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| Personal background |
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| There's not much to say because there's so much to cover and so few words to say it all in. What can I say? I'm female, 23 at the time of this writing and I was born on the twelfth stroke of midnight. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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1. Honestly? I think life is a natural occurance in the universe. Where life can be sustained, it IS sustained. But that's not to say sentient life, much less sentient life capable of actually making radio waves. Earth is roughly 4 billion years old. The universe is roughly 8 to 12 billion years old. Either the universe is young or Earth is fricken old. At any rate, if it took Earth one half to one third the current age of the universe to produce humans, then any other intelligent life out there must not be too far ahead or behind humans. I believe that dolphins are sentient (lots of evidence for it, they even recently passed a self awareness test). The only thing stopping dolphins and elephants from producing technology is that they lack hands with which to produce it. At any rate, the odds are for other life, sentient or not, and I think it'd be cool if we DID find another civilization out there. But if we DID find somebody else out there, what would we do? It'd be impossible to communicate with them, take thousands of years just to send a transmission, what garauntee do we have that they'd be listening?
2. If we did send a beacon out, how long do we leave it running? Humans took 2million years just to get radio going. What if we did? What if some alien version of SETI picked up the beacon? What then? Are we really willing to wait another thousand, ten thousand years to get a reply? I read one user's profile, he works with a radio station in Houston with 100,000 watts of power. He's convinced the signal has left the planet... Radio stations are omnidirectional, a broadcast... Most of the power is lost just trying to get it out a few tens of kilometers. A narrow beam at 100,000watts might make it to an alien civilization, but an omnidirectional broadcast? Nah... That's why I don't think we'll be able to find any alien civilizations that actually WANT to be found. I suggest that for SETI we take Drake's equasion and add on the fraction of civilizations radio capable civilizations that have survived that actual |
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