Contact with extraterrestrial life by 2025?
An image of the Allen Telescope Array, a project which could give astronomers the ability to look hundreds of light years into space and, they hope, discover intelligent life.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)SAN FRANCISCO--If you're one of the many people who doubt there's intelligent life anywhere else in the universe, or even someone who thinks there is but that it will take centuries to find it, get ready to be surprised.
"We'll find E.T. within two dozen years," senior SETI astronomer Seth Shostak said Tuesday night at an event held at Yahoo's Brickhouse here.
That is, he said, if the assumptions of many researchers within the SETI Institute are correct, assumptions that are based on a collision of computing power under Moore's Law and the distance into space we can look with new instruments that will be available to researchers in the years to come.
SETI Institute senior astronomer Seth Shostak, who spoke at Yahoo's Brickhouse in San Francisco Tuesday night about when we may discover intelligent extraterrestrial life.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)Shostak's talk was largely theoretical and was a quick recap of the history of the SETI project. He explained that it had originally been a NASA project, but that it had been canceled in the 1990s by a Nevada senator unhappy with its lack of success.
Now a private nonprofit based in Mountain View, Calif., SETI is the primary organization looking for intelligent life in outer space.
And Shostak estimated that if the assumptions about computing power and the strength of forthcoming research instruments are correct, we should be able to search as far out as 500 light years into space by 2025, a distance he predicted would be enough--based on scientist Frank Drake's estimate of there being 10,000 civilizations in our galaxy alone capable of creating radio transmitters--to find evidence of life intelligent enough to broadcast its existence.
The main tool for this research, he added, could be the Allen Telescope Array, a project funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and run by the UC Berkeley radio astronomy lab (RAL) and SETI. The array, made from dozens of small antennas, could become strong enough by 2025, Shostek said, to look deep enough into space to achieve what mankind has been attempting almost as long as we've been curious enough to look into the sky.
Daniel Terdiman is a staff writer at CNET News covering games, Net culture, and everything in between. E-mail Daniel. 
Re sbalourdos: As to warp drive engines, there is a theory to increase the dark energy behind a craft and decrease it in front of a craft, where it could actually travel faster than the speed of light (and its occupants would survive)... the problem is the amount of energy it would take... so we'd have to come up with a way to generate obscene amounts of energy.
Scientists have found things that they thought were "intelligent", turned out it was just a *new* class of stars.
There are countless ways to communicate over long distance i have seen.
I remember not too long ago, someone suggested using stars as massive beacons to create a network.
It would be a SLOW network, but hey, its massive, so you can't just say "oh, i wasn't looking", or intergalactic friendship is over.
Using the star-net as an example, how would they know it was natural, or changes by an intelligence?
They would need to know what kind of base they would be using, how they were encoding the messages, then the probably very long method of understanding what the gibberish even meant. (and considering we just barely created a simple pictograph communication device for Dolphins, it might take a long time)
2 years, i'd be surprised if in 20 years, we are looking at this again.
Bit harsh, i know, but really, this kind of stuff is hard, and depending on your definition of contact, technically harder than putting people on other planets.
I know i would love to see it happen, but the chances are quite low, considering the distances, different species with different languages, ideas of communication, encoding, signal weakness, etc.
Better to focus on massive "telescopes" grids, in space, to actually see if there is signs of intelligence, rather than hearing them.
Seeing them on other planets would be a much better achievement than a potential false positive...
That is, of course, after we fix our current major problems, as solitare_pax said.
Still, contact is a way out there in 2100+
I bet its the same out there - E.T.'s flying saucer got repossessed before he could make contact with us for a low-cost loan.
Another part of that problem is remembering that we have such information for long enough that it becomes useful. The storage-to-decode technology lifecycle problem is typical even of terrestrial events. Memory isn't enough. We all remember the trip to the Moon, but sadly, much of the technical know how for building and launching heavy lift vehicles died with the generation that built them and that was only a generation ago. We can recreate them but given some worldwide catastrophe, it is possible that even the necessity of that can fade. We are a much more fragile civilization than we want to admit when it comes to the relationship of high technology to organic lifecycles. One can speculate that simiar relationships exist elsewhere. Discontinuities should be factored into the equations.
So there are problems not insoluable but perhaps unsolved for both our civilization and any other beyond the seemingly insurmountable problem of faster than light travel.
ARE YOU SURE?
By my calculations in two dozen years it would be 2032. If you want to say by the year 2025 why don't you just say within 17 years.
Am I WRONG HERE?
Alex
The problem is funding. We are sending spacecraft to Mars to "look" for signs of life, costing nearly half a billion each. Why not put some of that money into SETI, where we have a greater chance at contact.
When I go to bed at night, I always wonder what another species might be doing right at that time, in another galaxy, solar system and planet!
Bill Gates - you can help!
Re: increase funding... again, I kind of have to re-ask my earlier question. If ID isn't science (shouldn't be taught or funded)... and SETI would have to rely on some kind of scientific detection of intelligence... how can it be science? How would they know if the found anything to begin with?Why should it be funded? I suppose it can set up as a religion, get tax exemption, and pass the collection plate at the FSM (Flying Spaghetti Monster) forum.... or maybe be funded by StarTrek fans.
The famous Fermi's statement still holds: we might as well lack 20 years to get so far, but for which wild reason all those postulated cultures should be expecting and not have reached us already?
http://www.disclosureproject.org/
http://www.spacefest.info/Speakers.html
1. Why are we so interested in finding out if intelligent life exists out there? What does it do for us as a civilization? Any 'evidence' we find will be based on passive observatiton of some type of radiation that we can detect. Which means the origination of that 'signal' is already millions of years old. Civilizations rise and fall in fractions of that time. Something may have existed, but might not now. Even so, we have no way to communicate with them. Anything we send to them will take an equally infinite amount of time to reach them. So unless we are interested in watching reruns of their sitcoms broadcast into space there's little constructive benefit in even detecting a signal.
2. People have discussed the basic limitation of faster than light (FTL) travel on our part, whether it be phsyically moving faster than light or transmitting information faster than light. This is a huge limitation, but clearly not one that is insurmountable. I'm not talking about warp drives or hyperspace or anything fictional. We have clear evidence in our own galaxy, observable evidence I might add that travelling faster than light is possible. The secret...gravity.
If we look at a black hole we know that light can not escape a black hole because the massive gravitational field is too strong. This indicates that gravity is capable of traveling faster than the speed of light. Or at least changing the gravitational constant of relative space allows you to "alter" the speed of light. Master gravity and we can travel faster than the speed of light (at least relative to our known universe).
3. Others brought up the very valid point of priorities. We are spending millions and billions of dollars on SETI and other space programs (granted not all government money, but money none-the-less). While these may be interested and ultimately ground breaking programs, they really pale in comparison to the problems this planet is facing right now. While it is nice to have a forward looking plan for the future, ignoring the delimma's today that could prevent that future from transpiring is very short sighted. We need to deal with the issues we have here and now that are a threat to us before we worry about playing spaceman and looking for extra terrestrials.
PS - Just laugh at that, don't waste time poking at all the scientific inconsistencies.
Not that I'm anywhere near perfect.
With such lag time, it makes more sense to send machine designs, programs, and data to interact through.
I've seen aliens with my own eyes, living and breathing and standing right in front of me. I don't need to wait 10+ years for some idiot in an observatory to tell me something I already know NOW and TODAY.
They EXIST they are REAL. DEAL with it. Don't hold your breath for 10+ years, they are HERE NOW. They've just been doing their own thing, that's all. Because, even if they appear on national television, NOBODY will believe it, they'll just think it's fake. An alien could come to you and poke you on the nose and you'd never believe it. Maybe people are just programmed not to believe it.
Even if I tell you IVE SEEN THEM WITH MY OWN EYES. 90% of people won't to believe me.
So for them, they have the greatest cover, because they are invisible to us, and apparently they will be for another 10+ years as long as people keep believing this garbage.
OPEN YOUR EYES. A blip on a radar in 10+ years does not substitute whats real TODAY AND NOW.
OPEN YOU EYES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
**** 90% of people WON'T believe me.
I was typing too fast. Thinking about this garbage makes me irritated and I make typos.
If you don't want to believe me,I don't care. Go ahead and wait 10+ years for a stupid blip on a computer screen.
I already know they've been here, and since I've seen them with my own eyes I don't need to wait for someone else to confirm what I already know.
I only made this post in a vain attempt to get people to listen, but I know nobody will.
I'm going to go back to living my daily life now because I don't need to waste my time thinking about aliens right now. I've got a job and other more important thing to worry about. If someone makes a reply worth acknowledging maybe I'll come back.
When they were present, Love literally flowed in the room. It was awesome, and yet something totally natural. Once another 'spirit' turned up, and the Love was right off the scale. This spirit refused to give any name, and when pressed, said 'Any description I could give of myself, would limit the possibilities of what I can be!' It took me some years to realise that here was the perfect description of 'God' ( shorn of religion and its fear-based dogma ). These spirits knew my answers before I opened my mouth, being clearly able to read my mind.
This supports the spiritual idea that everything is One, and that identity-based separation is simply an illusion. Living as we do in a rigidly fear-based identity-separated world, we are as a species wrecking our planetary home. We are looking to technology to take us to the stars, when the truth is right under our noses.
You cannot change the world - you can only change yourself. In doing so, The One Mind knows, and brings an event to you to mark your change. And so you HAVE changed the world.
Change occurs in The One Mind - your mind. You can choose with free will to unite or divide, to respond with love or fear. You cannot, however, ride both horses at once. No loving person can do a job that causes others harm without incurring karmic consequences, and yet vast numbers of people earn their living through harmful actions.
This species needs to slow down, take deep breaths, be inspired by The One Mind (TOM), and let the crazy fear-based drive for bigger, better, faster, and more, fall away into a relaxed state where the mind effortlessly creates solutions that are love-inspired win-win, rather than fear-based 'I win - you lose!'.
Simply understanding that death only affects the birth-to-death i-dentity body, and that the spiritual reality behind the temporary 'you' exists forever, would dramatically reduce the insane human birthrate.
Incidentally, when the channeller returned to the body after the guide had left, his body would jump, exactly like use of a defibrillator in an A&E. He would be disorientated for a minute or two, and have no memory whatsoever of the time 'here' or 'away'.
Simplicity is the answer, as every teacher has said throughout history, and yet man insists on complexity, with all its consequences.
Love from Zen :-)
They ARE here and have been for a VERY long time...look at the cave drawings and pictagraphs found all over the world from 100's and 1000's of years ago....
Get a clue people Extraterrestrial beings have been here...and continue to "upgrade" the human race....
- by drboy December 4, 2008 2:14 PM PST
- Suppose, just suppose...Back in the days, the sailboat never got invented, Europeans were content with their lot, and went on to invent the vacuum tube, semiconductors, microwave devices, huge antennas, etc. But even further back in the days, early migrators from northeast Asia walked across the Bering Strait, down the west coast and eventually settled, developed and fluorished in what we call The Americas, eventually inventing and improving the drum. Here we have two, high tech, civilizations, each with what they believe to be the latest in communications technology. Each society communicating with its own members, unaware of the other. My point is, just because today, we, as a tech species think electromagnetic radiation is the most appropriate form in which to communicate, doesn't mean species elsewhere in the universe agree. As path loss increases rapidly with frequency and distance, and the speed of light enters the picture, an intelligent species 'out ther' may have long ago concluded that the enormous amount of energy required to produce radio waves could be put to better use. On the other hand, or tentacle, the most intelligent entitys 'out there' may not be capable of the physical manipulations required to design, resource, manufacture and operate such devices. Perhaps the Drake Equation could be modified to include that intelligence in itself may be the highest achievement.
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