In 1950, during a lunchtime conversation with colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, famed physicist Enrico Fermi asked the question that launched a hundred (or more) proposed resolutions. “Where is Everybody?” In short, given the age of the Universe (13.8 billion years), the fact that the Solar System has only existed for the past … Continue reading "After all of This Time Searching for Aliens, is it The Zoo Hypothesis or Nothing?"
  • wjrii
    0•4 months ago

    From SETI’s FAQ:

    If an extraterrestrial civilization has a SETI project similar to our own, could they detect signals from Earth?
    In general, no. Most earthly transmissions are too weak to be found by equipment similar to ours at the distance of even the nearest star. But there are some important exceptions. High-powered radars and the Arecibo broadcast of 1974 (which lasted for only three minutes) could be detected at distances of tens to hundreds of light-years with a setup similar to our best SETI experiments.

    Every moment adds to our data of course, but the idea that we’re at some sort of tipping point in how we should perceive the odds of extraterrestrial civilization is silly. Some of this feels like sour grapes from aging nerds who come to believe that it won’t happen in their lifetimes, so it is obviously never gonna happen.

    • Sonori
      0•4 months ago

      To be fair, the odds of an intelligent civilization arising at the exact same time as us are rather absurdly remote on astronomical timelines. Aliens should be somewhere between a billion years old to at least a few million, and that is plenty of time to colonize vast reaches of space and build telescope arrays in the scale of small galaxies with only known tech.

      I agree though, it is rather silly to think that we’ve passed any point of significance in our search recently.

      • wjrii
        0•4 months ago

        True, and I suppose that’s a certain filter of its own. I suppose the main thing that makes me roll my eyes is that having done SETI by half measures for a handful of decades, the article is asking if it’s time to assume that the rather presumptuous (though not absurd) zoo hypothesis is “the answer”.

        This all is what it is. The results so far imply virtually nothing about anything, except I suppose that there is not a very close civilization intentionally listening for our types of signals and eager to communicate back.