I want to believe — but yet another massive search for alien technosignatures just turned up nothing

[Admin]

Hunting for alien civilizations isn't a matter of just waiting around for them to show up; it's the business of combing through enormous volumes of data to look for peculiar signals.

I want to believe — but yet another massive search for alien technosignatures just turned up nothing : Read more

 

[ChrisA]

Negative results are still "Good Science".

What we are learning or have learned is that technological civilizations are at least VERY rare. As we observe more and more in the coming decades we will be able to refine this and say "'very rare" with greater precision. Perhaps we will learn the number is "one per galaxy, on average". or whatever the number is.

Then the theorists can explain why the number is so low. My guess is that the transition from primitive to modern human intelligence required a statistically improbable event. That is a very rare genetic mutation that happened coincidently with a population bottleneck. The universe might be filled with "people" who can use a rock as a hammer and build a fire but only one in a million of them goes on to create agriculture and written language. THis is my guess. But see, this is the way science works, we observe that technology is extremely rare and then try to explain why and they have to find ways to test our explanations.

So we actually have learned a LOT from SETI. It is telling us that we must be the result of some very rare coincidence. What was it?

 

[bolide]

Logically, this resembles a certain retort to someone who complains that God didn't answer their prayers: "Yes, He did--and the answer was No."

 

[Classical Motion]

I love the idea of zero being a low number.

 

[rod]

The exoplanet sites, I am still waiting for life to be confirmed on any of them. NASA or exoplanet.eu sites.

https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/index.html, https://exoplanet.eu/home/

Looking at the exoplanet masses at .eu site, 104 are 2 or less earth masses. Example, AU Mic, all 7 of TRAPPIST-1 system, or others like tau Cet. Apparently we are not finding ET phoning home Other reports based upon the assumption of abiogenesis for the origin of life, our galaxy should contain many exoplanets with ET like life phoning home perhaps

Does planetary evolution favor human-like life? Study ups odds we're not alone, https://phys.org/news/2025-02-planetary-evolution-favor-human-life.html

"The model, which upends the decades-old "hard steps" theory that intelligent life was an incredibly improbable event, suggests that maybe it wasn't all that hard or improbable. A team of researchers at Penn State, who led the work, said the new interpretation of humanity's origin increases the probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe."

 

[ChrisA]

Logically, this resembles a certain retort to someone who complains that God didn't answer their prayers: "Yes, He did--and the answer was No."

Yes. Both are looking for confirmation of a belief that is not based on reason. So many people want Star Trek to be true or for there really to be gods living on Mt Olympus.

My argument is that SETI is a real science because it has returned real data. We now know a lot more about the universe. We know technological societies are at the most very rare. 70 years ago this was still an open question and now it is much more resolved. That is actual science

 

[AboveAndBeyond]

With 950,000 pointings they obviously couldn't spend much time on each one, so the implied sensitivity isn't great. It would be interesting to also know what frequencies were searched and with what bandwidth resolution.

 

[ChrisA]

There is a major flaw in the whole concept of listening for a techno-signature. It assumes there would be massive energy leakage. If the technology is very advanced it would not waste any energy by radiating it out to space. The only signals that you leave would be targeted communications.

OK, the counterargument is that technology requires time to become advanced and we might find a civilization that is not yet so advanced as to be 100% energy efficient. But how wide is that window?

I think we have to accept that Star Trek is not and never will be real. There is no galactic empire but on the other hand, there might be a half dozen civilizations that are just like ours and would be totally invisible to each other.