Comments on: The Search

By: Dark-Star

Dark-Star — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 05:25:27 +0000

“It’s as if the ants stopped looking for pherormone trails and looked tried to solve where all that food in the kitchen comes from…”

Exactly. SETI is built on a hopelessly bad premise. Any aliens that DID hear our signal might not have any idea of how to reply in a way that our instruments could hear, even if they managed to decipher our language(s) enough so they didn’t inadvertently send insults or a declaration of war.

By: alexandre

alexandre — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 17:13:44 +0000

I think you are getting it wrong: this is a direct blow at the SETI program that assumes that if there’s intelligent life out there, we should be able to capture their radio transmissions. Assuming ET intelligence communicates through radio is like the ants assuming other intelligent life should communicate by use of pheromone trails. Because ants cannot see, they can’t just look at the humans in the kitchen.

In the other hand, the Kepler mission is looking for exoplanets, a more basic assumption that if there’s life out there it probably lives in a planet not too hot (where most molecules become gas), no too cold (since life must need energy) and not too big (where the atmosphere reduces all complex carbon chemistry to simpler hidrogen compounds)

It’s as if the ants stopped looking for pherormone trails and looked tried to solve where all that food in the kitchen comes from…

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 15:05:19 +0000

Also relevant

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant#Communication

By: Michael

Michael — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 13:04:24 +0000

I’d think it is more how the ants look for intelligences that they can understand – that communicate with pheromone trails, ignoring the fact that they could live a totally different life than ants, relying on sight and sound. In the same way, we are looking for intelligence as we know it, ignoring all other possibilities.