Can we be thankfull that project Seti proves we are alone and unique?

Question

Perhapse we are at the center of the universe thanks be to God.
1984, after decades of,,,,,,,Uhm,,,,,, nothing, Seti decides to open up all of their resources to over 3 million home participants, to help search the cosmos and still 'Not even a ping'. Whats up with that?
Dawgonnit! 50+ years of searching the cosmos, a 6.5+ billion year old universe with literally millions of civilizations out there that have come and gone and none!,,,,,,,,, not one,,,, ever sent one single signal? In 6.5 billion years one would think a signal could travel quite a ways. One would think at least a ping would have arrived here by now. Seti and its home project have logged over 160,000 years of computing time making it the largest computation ever done. Ping? If intelligent life here on earth just occured by happenstance, surley it occured all over our galaxy and universe. Or did it? Ping?

Answer 1

Yes we are alone in this Universe and thanks for what you wrote that was very interesting

If there was life on other planets it would void Christ

but they say that if there was life on another planet that would mean there would have to be another Jesus

so that is more proof that there isnt life on other planets
and that is a good thing

Answer 2

O ye of little faith!

SETI is a tiny ear, looking for a shot in the dark. From the Drake equation the number of technologically advanced civilisations in this galaxy alone could be less than 7. Dotted all over this huge volume of space.

What do you suppose the chances are that these civilisations would be sending a tight enough beam for us to receive it at all, even with Arecibo? And what are the chances that it would happen over the brief period we've been listening, and pointed in the right direction?

Then consider the possibility that they're there, and could send us a ping, but simply don't have our type of gregarious curiosity. And what if they're shouting out hellos day and night, but using a transmission medium we don't use, or a data rate 1,000 times slower than we expect? Maybe they modulate dark energy for their transmissions, because it's so much better a carrier? Maybe they use lasers.

SETI is extremely unlikely to come up with anything under any circumstances, and maybe it's a silly idea. But one thing is clear: the absence of a message is no evidence of the absence of life in the galaxy.

CD

Answer 3

Not at all! I think SETI is pretty darn cool and very interesting. The problem is that the vastness of space will give us some grief in finding anything interesting... and even if we did detect something the odds are that the species who emitted it is already dead. For example if we detected radio waves and found out that it came from the Andromeda Galaxy (the closest galaxy to our own Milky Way galaxy) then the radio waves would have been emitted at least 2.5 million years ago. In 2.5 million years, their planet may have already been engulfed by their sun... and be long since dead. So SETI is only really useful in searching for intelligent life in our own Galaxy... and given the rarity of life, I would say that the odds of finding an 'intelligent' neighbour in the Milky Way alone is quite slim.

Answer 4

SETI is not by any means a fail-safe system. If there was another planet in the next nearest star system (Alpha Centauri) with a fully-blown civilisation on it equivalent to the one on Earth, sending out the same strength of signal as Earth does, then SETI still wouldn't pick up anything from it. It could really only find evidence from a power much greater than our own technology.

Answer 5

You do realise that in that time we've only covered some 50 ly of sky, right? And that it is at low resolution, and only searching for certain patterns, not just a ping?

And that we can't really detect signals of the power output possible by something planet sized over relatively short distances?

You do realise this, don't you? That the seti project would most likely find nothing even if life was there, I mean.

Answer 6

Any idea how big the sky is?

Computing stellar data with a 1984 computer? Of course, that should've scanned the whole sky within minutes...

We didn't know there was more than one galaxy before the 80's, we didn't know there were thousands of galaxy clusters before the 90's... and the universe is approximately 14 billion years old, not 6.5.

On a galactic scale, it's like we barely started understanding 1 + 1 = 2... Finding intelligent life with that level of expertise would be nothing short of a miracle.

Answer 7

Did you know that the universe is 156 billion light-years wide?

And only 11-20 billion years old?

There has not been enough time in history for a signal of some type to travel more than 1/15 the distance across the universe at light speed.

That leaves a whole lot of space we can't monitor and a whole lot of space for billions of civilizations to live in.

Cheers.

Answer 8

Would they ever tell you if they actually had found anything.
Think of this point.
SETI was a sexy selling point at a time when funding for all research was being cut and listening to Radio Telescopes aimed into space like a bunch of inter-galactic eaves droppers was never ever as sexy as firing rockets to the Moon.
There are many successes from the SETI program that have nothing to do with little green men.

Answer 9

#1. They may not use communication signals that we use.
#2. They may prefer communication signals that happen to deteriorate over large distances and/or aren't sent over large distances.
#3. According to current understandings of physics, it is physically impossible to pass the speed of light. Communication also cannot bypass the speed of light. (I disagree, but that's current theory). Meaning A. Most likely, they're stuck on the home planet too, if they exist, and B. they probably aren't bothering to send signals deep into space that they couldn't get a response back for for a bare minimum of 8.6 years (nearest star is 4.3 light years away)
#4. Intelligence is a supremely complex thing, and may not coincide with a body to use it right. Apes, dolphins, whales, and of course, humans are the more intelligent species... and of these, only apes and humans are physically capable of using their bodies to further intelligence. And really, since humans are supposed to have evolved from apes, that really means just one. Meaning... of all the time and divergent evolution of our planet, only One species has simultaneously emerged with intelligence and a body capable of utilizing it.

What if our ET friends are basically dolphins? If intelligent at all? Why does another race have to be vastly superior to our own? We could technically be the greatest minds in the universe, we could be the first ones who tried to search. That doesn't mean we're alone.

In short: your premise is flawed.

Answer 10

Maybe our pings aren't the same as the pings of other life forms. Oh and you do realize, that if the pings we sent out 50 years were traveling at the speed of light, they would still not even have reached the nearest solar system?

Answer 11

or maybe the intellegent life was actually intellegent and didn't screw up their environment. or perhaps they never relied on such means of communication. or perhaps the last of the signals passed us by ages ago and the next signals from another group of beings is still ages away. you over look possible explainations. plus twenty years of searching isn't that great. i wouldn't be surprised if we didn't receive a signal til the year 3000or even later.