dictates, such as military security, aesthetics, religion, and so on. But two aspects of SETI undermine this intuition: (1) SETI assumes long timescales for sender and receiver. But while cultural passions can set goals, economics determines how they get done. Many momentary, spectacular projects such as the pyramids of Egypt lasted only a century or two then met economic limits. The Taj Mahal so taxed its province that the second, black Taj was never built. The grand cathedrals of medieval Europe suffered cost constraints and, to avoid swamping local economies, so took several centuries of large effort. Passion is temporary, while costs constrain longterm projects. SOLVENCY: THE PROGRAM DOESN’T WORK SETI IS STUCK IN AN ANTHROPOCENTRIC RUT WHICH LIMITS THE CHANCES OF FINDING SIGNALS-Davies ‘10 [Paul; PhD; co-Director of the Cosmology Initiative, both at Arizona State University; The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence; 2010; Kindle Edition] I've been associated with SETI one way or another for most of my career, and have enormous admiration for the astronomers who operate the radio telescopes and analyse the data, as well as for the technical staff who design and build the equipment. I hope the eerie silence is indeed due to the fact that the search has been limited, and I am a strong supporter of the Allen Telescope Array. But I also think, for reasons I shall come to later, that there is only a very slender hope of receiving a message from the stars at this time, so alongside 'traditional SETI,' of the sort pioneered by Frank Drake, we need to establish a much broader programme of research, a search for general signatures of intelligence, wherever they may be imprinted in the physical universe. And that requires the resources of all the sciences, not just radio astronomy. There is, however, another factor that has to be addressed. By focusing on a very specific scenario – an alien civilization beaming detectable so-called narrow-band (sharp-frequency) radio messages to Earth – traditional SETI has become stuck in something of a conceptual rut. Fifty years of silence is an excellent cue for us to enlarge our thinking about the subject. Crucially, we must free SETI from the shackles of anthropocentrism, which has hampered it from the very beginning. SETI HAS BECOME TOO CONSERVATIVE, TOO FOCUSED ON ANTHROPOCENTRIC VISION-Davies ‘10 [Paul; PhD; co-Director of the Cosmology Initiative, both at Arizona State University; The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence; 2010; Kindle Edition] How could something as bold and visionary as SETI become conservative? A major part of the reason is the tendency of humans to extrapolate from their own experience. The very basis for SETI is, after all, an assumption that our civilization is in some respects typical, and that there will be other earths out there with flesh-and-blood sentient beings not too different from us, who will be anxious to communicate. Given that predicate, it is reasonable to take human nature and human society as a model for what an alien civilization will be like – we don't have much else to go on, after all. In the early days of SETI, when the basic strategy was being planned, there were a lot of questions along the lines, 'What would we do in those circumstances?' The result, inevitably, is an inbuilt bias towards anthropocentrism. SETI IS LOOKING FOR THE WRONG KIND OF INFORMATION-Benford ‘10 [Gregory, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, UC-Irvine; James, and Dominic, NASA Scientist; Searching for Cost-Optimized Interstellar Beacons; Astrobiology Volume 10, No. 5, 2010; pgs 491-498] We conclude that SETI searches may have been looking for the wrong thing. SETI has largely sought signals at the lower end of the cost-optimum frequencies. They also may have taken needless care adjusting Doppler shifts, since broadband beacons will need none. Searches have seen coherent signals that are non-recurring on their limited listening time intervals. Those searches may have seen beacons but could not verify them because they did not steadily observe for more than short periods. We should reconsider SETI search strategies to enhance use of higher frequencies and make systematic scans of the entire galactic plane, with special attention to the Galactic Center. Searches for such signals might best be done in midlatitude southern sites. We propose a new test for SETI beacons, based on the Life Plane hypotheses. This requires steadily observing over periods of years. Directory: file -> fetch fetch -> 11 th Lit Semester 1 Final Study Guide!!! fetch -> Industrial Revolution Inventors fetch -> Analysis for Galveston Hurricane of 1900 fetch -> The Illuminators (Team 2) 1900 Galveston Hurricane Cycle a team Assignment fetch -> Team csi-utb ruth Reyes Jose Ferrer fetch -> Galveston Hurricane of 1900 Cycle a-teacher as a Problem Solver fetch -> Is Climate Change Starting a New Dust Bowl? Cycle A fetch -> What makes a storm a hurricane fetch -> The 1950s were the "Happy Days" because it was a time of economic prosperity, technology development, new entertainment, new fashion and family growth. The 1950s was a great time fetch -> Sputnik and The Dawn of the Space Age Download 1.49 Mb. Share with your friends:
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