Can we finally put Seti to bed?

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

It is way too soon to give up. Sure, it's disappointing that nothing of clearly intelligent origin has come our way, but most astronomers know that this is a project that could reasonably be expected to take a very long time before we ever get that ping.

Answer 2

Yep! Perhaps we are the center of the universe. Perhaps the earth is flat. Perhaps some god that popped up out of nowhere did it all.

Come on! Get real. Seti has been searching for how long? Maybe 15-20 years? How long has our civilization been producing signals that might be detected elsewhere out of the 13 billion year old universe? Maybe 150 years? Will it still be doing so in another 150 years? Probably not. Seti has to find something so small in the total time so large since the beginning of the universe that may have operated for 300 hundred years. It's not near enough time yet to turn it off. A civilization 10 million light years away may have produced some signals but they haven't arrived here yet. And we may be gone before they do arrive. But, maybe, just maybe there is/was a civilization somewhere that produced these signals for a few years that was the right distance away that we haven't found yet.

The universe is vast. The time since the beginning of the universe is long. Civilizations may be neither.

Answer 3

First of all, there is no "center" to the universe. Bone up on your cosmology and Big Bang theory.

Secondly, almost all of our SETI searching has been done in that part of the electromagnetic spectrum THOUGHT to be the most probable for finding alien signals. There's a whole lot of the spectrum that we have never examined for any length of time. Also there's a distinct possibility that extraterrestrial civilizations have found more efficient means to communicate over great distances than simple radio.

You should try thinking outside the box a little bit.

Answer 4

I dont know why I'm bothering to respond to such a non-question, but I feel the need to inform you so that you will hopefully change your mind or at least think about the problem a little differently.

Our planet Earth has been around for about 5 billion years, the universe has been around for about 13-15 billion years. We've only known about radio waves for a hundred years! Think about how tiny of a time span that is. And most of that 100 years we didnt understand radio very well. We've really only sent one 'ping' with appreciable radio power EVER. All of the tv shows and news broadcasts that we've sent out have had such incredibly low power that even with our most powerful radio telescopes today we would only be able to see maybe 10 or 20 light years away. The one ping we did send is only 30 years away (and it lasted about 3 minutes).

Even if there were a million civilizations in our own galaxy that had been transmitting for 100 years, we still wouldnt have a good chance of hearing them. Our galaxy is HUGE. It has 400,000,000,000 (4 hundred billion!) stars. If there were a million civilizations, thats still one civilization per 400,000 stars! We havnt even really looked at our closest 1,000.

Keep in mind that a civilization cant just broadcast everywhere with super high power. Even turning all of the energy of a star into radio waves wouldnt stand out if its on the other side of our galaxy.

Giving up now is like getting up and leaving in the first inning of a baseball game.

Answer 5

Private people and companies support SETI through contributions in the hope that we will find proof of other civilizations and maybe even communicate with them. Cool!

Millions of people spend money to support the idea that an invisible being is building a future home for them in the sky and no one seems to worry about how dumb that idea is........

Answer 6

Our first radio transmissions were in 1900 by Marconi. They were not very strong, but by now are 107 light-years out into space. The diameter of our galaxy is about 100,000 light-years, and beyond our galaxy are literally (meaning this is the actual order of magnitude of the count) BILLIONS of galaxies. So most of these regions have no clue that we are here and broadcasting.

In addition, SETI does not broadcast, it only receives, and hasn't been up and running for that long, certainly not in terms of astronomical time. Put it to bed? We've barely gotten started.

Answer 7

A giddiditgoddaminiite criticizing the "Church of the the Holy Alien Signal"?

I see a new religious war coming! Hold on to your hats!

Or just keep laughing about the fools on either side. Now that is what I like to do!

:-)

Answer 8

You've clearly not heard of the Wow signal. Check it out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow_signal

Answer 9

I absolutely agree, kill it! We get hundreds of ufo sightings a day, yet this radio method is garbage. If we want to search for them, we need to build ufos or some other means of communicae. I just saw a giant glowing ufo the size of a football field earlier this year over Amarillo Texas, they're everywhere! why s.e.t.i.? stupid