Is there a way to stop SETI(Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence? )(DETAILS )

If you’re worried about extraterrestrial life being dangerous, then SETI is the wrong target for your ire. SETI is about detecting extraterrestrial life, not contacting it.

Most articles I’ve read about SETI indicate that once something anomolous/interesting is detected, they then attempt to contact the origin.

They’re hoping we meet a smart, peaceful alien species to introduce ourselves to.

Their endgame is communication with alien life.

You seem to be confusing SETI with METI. The latter is also called “Active SETI,” so it’s an easy mistake to make. The main SETI program, though, is only concerned with detecting extraterrestrial life. In any case, most of the programs that aim to communicate with extraterrestrial life agree that we would have to wait until a consensus has been reached about the pros and cons of doing so. Just because you’re trying to figure out how to communicate with extraterrestrial life doesn’t mean you’re going to take the opportunity as soon as you build the necessary technology.

Lord, I do wish that folks who oppose scientific projects would at least bother to understand those projects they oppose.

It would require enormous expenditures, real costs in materials and energy, to travel interstellar distances. I think the risk falling afoul of violent aliens is chimerical. No one is likely to go to the trouble of coming here.

Simple. Kill all humans. They’ve spent their entire existence since falling out of the trees to learn more about the world around them. The only way to stop this obviously dangerous behaviour is to exterminate every last damn one of them.

And if you think SETI is the most dangerous thing humans are expermineting with at them moment then might I point you in the direction of Google, who have AI’s working on encryption algorithms that other AI’s cant break and that not of the human operators will even hazard a guess as to how they work. Or the NSA who have an AI that sifts through telephone calls and metadata and orders drone strikes against people it suspects of terrorism in Pakistan without human intervention. Probably shouldn’t have called that one Skynet.

Know your enemy
Sitting in your ivory tower blissfully ignorant of an impending threat, ahem…Pearl Harbour?

If we find someone, it’s unlikely to be close enough to meet or even communicate. Most of our galaxy is tens of thousands of light years away. The messages would be that old.

And there are billions more galaxies, and they are millions and billions of light years away.

We are not going to meet, we’re going to listen to what they were doing a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Earth already is a massive radio beacon. Nothing that SETI can do would make it worse.
– Planetary radio communication constantly leaks out into space, and radio signals sent to and from the various space probes, satellites, and mars rovers, are omnidirectional.
– Earth lights up like a Christmas tree at night.
– Signature isotopes from nuclear weapons tests and use can probably be detected by aliens.
– So can the signature chemical compounds produced by technology (especially by the use of fossil fuels and the chemical industry) through spectroscopy.

You are like some intoxicated hooligan in a forest at night, that perpetually bawls like an imbecile, farts and burps and lets off some fireworks every minute, and then wonders if anyone will notice him, if he shouts “hello!” into the darkness.

The light, heat, and electromagnetic pulses from the 1950s and 1960s above ground nuclear testing are already speeding outward from Earth at the speed of light. A sufficiently advanced society could detect that as well as our atmosphere, abundance of water and moderate average temperature. (I like @ragingloli‘s apt description.)
A smart alien society would know we are to be avoided lest their property values drop.

SETI is attempting to detect extraterrestrial intelligence.

Not necessarily life.

And why not? There’s bugger-all down here on Earth.

I like how you assume that alien life is more advanced that us and how contacting them means our doom by default.

What if alien life is nothing more than amoebas?

If they are more advanced than us, what if they are pacifists, rather than brutes? As societies advance, people are going towards less violent behaviors and see norms and customs from the past as brutal and barbaric, thus coming up with more pacifistic solutions. Ergo, they should be more peaceful than us, no?

If they see us, what if they are afraid of us and our norms and behaviors? The earth is full of wars, violence, and generally people being assholes to each other. I did write we are going pacifistic as we advance, but we still have lots of different ways of violence among us, many of which are still accepted, at least in some parts of the world.

If they are more advanced than us, why haven’t they contacted us? They should’ve known about us by now. So, where are they? Why aren’t they occupying us, like we saw in all those American movies about alien invasion?

They either aren’t advanced enough to do us any harm, or they have advanced so much they have no need to attack one insignificant blue planet, or they see attacking in any way as simply nonsensical and needless.

We won’t know any of that until we reach out and try to find them.

Being afraid of a change just because status quo seems better is why there are societies who keep norms and customs from several thousands years ago. It is also extremely repetitive. What you say is what people used to say about the internet, phones, telegraphs, television, machinery, and probably even printing, when it all became new thing, respectively.

If we ever meet the aliens, maybe we can learn something from them.

It seems to me that a civilization advanced enough to get here and do us ill is almost certain to spot us before we find them. I think it likely that alien beings are well aware of us and probably monitor our doings. The thing to consider is that any civilization advanced beyond our own is likely to take a look at the way we behave and recoil in horror. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if we have already been “roped off” and quarrantined from associating with the “sane” residents of the neighborhood.

I like how you assume that alien life is more advanced…What if alien life is nothing more than amoebas?

The odds are that there are a billion of each kind. There is not one single “alien life”.

And back to the original question – a violent species probably would not last long enough to master interstellar communication or travel.

And a species which can master interstellar communication or travel wouldn’t be conquering or pillaging. They would need nothing from us.

I’ll ask my BBE when he gets here this week. He works in close proximity with the VLA in New Mexico https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqX9vLj3_7w

Also, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Searching and finding is essential. Let’s not let our silly obsession for safety and imagined dangers and paranoia stop science.

Also, if you want to chat science subjects you are very welcome to join us in our science group.

with tea and biscuits?

Yeah, sure, I can make a pot of tea and put out some hobnobs.

@ragingloli nailed it, as usual.
We are already contacting ET if they exist. They’re probably watching I Love Lucy reruns.

It is vital that SETI continues. If a verified signal is actually detected it would be the most important scientific discovery in the history of the planet.

Worst case scenario – SETI picks up a signal from some sufficiently advanced alien civilization out there. The signal’s source, however, is 35 light years distant (still quite within our “neighborhood”, astronomically speaking). So we send a message back, they receive our message in another 35 years. Maybe they’ve already received signals from Earth. Maybe they’re out there right now viewing old Star Wars broadcasts. Maybe they take those broadcasts as documentary and decide they don’t want to fuck with any civilization that can, and would, build something like the Death Star.

Or maybe they never saw Star Wars but still got our message back and decide to send us another “telegram”, which we’ll get a few decades from now. Mostly likely they haven’t accomplished interstellar spaceflight ether, so the most our civilization and theirs can do is send messages back and forth that each take decades to receive.

Us (2016): “Hello? Anyone out there?”

Them (2051): “OMG!!!!!! HAI GUYS!!!!!! What’s up?”

Us (2086): “Not much. Just chillin’. You?”

Them (2121): “Same. Hey, you guys ever make anymore of those ‘Star Wars’ movies? Those were pretty cool.”

Us (2156): “We did. The middle ones kinda suck though. Later ones are cool. We’ll send them your way. Say, could you guys send us some of your TV shows? All we’ve got here now is reality crap.”

Them (2191): “Nah man, same shit here. ‘752 And Counting’, shit like that….”

…they’re out there right now viewing old Star Wars broadcasts. Maybe they take those broadcasts as documentary…

No, too obvious. They’ll enjoy the space opera.

When The Kardashians arrives, THEN they’ll nuke us.

@stanleybmanly—a family member and I have that as a running joke, although we’re also mostly serious…. That there’s this entire intergalactic civilization just out there, and they know where we are and who we are, but they’re waiting for us to calm down and behave ourselves before they make contact.

Violent aliens… I know there are countless movies depicting this. I haven’t seen many of them because I am a bit of a wimp when it comes to adrenaline-charging movies… I prefer the ones like Contact and Men in Black and Galaxy Quest.

But the questions I come back to, are—how do they reach us, and why do they bother?

… If aliens can get to our planet, I imagine they are a civilization deft enough to travel to any number of places in the galaxy, simply because everything is pretty damn far away from everything… so why here? They must have a reason… Barring them being a civilization adrift in space for eons and generations that just happens upon our planet by accident (which seems like an even more unlikely scenario)—if they choose to come here and if they have the means to get here, then why not another planet in another galaxy? What’s the motive for Earth, and does that motive lead to violence?

Well, going by human history, scarcity of resources is a huge reason for wars and violence and massacre. But that doesn’t make sense in this situation. Because the situation is not a single a relatively small, confined planet – it’s the entire universe or galaxy or “quadrant” or whatever the aliens’ travelling range is. Our solar system (much less our planet) doesn’t have anything rare to offer as a resource. The elements and materials found here are found across space in countless solar systems (if astronomy has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that our solar system is unremarkable). So why would aliens bother attacking a planet with lifeforms stuck on it when they can just as easily point themselves towards a lifeless planet that provides the same materials with less of a hassle?

Perhaps we’re a threat to them, or they are worried we are going to be a threat to them, and that’s why they are taking a preemptive strike… But again, the vastness of the universe seems to make this sort of reason for violence untenable. Even if we in our solar system are galactic neighbors of this other civilization—there is no way we can possibly threaten to crowd them out of anywhere. There are just too many “anywheres” out there for everyone to crowd.

Perhaps they are just a violent creature by nature—lacking sympathy, volatile, power-hungry, greedy… Can you imagine the kind of organization and synchrony of individuals that would be required to mount a world-against-world scale war? If they are so quick to battle that they cross a galaxy simply to wage war on us, I can’t imagine that their civilization is terribly stable—which makes it unlikely they would ever reach us to start such a war.

Our most unique resource, from what we can tell about the universe, is the biodiversity itself that we are a part of. I have a hard time imagining an alien civilization advanced enough to reach us that doesn’t realize this. I’m not saying that is necessarily comfortable for us—if we use ourselves as examples, we can be pretty shitty to “specimens” in the name of research—but it’s certainly not war to the scale usually depicted in aliens-attack-earth movie scenarios, and it certainly isn’t the destruction of humanity or the taking-over of the Earth.

Curiosity seems, to me, like the best reason for an alien civilization to make contact – what else could they possibly want from us? To quote Ellie Arroway (the movie version anyway—the books top of my still-to-read list)…. Aliens coming here to attack us would be like us going out of our way to destroy some microbes on an anthill in Africa.

We wouldn’t ever do that. But, I think, we would send some people to that anthill to learn about those microbes.

Btw, shameless plug, if you’ve never seen Contact or Galaxy Quest, or haven’t seen them in a long time, they’re both available for streaming Netflix! That’s like half of my childhood right there. I’m very happy.

SETI arrays are receivers, not transmitters.

I agree with you about us (humans) keeping a low profile…There could be some advanced alien mean-heads that just don’t like us.

https://youtu.be/fxc55v67V_I

One of the recent subjects we chatted about was making another golden record to send out and what would we put on it. Remember when Carl Sagan and his wife (she wasn’t his wife yet, but they fell in love during the Golden Record Project) worked on what should be included on it? She was interviewed with a few others on the show to talk about what we would pick for information to send out, again. It was a really fun discussion. Someone suggested the Perodic Table of elements and I thought that was such a good idea I couldn’t believe it wasn’t on the first record. We talked about the format the information could/should be sent etc…. a really good talk. When I thought about it, I figured that we could transform the elements into some sort of basic language for communication, because the elements in the Universe may very well be the only thing we have in common with these aliens. Yes, I’m rambling on weird stuff because I woke up at 3.30am and my head isn’t quite awake yet.