| Personal background |
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| I'm AJ Milne, currently mostly a hardware architect, occasionally (tho' none too recently) a published writer, mostly nonfiction, journalism, some scraps of fiction. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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My views of SETI are, roughly, in no particular order of importance:
(1) That life in general may easily be fairly common in the universe, and we're reasonably likely to find it eventually, if only because we're reasonably likely to be around a long, long time to look, and this will give us plenty of opportunity to survey our surroundings, and out to a significant distance. But note also that the life I'm talking about here--as in: life in any particular place you look--is very, very unlikely to be intelligent life, or life whose intelligence we can easily recognize--the more common observation--just based on the necessarily naive guess we can make from knowledge of our own planet's natural history thus far--will be of atmospheres whose gas mixes suggest biotic processes of some variety at work, up to and including but by no means exclusively the obvious signature of life somewhat like ours: significant quantities of free oxygen. This may tell us much about the nature of that life at the biochemical level, but little beyond this. A lively soup of biochemistry won't, generally, even tell us if the local life is even multicellular as yet.
(2) That the current methods of SETI are not especially likely to find anything. Depending on a remote civilization deliberately sending us detectable RF or optical signals depends on too much we don't know; we don't know anyone's going to bother, and, again, since intelligent life may be incredibly rare, the average distances may simply make it untenable, but
(3) it still makes sense to make an effort here, at at least the level of investment we are doing. Call it playing a longshot on that small investment--the discovery would, it goes without saying, be monumental. And, as importantly, we know far too little to rule it out, or even reasonably assess the probability especially accurately. The error bars are enormous. Even saying 'don't bother' right now would be getting ahead of ourselves. It also gets work out of the way that we can do now, and leaves us free to do other types of surveys in the future as new instruments and methods become available.
(4) That if a volunteer distributed computing method could be arrived at which could assist in the assessment, say, of exoplanet spectra toward sussing out the contents of their atmospheres, that this would be a very sensible endeavour as well. While I've much respect for SETI, I find myself thinking we should also very definitely be investing in, more generically, SETL--which I hereby coin (if it hasn't already been done) as a term for the more general search for extraterrestrial life, not necessarily intelligent. Locating exoplanet targets whose gas mixes suggest biotic processes would tell us much, and help prioritize future instrument and technology investments toward other sorts of surveys. |
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