Quote:
Originally Posted by But
Quote:
Originally Posted by The Lone Ranger
I would certainly agree that if anyone thinks there's anything other than the remotest of chances that S.E.T.I. will ever pick up an extraterrestrial transmission, they're dreaming. As such, it's probably a great big waste of time and money. On the other hand, I can certainly think of worse ways to spend time and money.
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That. I just read a bit through one of the latest SETI papers and the numbers given in there. They looked at 1700 of the nearest stars I think, which is a microscopic fraction of the stars in our galaxy, and what they really learned was that near those stars, no one was either (for whatever reason) operating a transmitter with way more power than all electricity on Earth or blasting right at us with a smaller one. Well, one in the range between 1.1 and 3.45 GHz, to be more precise. With those methods, you couldn't detect our civilization even now. |
I tend to agree that passive SETI efforts are probably not likely to yield much in the way of direct results, but they are a pretty good tech. Applied distributed computing efforts like SETI@home, and the exercise of developing the methods to analyze the signals are pretty cool technologies that can have other uses and benefits. If nothing else, it is a cool way to tackle a problem, like a lot of other pure science efforts. Active efforts (at least what I think of as active, like beaming radio transmissions or whatever) seem more likely to be pointless.