One small item in the news last week that rang at least a temporary death knell on still another casualty of the Great Recession was the announcement that funding has been cut for the SETI Project out of UC Berkeley. For those of you who have never seen films like Deep Impact, E.T., Close Encounters, or Contact - to name just a few - SETI is the acronym for Search For Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence and has been an ongoing research project for some years now.
SETI refers to the main project, partially funded by the U.S. government, partially funded by private, non-profit, and corporate donors, which utilizes a vast $50 million dollar array of state of the art telescopes in Northern California to scan deep space looking for evidence of intelligent life outside our solar system and using the only tools we have – radio signals. The entire project is premised on the assumption that if intelligent life does exist out there, maybe it’s developed the same we have, meaning they have radio technology the same as we do. If they do have radio technology and they’re as curious about us as we are about them, then maybe they’re trying to send us some sort of broadcast as their way of saying "hello."
That’s what these incredibly advanced telescopes are looking for – some sign of an organized pattern in radio waves that would indicate they were generated by some sort of manufactured technology – this as opposed to the vast amount of randomly occuring radio waves that occupy much of our known universe. At the SETI website, they have papers that explain all this in excruciatingly technical detail; it’s quite necessary to have a doctorate in astrophysics to understand any of it. But it all boils down to a very simple concept – they know precisely what kind of patterns they are looking for. The name of the game is to set up a system so that you won’t miss this single diamond-in-the-rough buried deep inside this vast sea of quartz. This means they absolutely don’t want any false negatives. So the whole system is designed to generate a ton of false positives in the hopes that none of the negatives turn out to be E.T. They’d much rather be wrong about a billion positives than to be wrong about even one negative. This of course means that they must analyze a great many scans that might fit the pattern even though the odds that even one of them will are slim to none.
But that’s what they’re doing because that’s what we know. We know about radio waves and there really is nothing else in our present treasure trove of knowledge that would apply to this problem. I was not even aware of this $50 million dollar telescope that’s under the governance of UC Berkeley until I read the article last week. Microsoft’s Paul Allen was the benefactor who donated the funds for the telescope and now I guess even his vast resources are no longer sufficient to keep it going. That’s why I’m saying – E.T., if you’re going to phone home, you’d better do it quickly before they pull the plug and I hope you know that home is Berkeley, otherwise no one’s going to be home to get the message. I have no expectation it will happen but, fortunately, this is probably a temporary funding shortage and in a few years those telescopes will hopefully be scanning the skies again.
For the last 11 years, I have been involved in the SETI@Home project at UC Berkeley, which is different from SETI. Unlike SETI which is very expansive and very expensive, SETI@Home is a very low-key and low cost project. When UC Berkeley started this project in 1999, the objective was to find a novel new way of utilizing computer power in order to do the same work as a supercomputer which they could in no way afford. They came up with the idea of recruiting volunteers from all over the world to donate downtime from their personal computers to analyze small packets of data that Berkeley would send on from the Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico. Your computer would analyze the data, determine whether it fit the pattern or not, send the results to Berkeley and then SETI@Home would send you another packet of data and start the process all over again.
My recollection is that they needed to recruit 500,000 volunteers to equal the power of a supercomputer and then scan the skies from Puerto Rico for two years. Things turned out a little differently than they planned. Instead of 500,000 volunteers over a two year period, SETI@Home had that many online in the first two weeks. By the time I joined a few months later, they had over 2,000,000 online with 30,000 new volunteers aboard everyday. It became by far the biggest and most successful computing project in history and has since been expanded to include not only SETI but also cancer and famine research, among other projects. As of this evening, my computer has analyzed almost 350,000 packets of data from Berkeley. There are, of course, some volunteers who have whole banks of personal computers devoted to this project and have analyzed tens of millions of data sets. No E.T. yet. The prize is that if they do discover a planet that has life on it, whose ever computer provided the key that unlocked this greatest mystery in the history of mankind will have that planet named after them.
The two year project has now gone on for eleven years since it costs so little and the computing resources that have been donated are so vast. At least there’s been no mention (even a hint) on the S@H website that they will not continue operating. It is a noble pursuit and I’m happy to be part of it. However, having said that, let me qualify it now by stating that I don’t think anything will ever come of it.
Does that mean I don't think ET is out there? Not at all, quite the opposite. I believe it's highly unlikely that in this almost incomprehensibly vast universe of ours, that this little pinprick that we call our planet would literally be the only place that has intelligent life, let alone any kind of life. Statistically, that just makes no sense at all.
To illustrate why, I like to use the analogy of the Roman Empire. We're using this technology because this is what we have but in all likelihood it's wholly inadequate. To demonstrate why, I’m going to do a little back-testing on history and I’m going to use ancient Rome as the back-test. Let’s pose this same question as if we are living in ancient Rome with the technology they had. Of course, since Aristotle ruled the ancient world and had long since established to everyone’s satisfaction that Earth was the center of the universe (a view that would remain solidly intact until Galileo came along), there was no need to answer any questions about life outside this planet. In ancient times, there was no space, there was just the ether. No one was wondering about life in the ether. What they did wonder about was life on this planet.
So I say go back to ancient Rome and pose the same question but in a very different way. The question that likely occupied the great philosophers of the Roman world is – is there intelligent life outside of the Roman Empire? During ancient Rome, the Mediteranean, Europe, Asia Minor and parts of Asia (I believe Alexander was by far the greatest conqueror of the ancient world and that he got as far as India) were basically the whole of the known world. If the great sages of Rome had wanted to do an experiment to see if there were any other continents or civilizations on the planet, how would they have gone about this?
Pretty much the same as we are, using what they know and the technology they have. What kind of technology did they have? Besides chariots which would have been wholly inadequate for this purpose, basically they knew how to blow glass, make parchments, and communicate with language. So what would they have likely done but write a message in Latin saying, "Is anyone out there?" on a piece of parchment, put it into a glass bottle, take a ship out to the farthest known reaches of the ocean and cast the bottle off. Cast thousands, maybe even millions of bottles off. Then wait to see if any of them come back with the message, "Yes, we're out here."
There are a number of significant problems with this method. Even with millions of bottles being cast into the ocean, it assumes some of them will actually reach the Americas or Australia or Asia. It assumes if by some miracle someone actually finds one, they'll know what it means and what to do with it. It assumes they'll understand Latin and how to respond to it. It assumes that they will respond and throw the bottle back into the ocean. And the biggest assumption of all -- that the very few if any bottles that get tossed back will actually miraculously find their way back to Rome to confirm that Europe and Africa and Asia Minor are not the only civilizations on the planet.
It's pretty much a no-brainer that Rome would be waiting for something that would never come. Does that mean anything? Does that mean that there were no civilizations on the other side of the ocean, or other oceans beyond the one they knew? Does it mean that there were no peoples inhabiting other continents, that there were no Americas, no Asias, no Russias? Of course not. All of these civilizations existed during the time of ancient Rome.
The same is true of SETI. We are using radio technology to search for ET because that's what we have and what we know. But the entire strategy is based on some hugely unlikely assumptions -- that any intelligent life that might exist out there will look like us, will be advanced about the same way that we are, and the biggest assumption of all -- that they will have broadcast technology same as we do. But even if that is true, statistically there would have to be literally millions of planets out there with intelligent of life in order for there to be even one that looks like us. Furthermore, such a planet would have to be precisely at the same moment in their evolutionary development as we are AND asking the same questions that we are. Is there anyone else out there?
Then, assuming that they are at the same stage of development and have developed the same as we have AND have broadcast technology AND decide to use it to send us a radio signal, the chances of that signal miraculously finding its way into the very limited realm of our telescopes and us being able to detect it and interpret it are I think zero. And of course taking into account that they are likely millions or even billions of light years away, and since the universe is only about 14 billion years old, that makes it even more unlikely that a planet would have time to reach the same level of development that we have and still have time to send us a message.
Does that prove anything? Of course not, no more so than the Roman experiment would have proven that South America or Australia did not exist two thousand years ago. So yes, I do believe that it's quite likely that ET is out there. I don't believe it's at all likely that we'll find ET this way. But I can't fault it. It is all we have and we're basing it on all we know. Unfortunately, that isn't much.
Thanks to Todd for bringing the news about the SETI story to my attention. Or, depending on your point of view, you can blame him for inspiring me to write this post.
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