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have they found anything?

amb said:
If the galaxy was teeming with intelligent life as some postulate, surely some intelligence would have had time to respond to say; ''I Love Lucyshow". This tells us there is no human like intelligence in the immediate vicinity say 10-30 light years that use radio astronomy, the only form of searching the cosmos for signs of life.
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Maybe having watched the "I Love Lucy Show", they did not deem us intelligent enough to repsond. And it goes downhill from then on, wait till they see X Factor or Big Brother... :)
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
Of course your answer contradicts your repeated assertion that it's impossible for another species to evolve a given level of intelligence. (This stuff you keep saying about how if humans went extinct it would be impossible for any other species ever to evolve human-level intellgence.)
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I'm sick of answering this question. For the last time, out of the billion or so lifeforms that have become extinct on this planet, and apart from certain species like dolphins and perhaps whales and some other primates like neandertals, nothing has or is likely to reach our level of civilization.
It's taken homo sapiens around 2 billion years to reach this point purely by random events. Other creatures like the shark for example had even longer to develop yet have not done so. In a thousand-10 years, or as long as even a million years, what are the chances that the great apes will done a hat and shoes and turn up to work in an office?
 
amb said:
I'm sick of answering this question. For the last time, out of the billion or so lifeforms that have become extinct on this planet, and apart from certain species like dolphins and perhaps whales and some other primates like neandertals, nothing has or is likely to reach our level of civilization.
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That's not an answer: the point we are making is in response to this statement of yours, so I don't see how it could possibly be considered a response to what we have said.

You say, "nothing will ever achieve our level of civilization". Joe or I responds: "why not? there's nothing to stop them, and since intelligence is adaptive, we can expect it to be selected for in other species" we then go on to give examples of just that happening. You respond, "I can't believe I have to keep saying this: nothing will ever achieve our level of civilization".

And you think you're the one who's frustrated?

It's taken homo sapiens around 2 billion years to reach this point purely by random events. Other creatures like the shark for example had even longer to develop yet have not done so.
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In what way have sharks "had even longer to develop" than us? Were our ancestors not around at the same time as the ancestors of sharks? Don't we in fact have a common ancestor?

In a thousand-10 years, or as long as even a million years, what are the chances that the great apes will done a hat and shoes and turn up to work in an office?
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Very, very slim, but not zero. In 10 million years? Or 100 million? Larger. And of course there are many more species on the earth than just the great apes.
Of course that doesn't mean it's inevitable that other life will evolve human-like intelligence at some point (in particular if we are still around filling this niche), but it is certainly possible.
 
Roboramma said:
No, this tells us that no intelligent life in the immediate vincinity is engaging in a comprehensive enough search to have noticed our TV broadcasts, and also wants to send a message back in response.
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As has already been pointed out: Our omni-directional signals aren't even detectable outside our own solar system. The inverse square law is a bitch on that. The whole idea of our TV signals being detectable 40 light years away is science fiction fantasy.
 
amb said:
It's taken homo sapiens around 2 billion years to reach this point purely by random events.
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EPIC FAIL!

Really AMB, I can see why Joe keeps asking if you are a creationist.

1.) It only took Homo about 7 million years (at the most), and Homo Sapiens about 200,000 years.

2.) THERE IS NO RANDOM CHANCE. I ****ING HATE that application of the word random, and that is such a ceationist type statement that I am wondering if you have somehow had your brain replaced by a creationist. That is wrong in so many ways that I seriously am going to fly down to Australia with that car battery! STOP IT, okay? Your statement is the height and epitomy of incorrectness and even stupidity. :mad:
 
amb said:
In a thousand-10 years, or as long as even a million years, what are the chances that the great apes will done a hat and shoes and turn up to work in an office?
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I'm not sure how many years are in "a thousand-10 years", but to answer your question, the chances are not zero. You have claimed repeatedly that it's impossible (not simply improbable) for any other species ever to evolve human-like intelligence.
 
LarianLeQuella said:
As has already been pointed out: Our omni-directional signals aren't even detectable outside our own solar system. The inverse square law is a bitch on that. The whole idea of our TV signals being detectable 40 light years away is science fiction fantasy.
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Oh, I agree: unless the telescope is extremely sensitive. But at a distance of forty light years, you'd need a damn big telescope.
 
Roboramma said:
Oh, I agree: unless the telescope is extremely sensitive. But at a distance of forty light years, you'd need a damn big telescope.
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Does that mean that unless we have directed a signal to a potential planet, the chances of another intelligent species knowing about us is virtually zero, and that for SETI to pick up a signal, it would have to have been targeted at us too?
 
Pretty much. The SETI search via radio astronomy is a pretty longshot to put it mildly. While a longshot, it is (in my opinion) worth it:

1.) On the off chance we find something.
2.) The amazing advances made in signal processing.
3.) The advances that were made in distributed computing.

And just because we did things a certain way doesn't mean that any ETI would do something the same way we did. Who knows what we'll manage to uncover with this search.
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
I'm not sure how many years are in "a thousand-10 years", but to answer your question, the chances are not zero. You have claimed repeatedly that it's impossible (not simply improbable) for any other species ever to evolve human-like intelligence.
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Then perhaps the other human like intelligence will evolve from the beetles seeing there are 400.000 types of them compared to around 8.000 types of animals. Or another way. God must have been quite fond of beetles. :p
 
Beetles, termites, deer, cats, squids, etc. Who the heck can tell. It all depends on what niches need filling, how they are filled, and what evolutionary advantage intelligence provides. The possibilities are mindboggling (although not limitless mind you). Insects have the way they evolved with physiological limitations placed on them. Their respatory system would need to change quite a bit (or maybe develop a communal intelligence?). Like I said earlier, our intelligence has really only been on a rise for about 2 million years, with homo Sapiens only being very recent. And that came about (speculatively) due to the rapid changes happening in the nearby environment, the antithesis to the stable earth/rare earth hypothesis that you cling to.

Although, if they are truly intelligent, they would probably not have their species showing up in an office either with or without hat and shoes. :p
 
Belgian thought said:
Does that mean that unless we have directed a signal to a potential planet, the chances of another intelligent species knowing about us is virtually zero, and that for SETI to pick up a signal, it would have to have been targeted at us too?
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And not only that, there's the issue of timing. We'd have to be listening to that part of the sky just when a directed signal was arriving.

We have sent directed signals out a few times--but for a matter of minutes at a time IIRC.

But, the fact is, we don't really know what might be possible. What if an unmanned probe passed relatively near us and was broadcasting signals or listening in?

At any rate, it's certainly wrong to use the lack of a "hit" from SETI as evidence for the non-existence of ETIs. It's a tremendously large haystack, and a very tiny needle.
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
I think he means that Sagan dying at the age of 62 was tragic. If he'd lived longer (cancer free, that is), he would probably have contributed more to the popularization of science and critical thinking.
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I mean, how does "amb" figure he was a genius?

Weren't there others who contributed more to the popularization of science and critical thinking that Sagan more or less "borrowed" from?

Did his peers consider him to be a "genius"?
 
Bill Thompson said:
I mean, how does "amb" figure he was a genius?

Weren't there others who contributed more to the popularization of science and critical thinking that Sagan more or less "borrowed" from?
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IMO, no.

Did his peers consider him to be a "genius"?
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Yes, as do his successors (like Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson).
 
Carl Sagan did more than any other scientist of any sort apart from perhaps Richard Dawkins, to popularise science and in particular astronomy.
 
amb said:
Carl Sagan did more than any other scientist of any sort apart from perhaps Richard Dawkins, to popularise science and in particular astronomy.
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I'm with you on this, amb. I was born in '61 and grew up at the right time to be a big Sagan fan. I never missed a TV appearance, and I gobbled up his books as they were published.

I also think we'll never see his likes again for the simple reason that TV and the mass media have changed so much. Never again will a guy's appearance on the Tonight Show, for example, have an audience that's such a high percentage of the population. If nothing else, his contribution to the smart use of TV was genius.
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
And not only that, there's the issue of timing. We'd have to be listening to that part of the sky just when a directed signal was arriving.

We have sent directed signals out a few times--but for a matter of minutes at a time IIRC.

But, the fact is, we don't really know what might be possible. What if an unmanned probe passed relatively near us and was broadcasting signals or listening in?

At any rate, it's certainly wrong to use the lack of a "hit" from SETI as evidence for the non-existence of ETIs. It's a tremendously large haystack, and a very tiny needle.
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Indeed it is - I presume that now, with the discovery of exoplanets, we should be/are aiming the signals at these, i.e. to one side of the star, hoping that we would hit something within planetary orbits and repeating this after a certain period, in case one potential planet was behind its corresponding star, at the time of the first signal.
 
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