The debate over "Active SETI"
I’m back! Miss me?
Now that I’m no longer wearing my actor hat and performing eight shows a week of Beauty and the Beast, I’ll be posting regularly again. And what better way to start than with this fascinating article from SEED Magazine about the controversy in SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) circles over whether we should just be passively listening for alien civilizations, or actively announcing our presence.
Those opposed to “active” SETI point out that, in effect, we might just be putting up a big neon sign on the planet that says “Come And Get Us” (or possibly “Good Eats!”) if there’s something nasty out there listening. In fact, David Brin pointed out years ago (in this paper on Xenology: check out the section called “The Great Silence”) that one theory (that originated within science fiction) for why we don’t hear signals from other civilizations is that something hunts down and destroys anybody that start broadcasting.
Check out the article, and for more discussion of it, read this post at the blog that I picked up the link from, the always-interesting Centauri Dreams.
(Image: NASA.)
January 4th, 2008 at 5:04 am
In my early paper:
Sending and Searching for Interstellar Messages
http://arxiv.org/abs/0711.2368
was demonstrated that usual radar investigations of asteroids and comets are much more detectable by terrible Aliens than METI (Messaging to ETIs)
January 4th, 2008 at 9:02 am
Any pointers as to where exactly that theory originated in SF? If there‘s a decent SF novel in it, I‘d like to take a look at it.
January 4th, 2008 at 9:45 am
In his paper, David Brin mentions Fred Saberhagen’s “Berserker novels, and work by Gregory Benford that he doesn’t give a title for. Remember Brin’s paper is from 1983, though, so anything he references is more than 25 years old at this point.
January 5th, 2008 at 5:01 am
>In fact, David Brin pointed out years ago (in this paper
>on Xenology: check out the section called “The Great
>Silence”) that one theory (that originated within
>science fiction) for why we don’t hear signals from
>other civilizations is that something hunts down and
>destroys anybody that start broadcasting.
We and all other civilizations don’t hear signals from other civilizations because all other civilizations have Brin-like persons, who pointed out that we and other civilization don’t hear signals from because of something hunts down and destroys anybody that start broadcasting…