'The Youngness Paradox' --"Explains Why SETI has Not Found Any Signals from Extraterrestrial Civi

a reply to: JadeStar


JadeStar -- I have a question for you that maybe you can answer, or at least hunt for the answer:

If we were to consider all of the possible wavelengths that SETI thinks potentially could be carrying a sign of alien existence, AND compare that against the number of wavelengths and places in the sky that SETI has actually looked, what percentage of the sky/wavelengths have we investigated?

Plus, what power of signal have we looked for? Is it fair to assume that we would be able to pick up a signal from -- say, for example -- 50,000 LY away? or would that signal be too weak for us to detect?

a reply to: Soylent Green Is People

I think the idea is that since young universes would greatly outnumber old universes then this means our universe is likely young and THAT is why there's no life elsewhere. The problem I have wiht this is this argument is using the same data everyone else is. Another words, it STILL has to explain why we have no signs of other intelligent life despite the possibility for that having existed for billions of years in our galaxy ALONE. And what about the other galaxies? The bottom line is life could have emerged billions of years ago, but we're not aware of it. How do we explain life's absence elsewhere? This theory is one possible explanation, but not the only one. In fact, since we don't even know about life elsewhere, how can we say how much time it needs to emerge??? How can we even say that intelligent civilizations exist long enough to communicate with each other? Our universe may be young, but that may not preclude intelligent life from forming. And just because it forms, doesn't mean it'll survive to find others.

Note that we don't know there's no life elsewhere, we're just unaware of it existing elsewhere. There's a huge difference...

originally posted by: EA006
a reply to: RUFFREADY

If seti does/has find/found anything it's buried.

Wasn't it Jadestar who just recently uploaded a HUGE list of hundreds of candidates where potential interesting signals were detected? So obviously such data EXIST.

Also..doesn't make much sense to spend millions on a project and employ people for just exact that: Scanning the skies and looking for potential signals....just for them "to be buried" afterwards. Makes as much sense as the NASA-"they didn't land on the moon" theory.

On the other hand, with new methodologies now to detect potentially habitable planets, planets with life...it's possible SETI has become a little less "interesting" in regards to finding life on other planets. It's just one way to do it but IMHO not very effective, more like a lottery/chance game.

When SETI cannot even find a reply to the Arecibo message a few meters from one of there facilities at Chilbolton it does raise some doubt in the capability to find a message a few light years away. www.bibliotecapleyades.net...

It is good to hear that potential candidates for interesting signals are being identified. Hopefully in time a clearer picture of our true place in this universe will emerge.

'There Are 'Tens Of Billions' Of Habitable Planets In Our Galaxy, Astronomer Seth Shostak Says' - Read at Huffington Post:

www.huffingtonpost.com... ocial&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

"The number of habitable worlds in our galaxy is certainly in the tens of billions, minimum, and we haven't even talked about the moons. You know, moons can be habitable, too. And the number of galaxies we can see, other than our own, is about 100 billion. So 100 billion times 10 billion is a thousand billion billion [habitable planets] in the visible universe," he said.

Uploaded on Jun 23, 2014
Catch ALIEN ENCOUNTERS Tuesdays 10/9c on Science. | www.sciencechannel.com...
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the SETI search is relying on the premise that other species use the radio bandwidths. what if the locals developed optical or sonar for their communications or another form more suitable for their environment?

originally posted by: JadeStar

originally posted by: ArtemisE

I was watching a universe type show. Where they were interviewing the white haired SETI guy. ( can't remember his name.

Most like Seth Shostak. I shared a lunch with him once

In the interview, he was asked what the most common question everyone asks him is. His reply was, " If SETI does find proof of intelligent life. Who are you supposed to call first?" His answer to the question? No one! That's right No ONE! Not the Secretary of State, not the department of defense, not the president!

He is correct. At first detection you want to be sure what you are seeing is really extraterrestrial. Scientists don't go around shouting alien at the scantest evidence.

SETI has received plenty of odd signals but most of them turn out to be terrestrial radio interference, satellites, etc. Of those that were not that (so few I can count them on one hand) they did not repeat long enough to be studied in better detail.

So first of all you check your data.

The next step would be a call or email to another observatory which can check to see if they hear it. If they can't then it could be malfunctioning equipment at the observatory which made the detection. If they do hear it then they can help by following it after that part of the sky sets.

After all the federal dollars sunk into SETI?!? Really?

SETI does not receive federal dollars and hasn't since the early 1990s when NASA shut down its SETI project due to Congress confusing SETI with stuff like UFOS.

Only now have people from SETI been welcomed back to give talks to the House Science Committee on why it should probably receive some federal funding.

What politician would pass up the chance to give the "first contact speech"?

Plenty. Scientific ignorance reigns in the halls of power.

I disagree. The first contact speech will be far bigger then the moon landing speech. Whoever gives it will be immortalized forever. I just don't think any politician would ever pass that up. That's not even considering the dept of defense implications.


Even if tax dollars stopped being used in the 90s, they still helped build it and plan out the original protocall.

originally posted by: RUFFREADY
'There Are 'Tens Of Billions' Of Habitable Planets In Our Galaxy, Astronomer Seth Shostak Says' ...

That number would not surprise me at all.

However, we don't really know how common is it for the following to have occurred:

1. Life to form on those habitable planets
2. Complex life to form from that life
3. Intelligent life to form from that complex life
4. A technological civilization to form from that intelligent life
5. The ability for that technological civilization to send out some sort of EM radiation that we could detect as intelligent.
6. The chance that they did it relatively recently (in time for humans to also be around at all, and --more specifically -- be around to detect it).

Let's look at #2 for example. Life on Earth was just simple organisms for the first 75% to 80% of the history of life on Earth. It took 3/4 of the total history of Earth had passed before the first complex life formed -- i.e., complex life is relatively recent development on Earth.

We only have Earth as a guide to go by, but using that guide tells us that even if simple life is common (and we don't even know if that is true), complex life may not be nearly as common.



So, while there may be tens of billions of habitable planets, I wonder how many of those are inhabited at all (by some kind of life), and of those, how many are inhabited by life that may have sent some EM radiation that we can detect. I think the "tens of billions" goes down quickly. having said that, I personally think there are in fact at least some technological civilizations out there in our galaxy right now. I don't know if we would ever be able to know that they are there (and vice versa), but I think they exist.

A question arose, about the proportion of all possible electromagnetic wavelengths, at all possible sky positions, at various levels of sensitivity, that had been surveyed by SETI observers.
Dr. Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute has likened this universe of possibilities to the world ocean, and the totality of the work already done, to the dipping of a single glass of water out of that ocean. There are no grounds whatever to be pessimistic about an intelligently inhabited galaxy, on the basis of such a minimal sample.

You hear this all the time ..that "they" will pick up all our stuff ..

What would their scientist make of most of it?? The weird things?

The same goes for us..we get something like this.. ???

I mean if "they" never had entertainment!!

originally posted by: Soylent Green Is People
a reply to: JadeStar


JadeStar -- I have a question for you that maybe you can answer, or at least hunt for the answer:

If we were to consider all of the possible wavelengths that SETI thinks potentially could be carrying a sign of alien existence, AND compare that against the number of wavelengths and places in the sky that SETI has actually looked, what percentage of the sky/wavelengths have we investigated?

A very small amount.

Plus, what power of signal have we looked for? Is it fair to assume that we would be able to pick up a signal from -- say, for example -- 50,000 LY away? or would that signal be too weak for us to detect?

Sure. But that would depend on the strength of the alien transmitter. We simply do not know the upper limit to advanced technology or the types of powerful signals such technology might put out.

That said, I somehow doubt that the nearest technological species is that far away, that's halfway across the galaxy. Only if technological species were extremely rare (under 10 in the Galaxy) would anything like that distance of separation make sense.

We do not know how common or rare technological civilizations are so we just keep looking. It would not shock me if the nearest one is under 1,000 light years away.

I remember reading somewhere that one of the objections to the Kepler project back in the 1980s was that there was no evidence planets existed around any stars beside our Sun.

Some had argued that planets might be very rare, so rare that the nearest one would be out of range of detection by Kepler. After all, astronomers looked for planets around nearby stars using a technique called astrometry (which turns out to be the hardest to use technique for finding exoplanets from the ground).

Keplerwould have to wait 20 years to approval, 30 years to actual science returns.

It was only during the following decade did we learn planets were probably more common than anyone had thought.

Kepler,was approved only after ground based observations found the first exoplanets around nearby stars in the 1990s

And only within the last decade that we've learned that just about every star most likely has a planet.

Similarly SETI has been looking on and off for years but only recently have we begun getting the type of computing power and soon a large gathering area (the Square Kilometer Array) that could turn the search into a find.

Additionally only recently have we begun to look for things like lasers or alien waste heat in addition to radio waves.

And before, SETI didn't know where to look beyond just vague ideas of which stars might support planets which might support life.

Now we are building up a nice little database of potential life-bearing worlds which are being targeted by SETI.



Like I said, it is just my hunch but I suspect once we find one, we'll begin to find many, just like exoplanets laid outside of our technological capabilities until the 1990s but as soon as we found one, we found the galaxy teeming with them.

originally posted by: Ross 54
A question arose, about the proportion of all possible electromagnetic wavelengths, at all possible sky positions, at various levels of sensitivity, that had been surveyed by SETI observers.
Dr. Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute has likened this universe of possibilities to the world ocean, and the totality of the work already done, to the dipping of a single glass of water out of that ocean. There are no grounds whatever to be pessimistic about an intelligently inhabited galaxy, on the basis of such a minimal sample.

Exactly. That's a perfect analogy.

originally posted by: RUFFREADY
Link to the whole article published June 26, 2014 by The Daily Galaxy" www.dailygalaxy.com...

That source is about as reliable as "Before It's News", which is banned because it's not reliable.

I'd be ok with banning The Daily Galaxy also as I've found complete fabrications on that site.

I searched the following:

Guth "the synchronous gauge probability distribution strongly implies that there is no civilization in the visible Universe more advanced than us."

Daily Galaxy is the only source that search returned, so it's highly questionable at best that Guth even said that with no corroboration elsewhere, but even if he did say it, sounds like baloney to me.

The source gives no information about when he said it, where he said it, or to whom he said it.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

There's this blog post that quotes Guth's paper at arxiv (the link they give to the paper is dead): shkrobius.livejournal.com...

I managed to find the paper: arxiv.org...

The catch is that the argument assumes that our civilisation is the youngest that could have appeared in our universe (if I understood it correctly). Why? The Solar System has only been around for about 4.5 billion years, and there are probably many systems out there that are much older than ours.

I hope physics and cosmology buffs here read the paper and explain Guth's reasoning in simpler words.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur

originally posted by: RUFFREADY
Link to the whole article published June 26, 2014 by The Daily Galaxy" www.dailygalaxy.com...

That source is about as reliable as "Before It's News", which is banned because it's not reliable.

I'd be ok with banning The Daily Galaxy also as I've found complete fabrications on that site.

I searched the following:

Guth "the synchronous gauge probability distribution strongly implies that there is no civilization in the visible Universe more advanced than us."

Daily Galaxy is the only source that search returned, so it's highly questionable at best that Guth even said that with no corroboration elsewhere, but even if he did say it, sounds like baloney to me.

The source gives no information about when he said it, where he said it, or to whom he said it.

Well I did not know that. I've been all over the world and I still get fooled!! Thanks for your take on this important subject !!

Oh!! I did some searching and found how easy folks can get fooled ..(like me)

originally posted by: wildespace
I hope physics and cosmology buffs here read the paper and explain Guth's reasoning in simpler words.

Thanks for the link to the paper. I skimmed it, and it starts out with an outline of some well-established observations/assumptions, but then it veers off into wildly speculative ideas, apparently based in string or M-theory.

I'll cite some passages from the paper which indicate that the author does not support the conclusion given in the daily galaxy article:

p12:

If one chooses a truncation in the most naive way, one is led to a set of very peculiar results which I call the youngness paradox.

When a physicist says something like "most naive way", this often indicates an approach which is not well-supported in theory, and in the case of string theory, some people object to even calling it a theory, saying it should be called "string hypothesis" because that's all it is. This "paradox" isn't even well founded in such a hypothesis as indicated by "the most naive way" comment.

Next is the bombshell which totally destroys the daily galaxy article:

Perhaps this argument explains why SETI has not found any signals from alien civilizations, but I find it more plausible that it is merely a symptom that the synchronous gauge probability distribution is not the right one.

So, the author being cited in the article is saying he doesn't even believe this synchronous gauge probability distribution is correct. How's that for quoting out of context by the daily galaxy, which implies Guth supports this idea which he obviously doesn't?

To me it's so speculative it's about like reading a paper about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. "If the pin head is 0.5mm in diameter, and if the angel's feet have an area of x and need an area of y to move, then we calculate the number of angels that can dance on the head of the pin as follows....."

I can't say the math is "wrong" if the angels exist, but in that example the angels are a made up idea which we can call a "hypothesis". I'll cite one more passage from the paper:

All grand unified theories predict that there should be.....

As far as I know there are no grand unified theories, only grand unified hypotheses.

originally posted by: wildespace
...The catch is that the argument assumes that our civilisation is the youngest that could have appeared in our universe (if I understood it correctly). Why? The Solar System has only been around for about 4.5 billion years, and there are probably many systems out there that are much older than ours...

Indeed. Metal-rich stars (such as our Sun) are called "Population I" stars -- as opposed to less metal-rich Population II stars, and the hypothesized Polulation III stars (which were the very first stars, and lacked any heavy elements whatsoever).

Let's assume that it is more likely for a civilization to arise around a metal-rich Population I star (because of the abundance of civilization-building materials). There are population I stars in our galaxy that are older than our Sun, so it logically follows that other civilizations could have formed around those stars earlier than human life (or even complex life of any kind) existed on Earth.

Therefore, it seems to me that the universe is NOT too young, and there have been metal-rich Population I stars around for a long enough time for other civilizations to rise (and even fall). That's not the same as saying that there ARE IN FACT many civilizations out there -- I'm just saying I think there has been enough time.

There may be factors limiting the number of possible technological civilizations in our galaxy (and universe) , but "enough time" should not be considered one of those limiting factors.

originally posted by: ArtemisE
I disagree. The first contact speech will be far bigger then the moon landing speech. Whoever gives it will be` immortalized forever.


I just don't think any politician would ever pass that up. That's not even considering the dept of defense implications.

The difference being that the Moon Landing was a discrete moment in time when everyone knew we had landed.

First contact may be a lot more stretched out (over weeks or even months) and nebulous than this.

It could be awhile before we are certain first contact has actually occurred and when it does it is more likely such a speech would not come from a President or Prime Minister but an Astrophysicist or Astrobiologist.

Anything beyond that first one would be politicians and other people bandwagoning on the original scientific announcement which would resemble the announcement of Kepler 186 f (Earth's "Cousin") more than the moon landing speech by John F. Kennedy.


Remember the Moon Landing speech you refer to was made BEFORE the Apollo project existed. Not after.

Even if tax dollars stopped being used in the 90s, they still helped build it and plan out the original protocall.

That's like saying since tax dollars were used to build ARPAnet back in the 1970s then anything and anyone using the internet owes a debt to the US Government.

originally posted by: JadeStar

originally posted by: ArtemisE
I disagree. The first contact speech will be far bigger then the moon landing speech. Whoever gives it will be` immortalized forever.


I just don't think any politician would ever pass that up. That's not even considering the dept of defense implications.

The difference being that the Moon Landing was a discrete moment in time when everyone knew we had landed.

First contact may be a lot more stretched out (over weeks or even months) and nebulous than this.

It could be awhile before we are certain first contact has actually occurred and when it does it is more likely such a speech would not come from a President or Prime Minister but an Astrophysicist or Astrobiologist.

Anything beyond that first one would be politicians and other people bandwagoning on the original scientific announcement which would resemble the announcement of Kepler 186 f (Earth's "Cousin") more than the moon landing speech by John F. Kennedy.


Remember the Moon Landing speech you refer to was made BEFORE the Apollo project existed. Not after.

Even if tax dollars stopped being used in the 90s, they still helped build it and plan out the original protocall.

That's like saying since tax dollars were used to build ARPAnet back in the 1970s then anything and anyone using the internet owes a debt to the US Government.

What I'm saying is , since loads tax dollars were spent you can bet nasa/government had a hand in writing out the initial protocall. You have to imagaine that they wrote protocall a for if contact was made, when the project was originally designed.




I agree the politician who gives the speech will be a band wagon jumper, but that doesn't change the fact the speech will be given in the rose garden with the president giving the opening speech then handing it over to some one from SETI.


I just don't buy it. I think either there is a dept of defence number to call and he's lying or the powers that be already know SETI is looking in the wrong place for signals.

originally posted by: ArtemisE

originally posted by: JadeStar

originally posted by: ArtemisE
I disagree. The first contact speech will be far bigger then the moon landing speech. Whoever gives it will be` immortalized forever.


I just don't think any politician would ever pass that up. That's not even considering the dept of defense implications.

The difference being that the Moon Landing was a discrete moment in time when everyone knew we had landed.

First contact may be a lot more stretched out (over weeks or even months) and nebulous than this.

It could be awhile before we are certain first contact has actually occurred and when it does it is more likely such a speech would not come from a President or Prime Minister but an Astrophysicist or Astrobiologist.

Anything beyond that first one would be politicians and other people bandwagoning on the original scientific announcement which would resemble the announcement of Kepler 186 f (Earth's "Cousin") more than the moon landing speech by John F. Kennedy.


Remember the Moon Landing speech you refer to was made BEFORE the Apollo project existed. Not after.

Even if tax dollars stopped being used in the 90s, they still helped build it and plan out the original protocall.

That's like saying since tax dollars were used to build ARPAnet back in the 1970s then anything and anyone using the internet owes a debt to the US Government.

What I'm saying is , since loads tax dollars were spent you can bet nasa/government had a hand in writing out the initial protocall. You have to imagaine that they wrote protocall a for if contact was made, when the project was originally designed.




I agree the politician who gives the speech will be a band wagon jumper, but that doesn't change the fact the speech will be given in the rose garden with the president giving the opening speech then handing it over to some one from SETI.


I just don't buy it. I think either there is a dept of defence number to call and he's lying or the powers that be already know SETI is looking in the wrong place for signals.

Ps. I agree the first we here about it will be from a science press conference, but I think the confirmation speech will be at the White House.....assuming it's SETI that finds it.