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SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station

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Re: SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station

#31

Post by bbor »

nradov wrote: post #17
kurthr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even just knowing they are there/coming or might arrive in 1000y would have huge effects on human society. Not being alone as a species has fundamental existential meaning and religion. Would the effects be good? The truth can have bad effects, but so does not confronting reality.

Would it really though? I would still have to attend that early meeting tomorrow. Still have to go grocery shopping. Still have to pay my mortgage. Finding signals from aliens on some distant planet would be interesting for one news cycle. Then everything would continue on as before.

Our society - and your life - are controlled far more by culture and far less by material scarcity/“innate human nature” than most people believe, at least partially because the powerful perpetuate the phenomenon wherever they can. How would your mortgage change if the whole city/country/world decided that they shared some meaningful goals?

Plus, more fundamentally, I think most people intuitively find knowledge itself valuable. Even if bringing much joy to many people doesn’t erase mortgages, this dismissive attitude seems unjustified. Imo

Re: SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station

#32

Post by p-e-w »

While I do share a certain romantic admiration for the grandeur of SETI's goals, I have to agree with those who call this a waste of money and brainpower in our times.

The most ludicrous AGI apocalypse scenarios seem orders of magnitude more likely than finding conclusive evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. A second terrestrial intelligence is about to emerge, and the consequences of that might conceivably be far worse than a literal alien invasion.

Whatever resources are available for speculative anticipation of encounters with non-human intelligences should surely be directed towards hypothetical AGIs, rather than towards hypothetical beings from Epsilon Eridani.

Re: SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station

#33

Post by jojobas »

miika wrote: post #14

I doubt SETI could detect even our own signals, when it’s encrypted digital data. I mean it’s just noise like any background signal.. Then, we people are very soon capable of communicating using quantum entanglement, which means it’s beyond wireless and you simply couldn’t tap into it with some antenna. For these reasons I suspect that SETI is waste of money.

They are not trying to eavesdrop on aliens, they hope to detect their attempts to contact us (or anyone).

Re: SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station

#35

Post by f6v »

edgyquant wrote: post #24
kurthr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even just knowing they are there/coming or might arrive in 1000y would have huge effects on human society. Not being alone as a species has fundamental existential meaning and religion. Would the effects be good? The truth can have bad effects, but so does not confronting reality.

For most of history people knew we weren’t alone, given the existence of gods angels etc, so I don’t think this would change things all that much.

The difference is that aliens aren’t magical and all-powerful. They’re likely having similar struggles and fight the issues using technology. It’s a big difference to a god who just waves the hand and creates the universe.

Re: SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station

#36

Post by pavlov »

p-e-w wrote: post #32

While I do share a certain romantic admiration for the grandeur of SETI's goals, I have to agree with those who call this a waste of money and brainpower in our times. The most ludicrous AGI apocalypse scenarios seem orders of magnitude more likely than finding conclusive evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. A second terrestrial intelligence is about to emerge, and the consequences of that might conceivably be…

It’s science. It’s not in preparation for some kind of imminent encounter whose likelihood is weighed against some other event, but simply trying to understand our universe.

Maybe AI can do much better at interpreting signals than humans do, and we should build this lunar station so that the post-human AGI can listen to calls from other distant AGIs. It would certainly have more patience for interstellar communication than us.

Re: SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station

#37

Post by f6v »

nradov wrote: post #17
kurthr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even just knowing they are there/coming or might arrive in 1000y would have huge effects on human society. Not being alone as a species has fundamental existential meaning and religion. Would the effects be good? The truth can have bad effects, but so does not confronting reality.

Would it really though? I would still have to attend that early meeting tomorrow. Still have to go grocery shopping. Still have to pay my mortgage. Finding signals from aliens on some distant planet would be interesting for one news cycle. Then everything would continue on as before.

Your confusing the long-term impact on humanity and short-term impact on your life. That guy who took the shit out of the stables still had to do it for the rest of his life even after the Renaissance happened.

Re: SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station

#38

Post by Tor3 »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #29
nwallin wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I doubt SETI could detect even our own signals, This is true. The signals we communicate with amongst ourselves would be too weak to detect using present equipment at any distance. > when it’s encrypted digital data. I mean it’s just noise like any background signal.. This part is not true. A simple spectrum analyzer will show what radio bands are being communicated on and it's clear as day. > we people are very so…

> we cannot use effects related to quantum entanglement to communicate ELI5 to a non-physicist why not? I thought this was possible, if Alice and Bob share an entangled pair of a set of particles (i.e. each has a clique of particles entangled with the other), and they pre-arrange an algorithm for determining the meaning of different states of their particles. IIRC wasn't this the gist of the "wormhole" paper that wen…

Isn't the point of the Alice/Bob thing that none of them know the state of the particles before one of them actually check - and at that point they know the state of the other particle. But Alice can't set the state of her particle, which prevents using this to send information.

Re: SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station

#39

Post by p-e-w »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #29
nwallin wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I doubt SETI could detect even our own signals, This is true. The signals we communicate with amongst ourselves would be too weak to detect using present equipment at any distance. > when it’s encrypted digital data. I mean it’s just noise like any background signal.. This part is not true. A simple spectrum analyzer will show what radio bands are being communicated on and it's clear as day. > we people are very so…

> we cannot use effects related to quantum entanglement to communicate ELI5 to a non-physicist why not? I thought this was possible, if Alice and Bob share an entangled pair of a set of particles (i.e. each has a clique of particles entangled with the other), and they pre-arrange an algorithm for determining the meaning of different states of their particles. IIRC wasn't this the gist of the "wormhole" paper that wen…

Quantum entanglement means that pairs of particles can have correlated states regardless of the distance between them.

It does not mean that if you push on one particle, the other one lights up.

Imagine that two people are each given a coin with the property that whenever they flip those two coins simultaneously, they will either both come up heads, or both come up tails. How can you use that to communicate, that is, send information from one to the other? You can't. You can pre-arrange actions that you both will take when you see either heads or tails, but that's not communication.

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