| Personal background |
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I am a fairly good emulation of a living, human being.
I am almost absolutely certain that there are no aliens (apart from semi-socialised, barely tamed near-humans like myself) anywhere in the cosmos and there never will be. I am convinced that the only life anywhere, ever is right here and right now. Earth is unique in all the Universe in being inhabited.
We were once on the path to creating the alien, those Other Men, the Seed of Earth, the many millions of cultures that would have been the Children of Man but we failed. We retreated. We gave up. We killed the Dream of Stars.
There will be no cities in the skies. There will be no habitats on the sands of Mars. There will never be a thirteenth man on the Moon.
We had a tiny window when the powers, the knowledge, the will, the treasure and the Dream came together to make possible an infinite, eternal future for our children.
We wasted it all.
We threw it away.
And now Life will die on this rock and the Universe will roll on in endless silence.
Believing us alone, forever, and doomed, why would I participate in SETI? Why not? We may learn something from the effort. We may do real Science. It s a small enough effort for possibly vast rewards.
And it is always possible I am terribly wrong and we will find Those Other Men.
I'd like that.
It would mean that even when the human song ends and we are forgotten the Universe may still have beings who look at the stars and dream.
I think it is highly unlikely, but it's a nice image. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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1: I run SETI@home because it's there. It's a small effort, it is an excuse to keep my machines running 24/7 so I never need to wait for them to boot before I can use them and it costs me very little. It might just possibly led to new knowledge, new science, new wonders. The human species is doomed; we will never lift off of this planet and we've ensured that no technological species succeeding us can ever have a starship-building civilisation, we've used all the easy energy, but while we're here we may as well occupy ourselves with exploring the limited part of the cosmos that is accessible to us.
2: I love SETI@home. It's Humanity at its best. It's sort of a a smaller scientific equivalent of Doctors-without-borders or the polio eradication effort. And it might yield interesting results. The SETI spin-offs, like ASTEROIDS and EINSTEIN and PROTEIN-FOLDING certainly have. I would have done SETI@ even had the classic not given us a fairly cool screensaver. It appeals to my sense of wonder.
3: Get more funding. Convince the IAU to allow people to buy the right to *OFFICIALLY* name stars and nebulae after their loved ones for a small donation - in addition to any names the objects already have - and use that income for SETI and other science. There's no reason why a collected catalogue of catalogues can't have one additional field in the entry for every object and that field can't be a personal name of a human. With seven milliard humans alive and several hundred milliard stars and cloudy bits that could amount to a sizeable chunk of change.
Ask the Churches for money. Tell them we might find angels - which is unlikely but true.
Put 50-km dishes on Farside. Optical and radio. This could be done for far less than the cost of one aircraft carrier.
Put VLBI dishes in the Lagrange loci. They don't need to be precisely placed as software can correct for drift and a film of aluminium need not mass very much per dish.
Humans managed to land a robot on Eros. Were we to mass-produce probes we could drop them onto thousands of falling rocks. The resultant network of dishes and scopes could be used for interesting if slightly varying long-baseline interferometry, among other stuff. We should be mass-producing beacons to put on the minor asteroid dwarf planetoids anyway, just for traffic control; adding some computational power and a dish wouldn't increase either their cost or mass by much.
Build a very large array on Eris and another on Pluto. Both projects would be fairly cheap as they could be done as part of a manned mission to explore those icy rocks. It would not be hard to get a few million volunteers to go even were the mission one-way and lengthy. *I* would go.
I've been trying to think of a viable, cost-effective way to send some RTG battery packs and a set of upgrades to the Pioneers and Voyagers and have come to the obvious conclusion that it would be massively cheaper just to build a few hundred robots and fire them off in random directions - of course, I mean "in carefully chosen directions" - to form an ever-expanding shell of radio and optical "eyes". Given gravity boosts by the planets, which could be the subjects of science flybys, it might be fairly cheap (compared to a war or an Olympic Event) to surround our star with a vast network of sensors. I would have preferred to repair and re-purpose the Voyagers and Pioneers but that's just sentiment.
I know none of my suggestions are going to happen. Like finding aliens, it would be nice but it's completely outside the realm of the possible. It's a shame. It would be nice to have a bleepy robot on every falling rock in the System. |
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