Talk:SETI
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I removed:
- Most mainstream scientists ignore the SETI project. Many of these skeptics regard it as pseudoscience.
I don't think SETI is ignored any more than other scientific projects. Furthermore, the second sentence is a non sequitur. First we are talking about mainstream scientists, then about "these skeptics"? There are SETI-skeptics and probably scientists who think it is pseudoscience (although most skeptics simply regard it as a waste of time), but this description is hardly accurate. If you want to add a discussion of SETI-skepticism, please do so, with proper references. --Eloquence
The article says:
"Above 10 gigahertz, radio noise from water and oxygen atoms in our atmosphere tends to also become a source of interference. Even if alien worlds have substantially different atmospheres, quantum noise effects make it difficult to build a receiver that can pick up signals above 100 gigahertz."
The sudden jump to mentioning 100GHz seems odd. Should it be 10GHz? If it's right, it might help to reword the article to make it clear it isn't a mistake.
some notes to add
Interstellar communication is likely to be narrow-beam, point-to-point, to make it energy-efficient; and it is therefore very difficult to intercept. Signals are likely to be spread-spectrum for noise immunity; which will make them indetectable to us unless we have the spreading sequence.
So we will not find them; they will find us.
There are between 3,000 and 10,000 stars within 80 light years radius. .Y. of these having planets with liquid water.
What is the likelihood of a civilization if it exists, being a million years more technologically advanced than us? VERY HIGH . calculate this 10 billion years 4.5 billion years of 2nd generation stars? -> is our sun among the first 2nd generation stars? probably not. -> how many older? how many younger? distribution?
After a million years of nanotechnology, do they still need water? unlikely. What makes us think they would even be recognisable to us as life forms? Perhaps they are non-corporeal, and could inhabit our computer systems, create crop circles, control the weather, etc.?
- These really are pseudoscience ideas. All SETI is doing is looking for a non-random (i.e. patterned) radio signal that does not come from Earth. I see no problem with that; it makes no assumptions about what kind of life is being looked for. All it assumes is that they use radio waves as a form of communication. thefamouseccles
There's no way of providing a falsifiable hypothesis for SETI. If extraterrestrial life does not exist, there is no way of proving that unless we go to EVERY planet in the universe and check it. However, if we find so much as one instance of life, that proves the hypothesis. Perhaps the best way of going about the thing is to use a null hypothesis: namely, "There is no extraterrestrial life in the universe that uses radio waves for communication."
WOW! Signal
Information about the WOW! Signal from 1977 might be useful/interesting on this page. It's not currently mentioned anywhere on Wikipedia.
I added the "Wow! signal" entry in Wikipedia, but there is a factual error on this page, the "Big Ear" project started 1975, not 1985. Otherwise it would be ridiculous that they detected a signal 8 years before the project actually started... -- Ylai 19:22, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)