Russian billionaire: GET me some ALIENS ON THE PHONE. Do it NOW

[steve2470]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/20/russian_entrepreneur_slaps_100_million_bounty_on_et/

(yes original article headline)

Noted Russian biz lord Yuri Milner - already well known for handing out hefty prizes for physics discoveries - has now slapped down another hefty wad so as to kick the search for alien civilisation into higher gear.

A project he calls Breakthrough Listen will give SETI researchers access to the world's largest telescopes in hopes of picking up signals from other star systems. Despite theories suggesting thousands of potential extraterrestrial habitats for life along vaguely Earthly lines, any aliens that may exist have been giving Earth the silent treatment since serious search began in the 1960s.

Much of the cash pledged by Milner over the next 10 years will be used to secure observing time at the Robert C Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and CSIRO's Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia.

The rest will be split between acquiring equipment and hiring people. Milner has already assembled an impressive roll call of experts including the Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees of Cambridge University, who will lead an advisory group; Peter Worden, former director of the NASA Ames Research Laboratory, home of the Kepler effort; and expert alien hunters Geoffrey Marcy and Dan Werthime from the University of California, Berkeley.

[lumberjack_jeff]

1. Fermi was right. We're alone.

It's a good investment because it will help eventually prove him right... to the extent that proving a negative is possible.

[longship]

2. That's not what Fermi said.

Last edited Mon Jul 20, 2015, 08:41 PM - Edit history (1)

His question, where are they?, was a topic of discussion. The answer has more than one possibility.

The one I like is that the galaxy is really fucking huge, distances between stars are rather large, and warp drives do not exist.

on edit: plus, there's still the rocket equation which undermines any claim of interstellar travel.

[lumberjack_jeff]

3. It may be huge, but it's really old too.

The moon has been circling the earth largely undisturbed for 4 billion years. It'd be a great observation location for any robotic probes to observe the (in our understanding unique) virtues of Earth.

Yet the only machines and footprints there are ones we put there.

For that matter, why isn't the galaxy composed entirely of gray goo? We're *this close* to developing self-replicating nanotech. Surely someone else has done it before, right?

[longship]

4. Gray goo? I don't think so.

You see. One still has to obey the laws of nature. I suspect that the reason why there aren't warp drives is the same reason why there's no gray goo.

*This close?* Aha! You might mean the singularity.

About Ray Kurzweil's The Matrix wet dreams... No. We are not close to anything remotely describable as a singularity. You know that he takes megadoses of vitamins and supplements which will likely kill him sooner than later. He just doesn't want to die and has made up a kook futuristic religion around and based on his fears of death. His acolytes pay big bucks to worship at his Singularity conferences and university. Those supplements don't come cheap, you know.

People extrapolate wildly about short term projections, and miss the target entirely about long term ones. That's just human nature.

Where's my nuclear powered vacuum sweeper? My flying car? Our domed cities? And unfortunately all my hovercraft are full of eels.

Whenever you get your self-rep nano imbedded robotic butler Jeeves, do not make the instantly fatal mistake of requesting: Jeeves, make me some chocolate chip cookies.

Could not resist, my friend.


And yes, the age of the galaxy is what Fermi was getting at. However, it does not take rare galactic life to explain no visitors when there are so many other explanations.

[lumberjack_jeff]

5. Heh. My wife would say that talking to me now is no better than talking to a chocolate chip cookie

But in galactic timeframes, a human definition of "long term" falls apart. By long term, I'm talking about 100,000 years for humans to evolve, develop civilization, and meet their end by electing republicans... again, and again and again, 100,000 times in a row.

This assumes that in the whole galaxy only one technologically advanced species evolves at a given time. The cosmos is a lot of time and a lot of real estate in which mother nature could have experimented.

Surely one of those civilizations would have taken the novel self-destructive approach of gray goo - or at least developed robot probes prior to self immolation.

Personally, I think that the reason there are no technologically advanced aliens is because they're superfluous to the program.

[longship]

6. Well, the simulation hypothesis has no evidence to support it.

You bring up another hypothesis which I can see as possible, though. That technological civilizations might be rare, so that few exist in the galaxy at any one period of time.

However, I think life in general is very widespread in the galaxy. And a hope that there are intelligent ETs out there is why we continue the search.

It certainly would pucker some assholes if we discovered intelligent life out there. (So to speak.)

My best to you.

[lumberjack_jeff]

7. I'd be glad to be wrong, and I salute anyone's effort to prove it. (or dare, if that works)

[hunter]

8. I passed along your message, Mr. Milner...

... but they didn't want to talk to you.