In the event of SETI receiving a real extraterrestrial signal (maybe just a random ping as part of a general search or perhaps a real directed message) what action should occur in response?
Seth Shostak of SETI would let everyone know, no restrictions, he would let everyone know not only that there was a signal but also the co-ordinates.
Paul Davies would let everyone know of the signal but would restrict knowledge of the co-ordinates to an unspecified very few people.
What sort of process should be carried out to decide whether or not a reply should be transmitted, what that reply should consist of and who should transmit it? Of course in practical terms under the Shostak ethos control of the reply situation would be lost.
Why the paranoia? The odds of finding a signal and recognizing it are extremely long. There is essentially zero chance that establishing contact will pose any danger to us because we’ll never meet physically. Hell, the odds of an alien civilization being around long enough to receive our reply are pretty damn long. Anything this important should be public knowledge and open to public discourse with full disclosure.
Paul Davies would let everyone know of the signal but would restrict knowledge of the co-ordinates to an unspecified very few people.Why does Elmer Fudd come to mind]?
There was a paper published not too long ago which said that the stars best suited for supporting life-bearing planets haven’t finished forming yet, and that it would be a considerable period of time before there were a large number of such stars in existence at the same time.
Does anyone believe the crude ‘amount of real estate out there / weight of numbers’ argument that the known universe consists of perhaps as many as 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets, so there must surely by one on which a civilisation could have been born several million years before us and is also still thriving?
Davies states that he wishes for it to be so, but that the process of going from no life to life requires so many unlikely combinations of conditions, circumstances and events that he could easily form a counter-argument to ‘weight of numbers’.
Physicist Brian Cox has stated that if the universe is infinite, which it seems to be, then life must exist out there somewhere, as there are only a finite number of possible combinations of matter. This means that the combinations which led to the creation of life on Earth will have been repeated at least once, if not multiple times. Indeed, so he says, at least one of those planets would be such an exact duplicate of Earth, that another version of you, would be on that world, sitting there, reading this post, written by my exact duplicate.
Of the people who lecture on this, including those whose expertise is in related topics such as what happened here on Earth since the big bang, whose next lecture would folk most like to go to?
Brian Cox
Paul Davies
Richard Dawkins
Frank Drake
Brian Greene
Chris Impey
Michio Kaku
Jim Al Khalili
Jeff Kuhn
Lawrence Krauss
Charley Lineweaver
Lisa Randall
Martin Rees
Sarah Seager
Seth Shostak
Jill Tarter (retired but we will probably hear from her again)
Neil Tyson
They have a variety of skill sets but all have something interesting, or at least entertaining, to say.
Why the paranoia? The odds of finding a signal and recognizing it are extremely long. There is essentially zero chance that establishing contact will pose any danger to us because we'll never meet physically. Hell, the odds of an alien civilization being around long enough to receive our reply are pretty damn long. Anything this important should be public knowledge and open to public discourse with full disclosure.As much as I WANT to agree with you, the reality is in general the human race is extremely primitive. My god people stampede at Walmarts to save a dollar. Mentally we're nowhere near ready for knowledge of contact.
Can the distance to the origin of the signal bedetermined?
If it is 1,000 LY away then what is the big deal? We have had radio signals going out for decades. We cannot call them back.
psik