| Personal background |
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I am currently studying Artificial Intelligence and Psychology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
My homepage is at http://leamington.homedns.org/ |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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It would be arrogant and shortsighted of us to deny that extra-terrestrial life exists. However, the vast distances involved may mean that any signals, limited by the speed of light, could take eons to travel between two civilizations. Humans have very little chance of contact with ETI, until/if either we or they discover a method of hyperfast travel.
Placing a beacon is a good idea - but placing any form of meaningful information on the beacon to be transmitted would be impractical, as the recipient would have no way of knowing how to decipher the information. The best we could do would be to transmit a message in some mathematical form, or using a 'universal' such as chemical properties to indicate intelligence. A method of getting a particular point across, other than the fact that the signal is unarguably artificial, seems unlikely. Even these methods are based on what we perceive to be universal - there is no guarantee that another species would see these 'truths' as universal. Exchange of language would be confounded by this same problem - without physical exchange, we may never be able to find a medium of communication which the other party recognizes or can use.
Another problem which arises with the implementation of a beacon is that civilizations which discover EM/Radio after the beacon signal has reached their world (lets call them Marconians), will probably assume that this signal is naturally occuring, and ignore/compensate for it as nothing but interference. Assuming that SETI have got their assumptions right, and other forms of intelligent life broadcast a beacon in a similar way to us, then these naive Marconians will probably assume that that signal is natural as well. Indeed, how do we know that we are not Marconians? |
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