[meteorite-list] Prof Davies, Aliens, Hillary Clinton and Laurence Rockefeller

From: Richard Kowalski <damoclid_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2010 20:58:01 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <679740.39682.qm_at_web113606.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>

Actually Phil, I'd disagree with that statement, even though I believe that the universe is filled to the brim with life, I think that intelligent life is exceedingly rare.

Personally I think that SETI is never going to find a signal, not because there is no life out there, but that the circumstances required to find a signal is exceedingly small. The analogy put forth by others in this thread of a child looking out a window for 32/1000ths of a second is a good one.

Use ourselves as an example. Radio technology on earth is barely a century old and we are already rapidly moving away from high powered transmitters to low powered devices for communications. Our most efficient long distance communications are already moving via fiber optics, so require no radio transmissions whatsoever.

Ask yourself what are/or were the most powerful transmitters used?
The answer is Early Warning defense radar systems. In fact at those frequencies Earth was brighter than the Sun. As the Cold War wound down, and the technology improved, lower power transmitters could do the same job. For about 40 years, Earth shined exceedingly brightly in microwaves, with a peak radiance about 1/3 through that period. So you can imagine a shell of microwaves 40 light years in thickness traveling out from our solar system, expanding at the speed of light. (I'm sure I'll be corrected here, but that's OK. I welcome it.)

Say a intelligent civilization, only a century behind us in technology (Almost statistically impossible) 50 light years away from us will develop the technology to detect radio waves of that frequency. Our microwaves from the early warning systems have been reaching them for more than a decade already, but they won't develop the technology to detect this radiation for another 30 years or so.

In other words, just as they gain the ability to detect our unintended signal to them just as it has completely passed them by. Even if they point their radio telescope directly at earth, they wouldn't hear us as our signal drops again below the background noise.

And so it goes planet after planet as the signal extends out into space in an ever expanding shell, growing ever weaker. If we continue our trend to become more radio silent in other frequencies too, our civilization could become radio dark again as far as the universe is concerned in the next hundred years or so.

Expand this problem by a more realistic estimate that civilizations become technologically capable thousands or millions of years apart, not mere decades apart...

Now reverse the situation. For SETI to work you have to be listening at the precise moment the signals are passing our region of space. Miss it by a century, a decade, a year, a day, and its too late. The signal is no longer detectable. It may literally take many millenia before the right combination of circumstances allow us to detect another civilization through just their radio communications, intended or otherwise.

Ironically, I think that SETI is an experiment that should not be abandoned, because you'll never know if there is a detectable signal if you don't look. I just think it will never yield a positive result. However, I do believe that the canceled Terrestrial Planet Finder mission had a much better chance to find habitable, and planets that have abundant life.

--
Richard Kowalski
Full Moon Photography
IMCA #1081
--- On Thu, 9/16/10, JoshuaTreeMuseum <joshuatreemuseum at embarqmail.com> wrote:
> Maybe they know that? 50 years
> of complete and total silence from the SETI search means
> there is no life in deep space......
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Phil Whitmer 
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Received on Thu 16 Sep 2010 11:58:01 PM PDT