Aliens By 2035?
Oh? Seth Shostak will bet me a cup of coffee that we'll find aliens by 2035?
If I were a betting man, I'd take that bet. And he might as well buy it for me now, before inflation brings the price of that coffee to $20 or more!
There are many, many problems with Dr. Shostak's piece.
- "I'm optimistic by nature--as a scientist, you have to be."
-Nope. As a scientist, you have to be skeptical. Popperian falsification, anyone? Optimism--or lack thereof--is irrelevant.
- "Given the current state of SETI efforts and abilities, I feel that we're on the cusp of learning something truly revolutionary."
-This is going to sound quite crass, but it's true: nobody cares what Dr. Shostak--or anyone else--feels about might happen in the future. Especially when that possibility is so vaguely stated!
"...learning something truly revolutionary" could refer to anything from finding an extraterrestrial civilization to discovering that magnetic fields are regulated by microscopic men riding microsopic stationary bikes.
And upon what is this assertion based? A feeling. Very scientific.
- "Most of our experiments so far have used large radio antennas in an effort to eavesdrop on radio signals transmitted by other societies..."
-What if they don't want us to listen to them? Characterizing the SETI search this way is very disturbing, even if this was nothing more than a poor choice of words. If the people who are involved in this program see it as a cosmic game of peeping-tom, that raises the question of whether it's morally right to be pursuing this topic!
- [quote continued from #3] "...an approach that was dramatized by Jodie Foster in the 1997 movie Contact."
-Mmm, a made-for-Hollywood scientific endeavor. Because serious science is always fit to be summarized and dramatized in 2 hours.
This can be forgiven, though, because the search for aliens is inherently interesting.
Michael Crichton--yes, the science-fiction author--made some insightful observations about the sociology of science in his famous CalTech lecture in 2003. In that talk, he blasted the apparent mathematical legitimacy of SETI--the Drake equation--as "meaningless." You can read a transcript of that talk here:
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Crichton2003.pdf
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Ultimately, SETI is at least partly a PR move. Dr. Shostak discusses his belief that SETI can aid science literacy in a 2002 article: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2004IAUS..213..535S I would particularly like to point you to page 2, where Dr. Shostak writes "Because of their emotional content, the media can generate excitement for science."
But let's never allow that goal--to get kids excited about science--to compromise the integrity of what makes science so useful.
-At its core, SETI needs money to continue the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In order to attract funding, it needs to generate publicity. And it generates publicity by saying things like 'we'll find aliens by 2035.'
Unfortunately, the more mundane truth is that we don't know a) the nature of what we're looking for, b) when it will arrive (or whether it will arrive), c) if we'll even know a signal when we detect it, or d) if any such signals even exist!
This fact--that we're blindly groping around a pitch-black desert in hopes of stumbling across a pool of water--doesn't make for good headlines. But it has the virtue of being the truth.
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Despite all the above curmudgeonly objections, I'd personally contribute some funding to SETI if I ever become a multi-billionaire! But to be brutally honest with myself, the probability of that actually happening is smaller than the chance of a pointy-eared humanoid descending from a spaceship and bidding me, "Live long and prosper."
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This New Scientist article reports on a mathematical case that we may never detect extraterrestrial signals--not even if they cover half of our galaxy!Shostak has been spoonfeeding this optimistic prediction to media outlets for years. I give him credit for sticking with his initial prediction of contact by ~2035, rather than moving the goalposts. But if 2035 comes and goes with no alien signals yet, Dr. Shostak will be in his early 90s...if he's even still around to see whether or not his prediction has come true. And if it hasn't, I seriously doubt that anyone will criticize a man of such advanced age. But the history of futurists is littered with disappointment; I have no reason to suspect that this prediction will be any different.
If you're really down on futurism and/or want to read a morose counterpoint to the exuberant optimism of most predictions about the future, read this insightful takedown of the whole concept of predicting the future.
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