We may be defining "life" forces too slim and therefore bypassing instances of extraterrestrial forces of which we know nothing about.
2007-01-20 16:34:49 · 4 answers · asked by Robert L 3 in Science & Mathematics ➔ Astronomy & Space
Well... it's going to be difficult to notice "extraterrestrial forces of which we know nothing about", since by definition we don't know how to detect them.
The immediate problems facing SETI are actually funding and too many places to look.
It's not that they're narrowing the definition of life too much. It's that they're forced by expediency to look only in the regions of certain types of stars at certain distances from us.
A comprehensive scan of the sky in the plane of the galaxy would certainly cover more ground, but it would take a VERY long time to scrutinize everything.
The funding factor is another thing that motivates them to narrow their search criteria. They know how much money is budgeted for a given year, but not whether or not it will ever be continued beyond that. So they tend to operate on the premise that they have to search selected regions as quickly as possible before the money runs out.
Big Al Mintaka
2007-01-20 17:22:08 · answer #1 · answered by almintaka 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
SETI is not looking for life, they are looking for INTELLIGENT life. It seems very likely that life is abundant in the universe in the form of micro-organisms and possibly some form of simple plant life. Intelligent life would be far more rare and much more significant. It would also be easier to find since some extra-terrestrial cultures would be, in theory, far more advanced than we are and are undoubtedly transmitting something into space. The problem is, this is all conjecture and at our level of technology the only thing we can do is listen to the stars and hope we get EXTREMELY lucky, since that is the only way we'll find anything, unless they find us first.
2007-01-20 17:59:21 · answer #2 · answered by Timmy 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Hi. In my opinion, yes. We are looking for RF signals. This is based on the presumption that RF is used as a communication medium. Could an extraterrestrial receive signals sent over cable? Fiber optics? No.
2007-01-20 16:39:28 · answer #3 · answered by Cirric 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋
maybe they should look between george's ears
2007-01-20 16:43:53 · answer #4 · answered by iammoza 3 · 0⤊ 1⤋