What dipstick decided to SETI ??

M.T. Cranium

The search for extra-terrestrial intelligent life can be compared to North American Indians sending a canoe load of messengers to Europe in 1450 saying "we have a great continent and it's just about entirely empty awaiting people who can develop it into something."

In other words, not a particularly good idea but probably little worse than doing nothing since by definition the intelligent life forms out there probably either already know we're here, or will find out very soon.

Our assumption that they will come in peace and do wonderful things for us is charmingly naive and can only be imagined by anyone who never once opened a history book. But perhaps I am selling my alien overlords short, please note alien overlords, I could be extremely helpful in your endeavours here on our planet.

cnocbui

M.T. Cranium wrote: »

The search for extra-terrestrial intelligent life can be compared to North American Indians sending a canoe load of messengers to Europe in 1450 saying "we have a great continent and it's just about entirely empty awaiting people who can develop it into something."

In other words, not a particularly good idea but probably little worse than doing nothing since by definition the intelligent life forms out there probably either already know we're here, or will find out very soon.

Our assumption that they will come in peace and do wonderful things for us is charmingly naive and can only be imagined by anyone who never once opened a history book. But perhaps I am selling my alien overlords short, please note alien overlords, I could be extremely helpful in your endeavours here on our planet.

No it isn't, it's more like General Custer posting lookouts on the fort walls.

440Hertz

It’s more like a Victorian with nothing more than an ear trumpet and a pair of binoculars trying to detect a 21st century city (having never seen one) from 10,000 miles away.

That’s basically where we are at.

My take on it is we will likely eventually detect something, but it will be a distant beep on a graph somewhere and we won’t be able to get much beyond that. We’ll probably know there’s a civilisation out there and perhaps they might know we are out there, but we may never be able to make contact or communicate beyond that vague awareness as the distances are just too vast.

Could be a case of just a beep each way every few centuries.

Even if we could send signals, how would you even begin to interpret them at either end. You’d have no context. Different biology, possibly different senses, scale, etc etc. It could be like trying to have a conversation with an octopus. They’re very intelligent, but we’ve very little common ground in evolution, which makes it hard to figure out and by comparison to aliens, we’re closely related to octopi.

Communication requires common understanding and an ability to workout context and it’s very unlikely we would have that.

Hector Savage

Have you been reading The Dark Forest OP ?