News flash!: Aliens to be discovered by 2025! (really)

[Iamme]

A very large article about this in our Sunday paper. Some researcher, I think from SETI, claims that with our advances in this field, and our probings that have been going on for years now...that aliens will be discovered within 22 years from now.
I am not making this up.

This was a real matter of fact article. The person said that they are concentrating on stars that are 200 light years away (for some reason). This is roughly 1200 trillion miles away. The person claimed that it would not be unlikely to discover life forms that are like machines. I *think* that is what he said.

I lent out the newspaper and I can try to get it back so I can get more indepth. In the meantime, perhaps one of you could find under "SETI", some site that features this recent proclamation.

[nick]

Originally posted by Iamme
A very large article about this in our Sunday paper. Some researcher, I think from SETI, claims that with our advances in this field, and our probings that have been going on for years now...that aliens will be discovered within 22 years from now.
I am not making this up.


No, and neither is the journalist... but I bet the conversation went something like this:

Journo: "So, Mr SETI person, when will we discover aliens ?"
SETI person: "Well, um... we don't really know, but, um..."
J: "Well, how old are you ?"
S: "Um, 43, why ?"
J: "Well, would you hope to discover alien life before you retire ?"
S: "Why, sure"
J: "And... do you think that's possible ?"
S: "Well, um, sure"
J: "And let's face it, you wouldn't be doing this if you didn't think there was a good chance of success, would you ? Otherwise you'd be admitting that you're basically wasting your time !"
S: "Well, yeah, I guess if you put it that way, er..."
J: "Great ! So what you're saying is that within 22 years you're pretty confident of discovering aliens ?"
S: "Um, er, I guess so"
J: "Thanks Mr SETI person ! I'll just let my sub-editor tidy up the edges and we'll have a great story !"

[Hamish]

We discussed this one last week:

http://www.randi.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=29961

The 22 years is arrived at by plugging "reasonable" values into the Drake equation based on the most recent observations. The problem is that while our estimation of some of the Drake terms is getting better as we discover new extra-solar planets and find out more about our own biology, some of the other terms are completely unknown. In the case of some of the Drake terms, the values vary over several orders of magnitude. There are so many assumptions made in order to get 22 years out that this figure is as meaningless as any you get out of the Drake equation.

The media, however, may have asked this question of hundreds of SETI scientists over the past few years and got a variety of non-commital or just plain boring answers that do not make the news. The headline: "Aliens may be discovered within next 2 million years" probably won't get printed but 22 years is much sexier and is worth a few column inches. So there is the problem of selective reporting as well as the possibility, as nick has said, of quoting out of context.

[Archangel]

Originally posted by Hamish
We discussed this one last week:

http://www.randi.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=29961

The 22 years is arrived at by plugging "reasonable" values into the Drake equation based on the most recent observations. The problem is that while our estimation of some of the Drake terms is getting better as we discover new extra-solar planets and find out more about our own biology, some of the other terms are completely unknown. In the case of some of the Drake terms, the values vary over several orders of magnitude. There are so many assumptions made in order to get 22 years out that this figure is as meaningless as any you get out of the Drake equation.


That was most likely Seth Shostek(sp?), he's also the one who mentioned that the alien life we are most likely to encounter would be robotic, based on the fact that any sufficiently advanced enough civilisation would likely "download" their conciousness into machines thus getting around the generations needed for space travel.

For a really good fictional take on this idea (and an answer to Fermi's Paradox) you should read the Heritage Trilogy by Ian Douglas.

[Aussie Thinker]

Damn…

Another “original” thought of mine taken… lol

I thought this one years ago.. when I concluded that eventually humans will just jack into a simulated universe.

I also concluded that we have only been around a few thousand years and already we are close to this stage (in general history terms) and that any aliens that got “smart” enough would also end up doing the same.

So if we ever found them they would be locked away jacked in living simulated lives or downloaded into machines !

And so would we be !

[Iamme]

I brought the newspaper article in with me. Here we go:

(Headline) "Study: Aliens will be found by 2025". Note that it says 'will be'.

"Experts in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California..."

"And they suspect that our first interstellar interlocutor (person in on a conversation) might end up being a superintelligent machine rather than anything biological." I'm not sure how to interpret this. Do they mean WE are going to send a machine to communicate...or do they mean that what we FIND out there might be (a) machine(s), that will communicate with us?

"Seth Shostak unveiled SETI's predictions at an international astronomy conference in Germany earlier this month. He and co-author Alexandra Barnett went public with their findings Nov.1 when their new book, " Cosmic Company: The Search for Life In the Universe", was publisdhed by Cambridge University Press."

"There are as many stars in the universe as there are grains of sand on Earth's beaches, " said H. Paul Shuch, executive director of the SETI League. (Something to look up...The SETI League). " About 10 percent may have planets with intelligent life. That's your haystack. We investigated the rate at which astronomers will be scanning those stars for radio signals and concluded that it will take about one generation to find the needle. "

(yadda, yadda)

"Anyone with an Internet connection can join the search by downloading a free program at http:/setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu, which uses spare computer time to analyze radio telescope data."

" A project of the SETI Institute and the University of California at Berkeley, the Allen array will employ 350 dishes, each about 20 feet in diameter. It will be built 250 miles north of Berkeley with $12.5 million contributed by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft Corp., and Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft's former chief technology officer."

"The SETI Institute's Project Phoenix, launched as a successor to the NASA program, employs Arecibo and other radio telescopes in West Virginia and Australia. Computers monitor millions of radio channels simultaneously focusing on relatively close stars likely to host planets hospitable to life."

The newspaper article was maybe 35 column inches in all. I quoted but just a small part of it all.

[Hexxenhammer]

Originally posted by Iamme

"Anyone with an Internet connection can join the search by downloading a free program at http:/setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu, which uses spare computer time to analyze radio telescope data."
I do SETI@home. It's just a screensaver. It automatically uploads and downloads the chunks of data it analyzes. It's a great way to be a part of the REAL search for aliens.

[Darat]

Originally posted by Hexxenhammer

I do SETI@home. It's just a screensaver. It automatically uploads and downloads the chunks of data it analyzes. It's a great way to be a part of the REAL search for aliens.

You may then like to join the JREF team.