SETI – Not A Waste of Time

November 9th, 2007

Seth Shostak (space.com) asks “SETI: Is It Worth It?“. It’s a great read – he busts some common myths, and provides some reasons why SETI should and does continue even without government funding.

Personally, I am all for SETI continuing – the concept fascinates me (on both a scientific and religious level), the money spent on SETI is a drop in the ocean, and I really do believe it is our responsibility to search and look outwards. Success would change the world – there is no arguing that – and I believe overall for the good (it could give us the focus we need as a species, and put a few things into proper perspective – local xenophobia may vanish for example. We can hope).

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence seems a lot like a religious belief to me – both require faith from supporters, neither can be proved to be pointless by science, and the payoff for “success” in either case is huge no matter how you look at it :-)

I don’t follow the shallow “religion will collapse if we find intelligent life elsewhere” idea that so many people seem to subscribe to – as a Christian myself I can’t believe God created this wonderful universe just for us (in the same way God didn’t give us a huge curiosity and fascination with “out there” and the desire to explore, learn and understand).

As a fan of science fiction (“Contact” is one of my all-time favourite novels and films) I have thought and dreamt about all kinds of first contact scenarios, from beneficial through benign and on to disastrous – and plenty of reasons contact / proof hasn’t happened yet. Personally I sway towards beneficial. I definitely don’t believe we should “hide” from nasty aliens – I don’t believe anything we could do would help us hide from anything that could directly affect us anyway.

Slashdot coverage of the article includes all sorts of different viewpoints as always, including:

“How interesting it would be if we finally make contact with an alien race and the first thing they ask us is whether or not The Creator has sent a “Messiah” to us yet.”

SETI’s success may very well be an Outside Context Problem for our species (and an OCP could obviously still happen even without SETI), so it deserves to be discussed and explored. I love this quote from Excession, a scifi novel by the brilliant Iain M Banks:

“An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass… when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you’ve just been discovered, you’re all subjects of the Emperor now, he’s keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.” —-Iain M Banks, Excession.

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