SETI sitting down before the HORs.

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http://www.techtimes.com/articles/7525/ ... ngress.htm

I know they're trying to scramble for funds and in doing so might feel entitled to make up anything and everything, but what I don't understand - what on earth does our discovery of far more planets than we knew existed have to do with the increased likelihood that we're going to receive contact with intelligent life within 20 years?

The fascinating thing about this for me at least is we have reductive materialists trying their hands at the magical thinking game; the same sort of magical thinking that might have perhaps claimed a significant increase in the statistical odds of us receiving a cataclysmic asteroid or meteor strike due to our discovery of how many 'close calls' there are on a regular basis than we previously knew.

Is it just me or is this sincerely bizarre? It would be one thing if we said that we had faster than light travel and therefor set a 20 year mark because crossing the milky way had become like a plane flight across the country. We've got nothing of the sort, we might have some shot at asteroids for microbial life and that would have nothing to do with intelligent life nor the number of exoplanets we're discovering.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 28 May 2014, 12:23 am, edited 2 times in total.

Completely bizarre. I don't doubt that some kind of life existed / exists / will exist outside of Earth, but the chances of us bumping into an intelligent species are so vanishingly small SETI might better spend their time researching time-travel instead.

Governments already know that aliens are real. Why do you think we haven't gone back to the moon?

I personally support the SETI project and think that it's a great endeavor. Sure, it is a huge long-shot that they will actually find anything, and I would disagree with the assertion that it will "prove aliens exist in 20 years". But as you said, we don't have the capability to travel outside of our solar system, so it really is one of the few options we have to see whats out there. And if they did end up finding something, it would have the potential to completely change the world.

Not necessarily in the next 20 years. However, their argument is that the more Earth-like planets there are in the galaxy, the more statistically likely it is that extra-terrestial life could exist and even possibly intelligent life with high technological capability. It's based on the Drake equation and they've been making the same arguments ever since SETI first started. Only that before, we weren't certain how many planets and other solar systems were in the galaxy because the first known exoplanet was only discovered in 1994.

Lol, right, but the odds of us sending signals and getting a response back only would have been re-estimated by us, it wouldn't have 'changed'.

We have only observed a very small portion of the sky on a very limited timescale. We may have missed errant signals. Perhaps, the signals we encounter will not be communication but rather the result of a broadcast many millennia old. Our broadcasting capabilities are relatively young. We may inevitably discover newer unknown means for communication outside of radio wave transmission. Such transmissions may be passing by and through Earth at this moment and we wouldn't be the wiser. Scarier yet, perhaps once a culture reaches a technological point prior to its ability to restrain abrupt ignorant actions causes an almost across the board, repetitive mass extinction throughout the universe. Each culture finds itself, like us, unilaterally unaware of the past fates of off world technological powerhouses. What could be more persuasive than the last broadcasts of a planet prior to a nuclear winter? It seems worth funding to me.

I was baffled by what it was...that baffled you...about the article.

Is THAT it?

Is THAT all that your post is about?

The fact that you still havent learned not to take everything that grownups say literally?

When someone gets new info and responds by saying "that changes the odds of such and such" they don't generally mean that the information itsself somehow literally "changes the odds". It just shorthand for saying that "now I have become aware that the odds are different from what I thought before".

"Magical thinking" has nothing to do with it.