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capri0mniI'm transplanting this conversation from the reply thread, here, because I think it's interesting enough to deserve its own space, and because the comment boxes are getting narrower and narrower, and I like elbow room.
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pedanther: Second (and this is the biggie, imnsho), they're just assuming that aliens communicate by manipulating radio waves into special codes, just like we do.
I think you're being unfair. Listening for radio signals doesn't imply an assumption that all aliens will use radio signals, only a recognition the some aliens might.
And what's the alternative? If there aliens out there using a communication technique unknown on Earth, then by definition the people of Earth can't search for it anyhow. All we can do is look for the types of communication we know about - which, again, doesn't imply an assumption that those are the only types of communication.
ionlylurkhere: Yeah, this, and in fact there are speculations about other forms of interstellar communications that we wouldn't be able to detect (narrow beam-width incredibly powerful lasers and such), but as you say we wouldn't be able to detect those.
Though there is a powerful bias even within the radio thing that assumes that aliens seeking to communicate probably transmit somewhere around the 21cm line of hydrogen emissions (on the grounds that astronomers look for this to map gas clouds, so it would get noticed).
Generally, there's a huge parameter space of possible modalities of alien intelligence, of which some possibly-tiny fraction might be capable of and/or willing to partake in interstellar communication, which still leaves a huge parameter-space of possible methods of communication, of which some possibly-tiny fraction we might be capable of detecting, and even that parameter space of things we might be able to notice is mostly unexplored. The whole thing's got a long way to go yet.
(OTOH, we might not only be looking for intentional communication but overspill -- Earth has been generating radio waves that would look very very weird to aliens for well over a century. But then I knowcapriuni's seen the intro sequence to Remembrance of the Daleks,* so I shan't labour the point.)
capriuni: Earth has been generating radio waves that would look very very weird to aliens for well over a century
Actually, this is what got me thinking about it. On this week's Nova Science Now episode featured a piece on SETI, and the new technologies they're employing to broaden their search.
But in his concluding "final thoughts," the host pointed out that if we switch all our commications over to things like the Internet, we'll stop sending radio waves out into space, and aliens who have been (or will have been) monitoring our civilization through our radio leakage might just assume we've finally killed ourselves off.
pedanther:First, if scientists can't even recognize nonhuman intelligence on Earth (among rats, and pigeons, and yeasts and flatworms and such), what makes them think that they'll know alien intelligence when it pops into their viewscreens?
Not wishing to be disrespectful to rats or pigeons or yeasts or flatworms, when was the last time you heard about one building a device capable of transmitting a message over interstellar distances?
capriuni: when was the last time you heard about one building a device capable of transmitting a message over interstellar distances?
Actually, I haven't. But I have read (somewhere) that flatworms have been seen in the labratory exhibiting behavior that looks a lot like boredom (that, at least, suggests the possibility of intelligence).
And I've read/heard of squid and cuttlefish showing signs of curiosity, and how many plants seem to have neuron-like structures in their roots (mayapples seem to plan their growth cycles two years in advance).
My point is, many people seem to be assuming that Intelligence means "Just Like Humans." But maybe only humans are like humans. Looking for a needle in a thousand million haystacks is hard enough, without assuming that the only kind of needle is an embroidery #6).
(Besides, if yeasts or flatworms have figured out intersteller communication -- maybe through manipulating amino acid proteins -- what are the chances we'd notice any of it?)
pedanther: I'm not saying that flatworms and such haven't shown signs of intelligence; but I am saying that such signs of intelligence are beside the point when it comes to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
"Behaviour indicative of curiousity" is all very well, but it's small and subtle; you have to be on the same planet as the organism to even have a hope of seeing it. From another solar system, you don't even see the organism, let alone the behaviour.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is not about small and subtle; it can't be. It's about big obvious things that can be seen light-years away. It's not looking for the needle in the haystack so much as the pitchfork.
(Which, to reiterate, doesn't mean that the searchers think there are no needles, or that the needles don't matter. But when you're looking at a haystack from the far side of the field, or from several fields away, needles don't really come into it.)
So, when you asked, "If they don't recognise signs of non-human intelligence on Earth, what makes them think they'll recognise signs of extraterrestrial intelligence when it appears on their screens?"
...what I heard you ask was "If they can't spot the needles, what makes them think they'll spot the pitchfork?" To which I tried (not, I admit, very comprehensibly) to point out that failure to spot a needle doesn't cast any doubt on pitchfork-spotting ability, that what you need to demonstrate is a failure to spot another pitchfork.
...on re-reading, I suspect you meant "If they don't recognise most kinds of terrestrial needles, what makes them think they'll recognise alien needles?" But, as I've said, alien needles aren't even in the picture so far, and won't be until we find a way to cross the field and look at the haystack close to.
*Actually, I haven't. That was around the time WNJN started to go funky with its Doctor Who schedule, and I missed it.
Now, my next reply (glad I waited until after my breakfast and coffee before I attempted this):
Okay, I used "Like searching for a needle in a haystack" because that was the metaphor used on the Nova Science Now program that triggered this question in my mind. But I'll switch to using pitchforks instead, if you prefer.
My point is this: we're already surrounded by a myriad forms of alien life, here on Earth, in an ever expanding range of "alien" enviroments (The discovery of tube worms around deepsea volcanic vents, for example, has led some to speculate that Saturn's moon, Titan, could support life based on chemical energy, rather than solar energy). And that gives us a tremendous oportunity -- we can't study extraterrestrial aliens up close, to learn about forms of intelligence different from our own, but we can study our domestic aliens. ... It's easier to examine needles up close, and in detail, to learn as much as you can about them, then it is to examine pitchforks (well, that analogy doesn't quite work, but I hope you can suss out what I mean).
And expanding our definition of "needle" to include not only Embroidery #6, but also hyperdermic needles, and upholstery needles, and suture needles, and bone sewing awls from the neolithic -- to have a broader understanding of what needles can be, and the different way of making them would probably broaden our expections of what pitchforks can be, too.
Imagine, for a moment, that we're scanning a field filled with a hundred, million haystacks, at late dusk, with the silhouette of dense forest in the background. And we've got our eyes peeled for that farm impliment that Grant Wood painted in American Gothic, because we haven't bothered to consider that any other form of pitchfork is possible.
Maybe there are pitchforks with twisted, spirally handles, or with multiple handles, to be used by and bunch of people at once, or pitchforks with transparant handles, to move the hay about with manipulated light energy. There might be a hundred giant pitchforks, right smack dab in the middle of our line of sight, but because they're nothing like our pitchforks, and because we can't be sure of how far away they are in the dim light, we're confusing them with the trees in the forest, in the distance.
We're searching for signs of outerspace intelligence, and we don't even know what "intelligence" is...
Oh, and while composing this entry, I looked up SETI and found the Website for The Planetary Society (founded by Carl Sagan to be an advocacy organization for SETI), and found this passage (from their page What to expect when ET calls):
*facepalm*
The MARY-SUE! It burns! It burns, my Precious!
I'm withionlylurkhere: If we ever do catch a snippet of interstellar communication from an extra-terrestrial species, it will probably be a case of accidental eavesdropping. I'll believe that a greatly advanced alien species is tailoring a message just for us when we make a concerted effort to invite tree frogs to an international summit on global warming.
pedanther: Second (and this is the biggie, imnsho), they're just assuming that aliens communicate by manipulating radio waves into special codes, just like we do.I think you're being unfair. Listening for radio signals doesn't imply an assumption that all aliens will use radio signals, only a recognition the some aliens might.
And what's the alternative? If there aliens out there using a communication technique unknown on Earth, then by definition the people of Earth can't search for it anyhow. All we can do is look for the types of communication we know about - which, again, doesn't imply an assumption that those are the only types of communication.
ionlylurkhere: Yeah, this, and in fact there are speculations about other forms of interstellar communications that we wouldn't be able to detect (narrow beam-width incredibly powerful lasers and such), but as you say we wouldn't be able to detect those.Though there is a powerful bias even within the radio thing that assumes that aliens seeking to communicate probably transmit somewhere around the 21cm line of hydrogen emissions (on the grounds that astronomers look for this to map gas clouds, so it would get noticed).
Generally, there's a huge parameter space of possible modalities of alien intelligence, of which some possibly-tiny fraction might be capable of and/or willing to partake in interstellar communication, which still leaves a huge parameter-space of possible methods of communication, of which some possibly-tiny fraction we might be capable of detecting, and even that parameter space of things we might be able to notice is mostly unexplored. The whole thing's got a long way to go yet.
(OTOH, we might not only be looking for intentional communication but overspill -- Earth has been generating radio waves that would look very very weird to aliens for well over a century. But then I know
capriuni's seen the intro sequence to Remembrance of the Daleks,* so I shan't labour the point.)capriuni: Earth has been generating radio waves that would look very very weird to aliens for well over a centuryActually, this is what got me thinking about it. On this week's Nova Science Now episode featured a piece on SETI, and the new technologies they're employing to broaden their search.
But in his concluding "final thoughts," the host pointed out that if we switch all our commications over to things like the Internet, we'll stop sending radio waves out into space, and aliens who have been (or will have been) monitoring our civilization through our radio leakage might just assume we've finally killed ourselves off.
pedanther:First, if scientists can't even recognize nonhuman intelligence on Earth (among rats, and pigeons, and yeasts and flatworms and such), what makes them think that they'll know alien intelligence when it pops into their viewscreens?Not wishing to be disrespectful to rats or pigeons or yeasts or flatworms, when was the last time you heard about one building a device capable of transmitting a message over interstellar distances?
capriuni: when was the last time you heard about one building a device capable of transmitting a message over interstellar distances?Actually, I haven't. But I have read (somewhere) that flatworms have been seen in the labratory exhibiting behavior that looks a lot like boredom (that, at least, suggests the possibility of intelligence).
And I've read/heard of squid and cuttlefish showing signs of curiosity, and how many plants seem to have neuron-like structures in their roots (mayapples seem to plan their growth cycles two years in advance).
My point is, many people seem to be assuming that Intelligence means "Just Like Humans." But maybe only humans are like humans. Looking for a needle in a thousand million haystacks is hard enough, without assuming that the only kind of needle is an embroidery #6).
(Besides, if yeasts or flatworms have figured out intersteller communication -- maybe through manipulating amino acid proteins -- what are the chances we'd notice any of it?)
pedanther: I'm not saying that flatworms and such haven't shown signs of intelligence; but I am saying that such signs of intelligence are beside the point when it comes to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence."Behaviour indicative of curiousity" is all very well, but it's small and subtle; you have to be on the same planet as the organism to even have a hope of seeing it. From another solar system, you don't even see the organism, let alone the behaviour.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is not about small and subtle; it can't be. It's about big obvious things that can be seen light-years away. It's not looking for the needle in the haystack so much as the pitchfork.
(Which, to reiterate, doesn't mean that the searchers think there are no needles, or that the needles don't matter. But when you're looking at a haystack from the far side of the field, or from several fields away, needles don't really come into it.)
So, when you asked, "If they don't recognise signs of non-human intelligence on Earth, what makes them think they'll recognise signs of extraterrestrial intelligence when it appears on their screens?"
...what I heard you ask was "If they can't spot the needles, what makes them think they'll spot the pitchfork?" To which I tried (not, I admit, very comprehensibly) to point out that failure to spot a needle doesn't cast any doubt on pitchfork-spotting ability, that what you need to demonstrate is a failure to spot another pitchfork.
...on re-reading, I suspect you meant "If they don't recognise most kinds of terrestrial needles, what makes them think they'll recognise alien needles?" But, as I've said, alien needles aren't even in the picture so far, and won't be until we find a way to cross the field and look at the haystack close to.
*Actually, I haven't. That was around the time WNJN started to go funky with its Doctor Who schedule, and I missed it.
Now, my next reply (glad I waited until after my breakfast and coffee before I attempted this):
Okay, I used "Like searching for a needle in a haystack" because that was the metaphor used on the Nova Science Now program that triggered this question in my mind. But I'll switch to using pitchforks instead, if you prefer.
My point is this: we're already surrounded by a myriad forms of alien life, here on Earth, in an ever expanding range of "alien" enviroments (The discovery of tube worms around deepsea volcanic vents, for example, has led some to speculate that Saturn's moon, Titan, could support life based on chemical energy, rather than solar energy). And that gives us a tremendous oportunity -- we can't study extraterrestrial aliens up close, to learn about forms of intelligence different from our own, but we can study our domestic aliens. ... It's easier to examine needles up close, and in detail, to learn as much as you can about them, then it is to examine pitchforks (well, that analogy doesn't quite work, but I hope you can suss out what I mean).
And expanding our definition of "needle" to include not only Embroidery #6, but also hyperdermic needles, and upholstery needles, and suture needles, and bone sewing awls from the neolithic -- to have a broader understanding of what needles can be, and the different way of making them would probably broaden our expections of what pitchforks can be, too.
Imagine, for a moment, that we're scanning a field filled with a hundred, million haystacks, at late dusk, with the silhouette of dense forest in the background. And we've got our eyes peeled for that farm impliment that Grant Wood painted in American Gothic, because we haven't bothered to consider that any other form of pitchfork is possible.
Maybe there are pitchforks with twisted, spirally handles, or with multiple handles, to be used by and bunch of people at once, or pitchforks with transparant handles, to move the hay about with manipulated light energy. There might be a hundred giant pitchforks, right smack dab in the middle of our line of sight, but because they're nothing like our pitchforks, and because we can't be sure of how far away they are in the dim light, we're confusing them with the trees in the forest, in the distance.
We're searching for signs of outerspace intelligence, and we don't even know what "intelligence" is...
Oh, and while composing this entry, I looked up SETI and found the Website for The Planetary Society (founded by Carl Sagan to be an advocacy organization for SETI), and found this passage (from their page What to expect when ET calls):
We can scarcely imagine their thought processes, or their reasons and methods for communicating with us. All we can do is make some educated guesses based on our own knowledge and technology. And even if we are wrong about the aliens' reasoning, we can still hope that they will try to tailor their signal to our own naïve expectations.
*facepalm*
The MARY-SUE! It burns! It burns, my Precious!
I'm with
ionlylurkhere: If we ever do catch a snippet of interstellar communication from an extra-terrestrial species, it will probably be a case of accidental eavesdropping. I'll believe that a greatly advanced alien species is tailoring a message just for us when we make a concerted effort to invite tree frogs to an international summit on global warming.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-27 01:05 am (UTC)But I think you're still making an unfair reading of the searchers' motives. I read that paragraph as a frank admission that they hope - not expect, but hope - that ET will be actively trying to help out, not because they feel entitled to the help, but because they realise that they need it.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-27 02:25 am (UTC)I'm sure the searchers are being as level headed and sincere as the can be, and doing the best they can with the limited tools they have available. It's just that, to quote an old chestnut, "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything around you starts to look like a nail."
And right now, in order to achieve success, it seems to me that they're focusing their energy on getting a bigger hammer. As you pointed out, early on, there may, in fact, be nails out there.
But I think they'd have a greater chance of success if they put some more of their energy into working with scientists from other fields, too -- biologists and cognitive behaviorists, et alia, to get a clearer picture of what it is they might be looking for, that's all.