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Astrobiology

SETI's Echo Chamber

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
December 27, 2016
Filed under
SETI's Echo Chamber

Why Only Americans Are Interested in the Hunt for Alien Life, Seth Shostak, NBC
“Bottom line? Today, SETI is solely an American enterprise. And even then, it’s pretty minimal. SETI is not on the back burner … it’s on the pilot light. The total number of researchers can be tallied on your extremities, and there’s essentially no government funding. The effort is tiny, but at least there’s effort. So what’s going on here? If a dozen other countries have the telescopes, the money, and the research horsepower to search for cosmic company, why is this extraordinarily profound quest confined to the U.S.?”
Keith’s note: First of all, Project Breakthrough is being funded to the tune of $100 million by Russian businessman Yuri Milner. Milner is renting time to do SETI scans on the largest radio telescope on Earth which is located in China. So this claim about the U.S. being the only country that is interested in SETI is simply untrue. Follow the money. Second, there’s Shostak’s suggestion that America’s special frontier mentality is behind all of this. No mention of the other nations of similar age who confronted – and still confront – real frontiers. A gross oversimplification to say the least. Lastly and most importantly: How can Shostak possibly know what people in every nation on Earth are or are not interested in? He seems to equate writing checks to the SETI Institute and renting telescope time as being the only way to measure “interest” in SETI. Could it be that limited budgets and other priorities that he is unaware of drive these decisions – just as they halted Congressional support for SETI in the U.S.?
Let me suggest that it is Shostak and his clan of SETI enthusiasts who have a problem understanding how to communicate with large portions of humanity about SETI. It may well be that there is a vast amount of public interest in astrobiology and searching for intelligent life – interest that does not show up on the radar screen of Shostak et al because they do not know how – or care – to search for it. Until the SETI community takes the time and creativity to understand humanity’s stance on life in the universe with the same methodology that they apply to aliens, this situation is not going to change.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

26 responses to “SETI's Echo Chamber”

  1. fcrary says:
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    That was a bit of a stretch. As far as open frontiers go, Russia had one as recently as the United States. (Although the social dynamics of going/being sent to Siberia were quite different.) If his point was about high risk exploration, what about the British Antarctic expeditions of the early 20th century? Or, since he mentioned the Dutch, exploitation of the Dutch East Indies? I could probably expand that list.

    But SETI does have on very real problem. Professional astronomers have looked on that sort of thing. It became “not serious” and science fiction after Lowell and the Martian canal business.

    • mfwright says:
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      “… after Lowell and the Martian canal business.”

      But yet this hasn’t dampened the goals of colonizing Mars which I think is very slim like detecting radio signals from ETs. Generally I see SETI as a big fishing expedition that hasn’t yielded any results though they have really smart people like Nathalie Cabrol to show their work on other subjects like formation of planetary lake systems (may lead to other discoveries we haven’t thought of yet) or other esoteric subjects most of us haven’t thought of (kind of like people such as Galileo were doing centuries ago). But… just think… what it would be like if a narrowband organized data in a radio signal is detected (imagine if coming from a particular place in the sky that makes a certain car model become a collector’s item).

      • Mark Friedenbach says:
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        Progress towards putting boots on Mars is measurable. Progress towards finding little green men is not. Either you’ve found the buggers or you haven’t, and when you don’t it is hard to argue that the invested time and resources were worth it.

        I’m not saying money spent on SETI is wasted, but that without a positive result it is very difficult to counter such a claim.

        • Daniel Woodard says:
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          However some of the unknowns in the Drake Equation are becoming clearer thanks to detection of extrasolar planets, and maybe the WST will show more.

          Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone. Either possibility is mind-boggling.

    • David_Morrison says:
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      SETI as a serious issue/opportunity came after WW2, and well after “Lowell and the Martian canal business.” They are not related.

      • kcowing says:
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        David the public connects things in ways that scientists do not expect. The Martian canal thing still echoed when I was young and Mariner IV visited Mars. People my age without a science background probably still remember that now in 2016. And many people still think that the Moon landings were faked fifty years after they happened.

        • David_Morrison says:
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          Keith: I am even older than you, and I also remember the disappointment expressed when the Mariner IV images showed a “lifeless” planet Mars. But I make a distinction between finding life on Mars and searching for INTELLIGENT life far beyond the solar system. Support for SETI peaked long after Mariner IV.

          • kcowing says:
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            I clearly recall hearing all the stories of searching for Martians. SciFi stories abounded. SETI has not always been a focused endeavor called “SETI”. Steve DIck’s excellent writings show that all of this has ben intertwined for a very long time.

      • fcrary says:
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        I wish that were true. But even today, there are still a large number of astronomers with a negative and condescending attitude towards planetary astronomy. Before HST was launched, I heard a talk by one of the scientists who developed the FOC. In describing the initial instruments, he mentioned that the “Wide-Field and Planetary Camera” was just called “planetary” because the field of view was about the size of a planet. It was not, he said, as if they were going to waste observing time on things like planets. Fortunately, he was wrong about that. But that’s the sort of attitude I was referring to, and as far as I can tell, it started around the time of Lowell and his canals.

  2. David_Morrison says:
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    It in interesting to compare government and public support for the search for extraterrestrial life (which is a major driver behind both NASA/ESA planetary exploration missions and the discovery of exoplanets) with the problems of funding the search for intelligent life. Evidently the two efforts are perceived differently. In the first case, we have attractive candidates for microbial life close to home, in Mars and Europa and Enceladus. There is a potential for payoff within the next few decades. But in the case of SETI, we don’t know were to look or even what kind of signal to seek. The payoff of finding intelligent life would be huge, but perhaps the risk of failure is also perceived as high — although in fact there no way to estimate the probability of success for SETI. One thing is sure, however — if we don’t search, we will never know.

  3. fcrary says:
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    Coverage. For a radio search, a signal could come from any of a large number of stars. A credible detection would require repeated detections. One study found that the most detectable radio signals from Earth are not radio or television (despite what you will read in science fiction stories.) They are military radars and scientific radar studies of asteroids. That’s because they are high power and beamed into a narrow direction. But the correlary is that an extraterrestrial observer would only be in the beam on rare, infrequent occasions. If the same thing is true in reverse, then we’d need lots of coverage and monitoring to get a credible detection. For the same reason most comets are discovered by amateurs, this implies lots of small radio telescopes are better than a few big ones. Also, the signal processing is very suitable for crowd sourcing (which has been done in some cases.) So “we’re small and have a limited budget,” isn’t necessarily the reason for a lack of effort.

  4. Bob Mahoney says:
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    I am curious, given how the lines between reality & fantasy have blurred in our information age, what percentage of folks actually think/believe/presume (and I’m not talking cranks such as those who believe the silliness passing for evidence in the likes of ‘Ancient Aliens’ on TV or The Face on Mars crowd) that genuine evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence actually exists and is accepted by the scientific establishment.

  5. John C Mankins says:
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    One small correction to Keith’s observation: as I recall (but have not checked), Mr. Milner’s investment is $100 million, not billion.

  6. Michael Spencer says:
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    We’ve had Seti At Home running on our office computers for more than a decade- since the beginning, whenever that was. Periodically I look at the distribution of participants, noting folks all around the world and in places that might surprise like Afghanistan and Namibia. Seth surely knows this. I suspect he’s either using hyperbole or he’s suffering from the effects of a scientific life spent with no result.

    Aside from the enormity of the star field and the near certainty that at least one of them is alive, Seth’s boss- Dr. Tartar- likens the seti effort to testing Earth’s oceans with a teaspoon. She has a way of putting things into perspective.

  7. Daniel Woodard says:
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    It’s not clear from the article exactly what the current US effort is, but given that it is “on the pilot light” maybe we are not in a position to criticize other countries efforts. Certainly there are opportunities for NASA if the interest exists; the Allen Telescope Array http://www.seti.org/ata seems the most promising.

  8. Paul451 says:
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    Shostak’s fondness for “METI” (and contempt for its opposition) suggests a lot about his personality, IMO. Immature, selfish, short-sighted.

    • kcowing says:
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      And your response says a lot about your personality.

    • Daniel Woodard says:
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      I’m not sure why there is a distinction. if we receive a signal, and reply to it, than essentially we have METI. If we do not intend to reply than listening is pointless.

      • Chris Winter says:
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        It’s reasonable to assume that a reply might be sent, depending on the content of the signal we receive. But METI, as I understand it, means sending our own signal before we receive anything.

  9. David_Morrison says:
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    Anomalous radar returns? What does that mean? Please note that there are 50 years of history in discussing what sort of extraterrestrial signals are possible and how to search for them. And Seth Shostak knows this field as well as anyone.

  10. David_Morrison says:
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    Keith, thanks for replacing the photo you had of another mm-wave radio telescope with the Allen Array, which is used for SETI..

  11. Al Jackson says:
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    One thing maybe Seth should have noted is that he is member of the International Astronautical Federation and has given papers at the International Astronautical Congress. The IAF is the only professional organization , at least big one, that has a SETI committee. I guess Seth is a member of the British Interplanetary Society. The Journal of the BIS is one of the few journals that publishes SETI papers consistently and supports SETI research. Neither the American Astronomical Society or the AIAA are ‘up front’ about SETI tho neither is hostile to it, the AAS does publish a few SETI papers.

  12. Chris Winter says:
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    There is a book that claims SETI is not science because it can never be falsified — we can never determine that ET doesn’t exist; a radio beacon might be lurking just beyond our current detection range, which can never be infinite.

    I hasten to point out that I think this is a bogus objection to doing SETI research.

    I’ve been trying to remember the title of the book. It’s not just about SETI, but discusses a number of scientific areas. Unfortunately, my memory is coming up short. I thought the title might be There are no Neutrons, but neither Amazon nor Google finds such a title.

    • Daniel Woodard says:
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      A good discussion of this topic by Steven Novella: http://theness.com/neurolog

      Here’s another comment, apparently from Michael Crichton:
      “N=N*fp ne fl fi fc fL
      This serious-looking equation gave SETI an serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated.”
      https://designmatrix.wordpr

      IMO this assertion is incorrect. The number of stars in the galaxy is well-known, the number that have planets in stable orbits capable of supporting life is rapidly being elucidated, and even the WST may give some information on the presence of life from atmospheric spectroscopy. If there are _no_ signs of extraterrestrial signals then even this will provide some information on the most elusive parameter, the probability of life evolving to form a technological civilization.

      • Chris Winter says:
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        Thank you for those links. They contradict one another in an interesting way. Steven Novella says that SETI is science because its hypothesis is testable (and I agree). Michael Crichton says it is not testable. His basis for this is the Drake Equation, which he describes as pure guesswork. Some of the terms do require guesswork, but that fact has no bearing on whether or not SETI is testable. We don’t need to estimate the number of grains of sand on a beach to determine whether or not sand exists.

        It seems that, just as he did with climate change, Crichton failed to understand SETI.