On Tue, 8 Oct 2002, Gary McMurtry wrote:
> In the collection is an
> article by Ian Crawford entitled "Where Are They?", subtitled "Maybe
> we are alone in the galaxy after all". I found this article thought
> provoking to say the least. Crawford uses the SETI results to date
> to suggest that we have already eliminated much of the Milky Way
> galaxy as a source of advanced civilizations beyond or equal to our
> own capabilities. I found this result shocking.
As well you should! Because its a *stupid* idea. I wrote a critique
of this article in:
"Misconceptions Regarding SETI, Dyson Spheres and the Fermi Paradox"
http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/Critiques/MRSDSatFP.html
My objections weren't as much to Crawford's ideas as they were to
the Andrew LePage sidebar. The problem in general however still
remains -- the significant majority of current "SETI" searches
are directed towards finding something that is highly unlikely
to exist. To see this clearly requires a moderately deep exploration
of all of the SETI literature (something I've done). If you want
to find advanced civilizations (the most likely kind of "life")
then you have to be searching where stars are *not* visible
(because their civilizations would have enshrouded them for
power harvesting purposes) and you need to search in the far-IR
regions of the spectrum (very hard to do from the surface of the Earth).
I'm not saying that Crawford is wrong (we might indeed be the only
civilization in the galaxy) but their reasoning for concluding
that is highly anthropocentric and therefore fundamentally flawed.
If you look at the evolution of "life" -- it would appear to be
something you can't easily knock down -- every time you do that
simply develops a strategy around those knocks. We probably
have almost as long left to evolve "intelligent" life on Earth
as we have had to date. Eliminate humanity and something will
rise up in its place. Life most likely gets lots of chances.
The trick to thinking about this is to wonder whether there
are universal attractor(s) for "life" that will cause it to
ultimately converge around those optimized states. A recent
message to this list cited perhaps 3 "niches" that life on
Europa might converge around. There has been far too little
thought (IMO) devoted to the niches life might converge upon
in the galaxy (and how we would identify signs of such
convergence).
[Since a detailed discussion of SETI isn't the topic of this
list I'd suggest taking it offline for people who are interested.]
Robert
==
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