Title pretty much says it, do you think that a signal from extraterrestrial life will be detected in your lifetime?

I'm just curious how people who are crunching for SETI feel about this question.

One of my classes at school is about extraterrestrial life and one key part of the search for ET in the universe is the Drake equation and the variable that represents the average life span of an intelligent civilization that wants to communicate got me thinking.

My own opinion is that no, a signal will not be detected in my lifetime, but from a purely statistical standpoint as it relates to the Drake equation, the longer we look the better our chances are so we need to look and look harder with better and better technology.

It would also seem to make more sense to "transmit" vs just searching for a signal. Setup a beacon on the dark side of the moon powered by a nuke and let it rip.

Do you think that a signal from extraterrestrial life will be detected in your lifetime?

I'd like to say that we'll recieve a transmission, but it'll take a decade or two in order to understand it. The Rosetta Stone comes to mind.

The first reports or details of the transmission will be swept under the carpet in the name of Homeplanet Security, and even so 90% of the report will have thick black marker crossing out the text...

It's too big a sky to be empty - Something will be detected. I hate to sound pessimistic, but I doubt that we'll find it intelligible.

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Honestly, I think we're going to receive a signal sometime in the next 60-70 years.(As is estimated my life expectancy being from the most healthy state in the Union. ^_-) We might also have already received a "signal", ala Big Ear in 1977, but I'm not looking for us to decipher it. We have no idea how to translate much of what is already on Earth and that's only because we're able to compare it to something we humans already know.(Echo-location of Bats akin to radar, dolphin pitches similar to sonar, etc.) A rosetta stone would be great but what are the odds of finding it? Maybe the outlandish ideas of Roswell or the mystery room under the Sphinx might hold answers but from a realistic point, yes, we'll be SOL if we try to figure it out.

I don't think we'll have the paranoia as Neo says, though being a US Citizen, I wouldn't put that much past the GOP-controlled government. Plus, something of that magnitude, given the sorry state of our intelligence, I don't think it'll be long before we see something on CNN or Fox. Plus, I'd hope the government would realize that this would be something to unite the world against and given our technological strength, manpower, industry and economy, the US would naturally be among the leaders of any joint-international effort.

Anywho, 2 cents worth. We'll find something in the next 20 years, probably crack it's contents 10 years after that and in 30 years, we'll be finding images of them soon enough.

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As far as I'm concerned, finding a signal is a small part of this. It simply answers the question: are we alone? That then leaves us with a new question: what happens the day after?

We won't be able to decode it, unless it was intended to be decoded (a Contact scenerio). Imagine a signal, that the encoding and compression wasn't known, now add that we have no reference for the language. Heck imagine it was in a language we did know, but we didn't know which one (ie it could be chinese, latin, buhi, or Tamil), even here it would take a long time to figure out.

So what do we do now?

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Still looking for something profound or inspirational to place here.

So what do we do now?
Debate the Fermi Paradox, drink lots of coffee, and wait for something to happen.

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Debate the Fermi Paradox, drink lots of coffee, and wait for something to happen.


I guess I was about as clear as mud. By now, I meant when the message comes (and we cannot decode it). I guess I do need more coffee.

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Still looking for something profound or inspirational to place here.

> Debate the Fermi Paradox, drink lots of coffee, and wait for something to
> happen.
>
>
> I guess I was about as clear as mud. By now, I meant when the message comes
> (and we cannot decode it). I guess I do need more coffee.

The rest of the world will debate the lies of the Church, the Pope will be burned in Effigy, Islamics will claim Mohammed told them to kill all the infidels but since they are no longer the chosen ones, they will kill themselves, Oil companies will exploit those that can't find bombs to strap to themselves and France will realize it's stupidity and simply accede to rightful German rule.

In the meanwhile, nothing would really change because even if we get the signal, it would take decades to send a reply, if they haven't picked up our leakage already. Maybe we'll get real lucky and they bounce back "What's Opera Doc?"

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We will overcome some day...

I mean the evolution in science and the quest towards this goal is the same :

- perhaps we will not find it during our lifetimes

But others will stand up on our shoulders and will continu were we left off

- in the end we will be succesful...

Da Vinci allready had the idea of the helicopter, though he couldnot built one. As time passes by other techniques and technologies come at hand. Other discoveries in supporting sciences will enhance things. I call it technical evolution.
So dont worry, if the time is right humankind still will realise great achievements, nothing of our search will not be usefull.
Even if an experiment has not the desired outcome it will be usefull for the others coming behind us, because they will stand upon the shoulders of our knowledge...

Greetings from Belgium ;-))

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what's this about 1977 ?

my two cents:
it seems Quite possible that somebody is already sending a signal. physics is pretty universal, so you gotta assume ET know about broadcasting. so you could almost assume that there is an advanced civ somewhere that has been broadcasting for a while now, and that we are already receiving info. is there cause for concern that SETI isn't covering enough wavelengths? are the work units chopped up too much? could there be a message over a few WU's that is being missed? is the SETI thing running on my computer doing a good enough job of decoding?

what about the current rates of dish installation and scanning ?
is there an ETA when the entire sky will have been recorded for the SETI project?

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<img src='http://www.boincstats.com/stats/banner.php?cpid=91fd5a674ce4fa63eb7fb88a341d6698'>

Welcome to SETI/BOINC.

is there cause for concern that SETI isn't covering enough wavelengths? are the work units chopped up too much? could there be a message over a few WU's that is being missed? is the SETI thing running on my computer doing a good enough job of decoding?
Flip a coin. We might be doing everything right, but nobody's transmitting; we could be doing everything wrong, and the universe could be abuzz with verifiable signals.

I don't think we'll be able to answer those questions until after they're made moot - Either by extraterrestrial communications, or by our own demise.

what about the current rates of dish installation and scanning ? is there an ETA when the entire sky will have been recorded for the SETI project?
AFACT SETI is a continuous project. Or at least so I'm led to believe.

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No, I don't think we'll detect a signal in any of our lifetimes, but I hope I'm wrong.

It may be that radio waves are a really bad way to communicate. Maybe it's something only very primitive, recently industrialized civilizations use. It could be that in 100 years or less we'll abandon radio waves in favor of some exotic new technology and when we look to the sky we'll see it teeming with information from advanced civilizations.

If using radio waves is something that generally lasts no more than a few centuries then radio signals would only be brief blinks of activity just before the real signals begin. There would be little point in advanced civilizations using radio waves to send out signals, little value in primitive beings like us listening for them (though it's all we know now, so that what we look for) and little hope of catching some as they fly by and then stop when their senders find a better way.

Or maybe the universe is mostly full of microbes and algae-like stuff and we'll never find anything. Look how long it took us to get to this point. I hope Earth is just a late bloomer, but it could be a child prodigy. I've read that Earth could have as little as another half-billion years of viability for life. Maybe that's a pessimistic estimate, but that would mean life on Earth is 90% done and we only just got here. So maybe it was a huge fluke that we became as advanced as we have and an asteroid or other environmental disaster could do us in any minute.

I don't think we are the only technologicaly advanced beings in the universe, but we could be very few and far between.

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Well since I'm only 17, I think we will find one in my life time.

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> Well since I'm only 17, I think we will find one in my life time.
>
Im 16, so i concure ... that is i dont get run over or die in a weird and wonderful way and live my natural life time!

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Considering the vast distances involved - and the EXTREMELY short length of my lifetime - NO. Would I love it to happen, absolutely.

Is there other life in the Universe - IMHO - absolutely. Yes, the Earth, and our solar system are VERY special - we have been gifted with a great planet - and MANY other circumstances that allowed us to evolve life (intelligent life) here. Are we the ONLY intelligent life? Well...depends on how arrogant you are. I don't consider the human race as being all that smart anyway...so....it's easy for me to think there are others more intelligent. Also...consider that for every star in the Milky Way - there is also, roughly, another GALAXY....

Don't get me wrong - we ARE lucky. Life may not be as widespread as I once wanted to believe - however - there MUST be other planets SOMEWHERE that have been as equally blessed (or even moreso) than ours - and therefore, life would thrive there as well.

The problem is the distance. We are bound, at this point in time, by the speed of light. Our communications - forgetting even about SETI - have only reached maybe...70 or 80 light years out (which is a STUPIDLY small distance).

There are assumptions made, of course. Sure..we may have sent transmissions to an intelligent race - maybe they don't understand them as such (and, the same goes for us as well - maybe we received them...but don't know it.)

There are soooooo many things to it that I won't expand on here further. Briefly, I will say that if we do have contact - it will be a VERY unlikely event - the odds are high....we won the lottery. The true universe is JUST too vast - and, Earth, if you look at it is in a very quiet place (good for us) - and not located near any likely candidates for life in our near future.


My opinion...yours may differ. I would love to see other life. It may make our fighting over this little blue dot finally seem trivial.

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Yes, you're right, it really is a question of time. Not distance, not probability, not willingness to communicate, not technology. All of those variables pale in comparison to the time involved for a signal just to transverse the milky way due to the vastness of space. With a liberal interpretation of Drakes equation, I think that statistically, we need to be doing something like SETI for 1000 years to run across a signal and we've only had radio for 70 years. 70 seems like a long time in human standards but it is less than an instant on the cosmic scales we're talking about.

It really is a scale of things that humans cannot comprehend because we only live such a short time and the earth is so tiny. It's interesting. We're the pioneers.

In my bio, I've pointed out that there's something called an "inverse square law" that applies to radiated energy, such as omnidirectional radio signals. Basically this says that if you get a certain amount of energy at a certain range, than moving the object x further away from the source means you get 1/(x^2) of the energy hitting the target object. Let's do the math (please someone check my math, as I am quite rusty).

Assume a transmitter on planet X orbiting Alpha Centauri that induces one gigawatt of power in a radiotelescope-sized receiving antenna one mile away (a ludicrously high amount, but let's run with it). Alpha Centauri is approximately 4.3 light years, or approximately 5.9x10^12 miles. That's 1x10^9 watts divided by 34.81x10^24, or approximately 2.9x10^-17 watts. That's sixteen zeroes in front of that 2. Ordinary radio receivers, just as a reference, tend to cut out at around the sixth zero, and we're talking a signal strength a trillion times weaker. I'm not sure how low radiotelescope thresholds go, but at some point we're talking about heat from sunlight causing more activity in the antenna than this signal. Seems like long odds of catching the Centauran super-broadcast version of "My Favorite Martian."

No, it is not possible for us to pick up an unintentional signal from a planet in another star system. It would HAVE to be a Contact scenario, where they somehow knew we were here and were sending us a tightly focused signal (which on their end still seriously sucks down the power). We have to face the possibility that this may not happen simply because it would be very difficult to detect this small planet from any great distance, and even so the aliens would be trying to strike all candidate planets, so it really depends on their commitment to the broadcast project. Can you imagine humans setting up thousands of transmitter beams broadcasting for centuries and millenia while waiting for a signal back?

All in all, I doubt this project will produce a positive result. I participate anyway, because I don't believe hypothetical skepticism like I've shown is enough reason not to try. People much smarter than me have been wrong before. This project costs so little in the grand scheme of things. Also this is a good testbed for tackling the problems of distributed computing projects. Just look at the evolution from SETI classic to BOINC.

As long as someone has broadcasted something within the last 90000 years we should pick something up from our own galaxy.

Maybe Seti should do more random sampling hoping to strike it rich?

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> No, it is not possible for us to pick up an unintentional signal from a planet
> in another star system. It would HAVE to be a Contact scenario, where they
> somehow knew we were here and were sending us a tightly focused signal (which
> on their end still seriously sucks down the power).
>
> All in all, I doubt this project will produce a positive result. I participate
> anyway, because I don't believe hypothetical skepticism like I've shown is
> enough reason not to try. People much smarter than me have been wrong before.
> This project costs so little in the grand scheme of things. Also this is a
> good testbed for tackling the problems of distributed computing projects. Just
> look at the evolution from SETI classic to BOINC.
>

I agree on both points.

1. Consider Seti@home is only searching a very specific narrow band of frequencies - see the links on the Seti Classic pages. The arguments over this narrow band have raged since the inception of radio seti. It implies that we search for a contact signal rather than a wideband splurge of communications broadcast.

2. Regardless of a good dose of healthy skepticism, I too contribute to Seti@home because I can, it develops DC projects for more tangible results and finally, you never know until you look .......

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> 1. Consider Seti@home is only searching a very specific narrow band of
> frequencies - see the links on the Seti Classic pages. The arguments over
> this narrow band have raged since the inception of radio seti. It implies
> that we search for a contact signal rather than a wideband splurge of
> communications broadcast.

Actually, my point I was trying to show with the numbers is the Contact scenario is the only signal we can possibly receive. Any signal not intended for us and tightly focused on us would literally be a trillion times too weak for a receiver in our star system to pick up. And conversely ET will never hear our open air broadcasts for the same reason.

My numbers were even overly optimistic, using a huge transmitter that has to my knowledge never been used on Earth for practical transmission, and ignored many factors, like interference from natural noise, noise in the receiving set, degradation by the atmospheres at the destination and--presumably--source, and a myriad other things that can go wrong with a radio signal.

I will state it again clearly: from what I know of radio theory, it is not possible to pick up a signal like our open-air television or radio from a distance even as close as the nearest star system to ours.

Given that, looking on the hydrogen line is logical given the limited resources SETI has. I'd like to look in other "quiet areas" of the spectrum too, but I understand SETI's reasoning.