Scientists - Time to actively try to contact aliens using "active SETI"

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I'm balls deep for this stuff.

If anybody is gonna get wiped out by an alien race I wanna see it first hand.

Or

If they wanna make our lives better with farther progressed technology and a vaster knowledge of the universe I'm in for that too.
 
Whatever happened to that former Canadian politician who claimed that the US government had been working on a 'anti alien' weaponry for years?

Maybe the US have decided that they have enough GM made ray guns stockpiled to start blasting drum and bass music into outer space and see what pops up.
 
Master Yoshi said:
sand-castle.jpg


We're like the sand castle, if this actually works.


If you were an alien, how would you view the human race? They would probably think of us as parasites. Nothing more.
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For us to say that aliens would view us we view something on Earth (a parasite) is silly because those beings might not resemble us in any way (biologically or psychologically speaking).
 
What I wouldn't give to be in the group of humans who came into contact with intelligent extraterrestrial beings for the first time in human history. Don't care if afterwards they proceeded to roast us all alive, which I highly doubt. Any civilization that has solved the energy problem of interstellar travel won't be needing any sorts of resources from this planet anytime soon. They could decide to kill us all anyway just cause. But with this type of mentality we are not going to get anywhere in actively trying to communicate with them. So screw that.
 
I could see some concern for a type of AI machine that has only one objective to collect resources to better themselves or their creators.
 
Master Yoshi said:
sand-castle.jpg


We're like the sand castle, if this actually works.


If you were an alien, how would you view the human race? They would probably think of us as parasites. Nothing more.
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I always hated the assumption that if they have interstellar travel, they would not care about intelligent life in the universe.
 
Lautaro said:
Are we that noisy?
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I am still amazed by distance in space...I mean it's insane distance that I can't even fathom in my head.

That's one tiny dot in one galaxy, and that dot is 200 light years wide...that's insane!

200 years at the speed of light just to cross that tiny space...let alone the rest of the galaxy and beyond that...still amazes me.
 
3phemeral said:
Well, I suppose if they were comprised of the same DNA we'd have reason to worry about being 'consumed'. But all this recent concern over "too intelligent" A.I. makes me think it isn't too far off that habitable epoch-era life forms may have been done in by their own self-replicating machines and are multiplying throughout this ever-expanding universe, just waiting to deem us inferior and enslave or destroy us.

Bring it on!
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Everyone knows DNA is a Von Neumann machine, and the answer to Fermi's paradox.
 
Toxi said:
On the bright side, it's likely we won't actually contact anything because no matter how much life is out there, the odds of it actually catching these transmissions is infinitesimally small. And then if they do receive them, they won't be able to do anything about it for a few hundred or thousand years.
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If our mathematical model of the warp drive has even a chance of it being possible, a class 2 or 3 civilisation catching our signal could be on our doorsteps not even a day after receiving it.

Carl Sagan was against it too. Its completely foolish to enter a jungle, naked, full of potential enemies and start yelling to get attention. We're all on the same planet too so its not like we have another home if this one catches fire. We're so primitive space travel wise that we would be sitting ducks if the worse happened. Our impatience could cost us everything. I know some scientist just want the recognition of being the first to find intelligent lifeforms, but for the better of everyone, we shouldnt. Its REALLY not an urgent matter to find neighbors anyway. Develop your tech first, expand colonies, be sure you can handle a fight.
 
Yeah I'm in the camp of "I don't think this is a good idea".

I just don't see what could be gained from this (i.e. human race benefiting). Maybe understanding advance technology, but we'll have to break that communication barrier first.

How long before they are cutting us up on the operating table to observe our biological make-up? They surely won't ask us for permission and how do we respond?

risk > reward, IMO.
 
I think it's about time we had a good ol' alien invasion to unite Earth like in that movie where everyone on Earth unites against a good ol' alien invasion and some dude does a speech about it.
 
All this talk of benevolent aliens helping us out or malicious aliens coming to destroy us. Based on our (potentially imaginary) very little contact with aliens, I think it's fair to say aliens just aren't that into us. Guys...what if we're just boring? Not some disgusting pest to be swatted or potential friends and allies, just kind of like a stupid yappy dog that lives in your neighborhood: Irritating, uninteresting, best ignored.
 
Osiris said:
HpHUMye.jpg


The total extent of our radio transmission contact with the galaxy we are in, let alone the universe.

I for one am glad of that fact, the whole idea of advertising our presence to alien lifeforms of unknown ability and motivation always seemed like stupidity to me, actually making contact would probably lead to the whole of mankind winning the Darwin award.
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Whoa... why is everything so big..
 
Ophelion said:
All this talk of benevolent aliens helping us out or malicious aliens coming to destroy us. Based on our (potentially imaginary) very little contact with aliens, I think it's fair to say aliens just aren't that into us. Guys...what if we're just boring? Not some disgusting pest to be swatted or potential friends and allies, just kind of like a stupid yappy dog that lives in your neighborhood: Irritating, uninteresting, best ignored.
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There is the very real danger that whilst life may not be as rare as we think in the universe, the required mix of resources and conditions together to support life are, and therefore any system capable of sustaining life becomes possibly valuable and attractive in it's own right, and any life form already there could be nothing more than an inconvenience.

It's wise to not assume human motivations to alien civilizations, but there are motivations we can learn from nature all over the planet that are fairly universal, those of self-survival and competition for resources for one.
 
Dudes, can you image if there was an Alien civilization that's been broadcasting from the other end of the galaxy for 1000s of years and we just started getting the broadcasts tomorrow?

Would transform everything. We would work so hard to eradicate them.
 
I would love it if interstellar travel turned out like it did in the Harry Turtledove short story "The Road Not Taken".

All of this radio nonsense is worthless because no one has the capacity to pick it up.
 
Sapiens said:
Dudes, can you image if there was an Alien civilization that's been broadcasting from the other end of the galaxy for 1000s of years and we just started getting the broadcasts tomorrow?

Would transform everything. We would work so hard to eradicate them.
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facepalm.jpg
 
The issue with trying to communicate with other beings in space is one that, even at its basest form, assumes that communication is necessary for intelligent life. This, much like almost everything we as a species tends to assume, is a human-centric (perhaps even earth-centric) relativistic means of viewing things.

But if i keep going down this rabbit hole about what other life in the universe could be like i'll just sound like i've enjoyed too many jazz cigarettes this afternoon, hah.
 
I don't know man, so much about life on Earth seems to be based upon dealing with scarcity and mutual violence, i'm not talking about humans and wars either, i'm talking about the basic idea of natural selection.
Just, life itself seems to be based on killing your neghbour to stay alive another day.

I'm thinking if there's other intelligent life out there, it's likely based on the same basic idea, so i don't know how many chances there are, that they'd be kind to us.
People often go on about humans being a virus and being violent, but really, that's life itself.

We really lack any kind of perspective to assess risk even remotely.
 
ThoseDeafMutes said:
I'm in the "please don't" camp, personally. Not comfortable deliberately signalling our existence until we've hit singularity or at least got a population outside of Earth.
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Well, chances are that by the time they detect our message and manage to get here, we'll have already hit the singularity.

Unless they're transdimensional and they can just sort of shift over or something.
 
I think one of the only chances we humans have of ever putting aside petting nationalistic differences and actually working together for a common good would be to find someone else to be afraid of/hate. I guess that's the Watchmen approach but I do think we perhaps need to discover intelligent alien life before we fuck ourselves over.
 
Osiris said:
There is the very real danger that whilst life may not be as rare as we think in the universe, the required mix of resources and conditions together to support life are, and therefore any system capable of sustaining life becomes possibly valuable and attractive in it's own right, and any life form already there could be nothing more than an inconvenience.

It's wise to not assume human motivations to alien civilizations, but there are motivations we can learn from nature all over the planet that are fairly universal, those of self-survival and competition for resources for one.
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Nah, our planet is worthless to any alien that can cross interstellar distance. We could build a functioning space habit with currently existing technology if we could just get the stuff off the ground and into space. Any space-faring civilization can just construct all the living space they could ever desire. And Earth possesses a paltry amount of natural resources compared to the other planets even in our own Solar System. If aliens came here looking for natural resources, which would they pick: the planet that is already heavily mined and covered in natives armed with nuclear weapons, or just start mining the moons of Saturn? The chances they want our wheat are almost non-existant. Even if they somehow can't grow it themselves, there are 50/50 odds the chirality is wrong for them to digest (assuming they even metabolize the same stuff we do and are made from the same base chemicals we are).

Planets in the habitable zones of stars aren't really that uncommon. We've been discovering tons of them in recent years. It would be much more convenient for an alien species to find one of those that is unoccupied and then terraform it to their own desires rather than mess with a planet that is suited for a completely alien life-form (to them) like us.

Space is so overwhelmingly abundant with completely uncontested resources that it is extremely unlikely that an interstellar civilization would have any need to go to the effort to get into a conflict with us over the paltry amount of resources found on our tiny planet. By far and away the most valuable and precious resource on our planet is us, so I don't see aliens ever bothering us unless they were interested in us specifically. And since we don't pose any threat to them, I don't see an alien species going out of its way to come to our planet just to pick a fight.
 
I wish extra terrestrials would come with their advanced technology and mimic God by making the sky swirl with brightness and echo a booming voice into the language of all areas to not kill other people over religion (or you know, anything), that gays are to be treated equally, etc.

But then all the religious people will say that it was the devil speaking or some secret military tech.

I mean even though I'm not religious, I'd be skeptical if something like that happened, too.
 
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