Searching for ET

[edepot]

While searching for life seems to be different from "meaning of life", perhaps finding other lifeforms will teach us different meanings of life. Perhaps aliens from other worlds see the world differently from us. I think on Earth the most successful species are those able to reproduce the most and live the longest (number of generations). That is why the ultimate human goal may be to propagate to all the stars (to reproduce), or to have eternal life in some capacity. However, other aliens may not have this same goal in mind if they grew up in different environments. To give an example, an intelligent tree may just simply want less neighboring trees so it can grow bigger and grab all the sunlight to itself. Or maybe it wants to eventually go nearer and nearer to the power source (the star), eventually travelling close enough to it to burn up in it in bliss! This may seem implausible, but something to think about.

I think there are many programs out there like SETI that tries to look for signals of aliens from other planets by checking for signals that do not look random. An example is a sequence of numbers that seem to repeat over and over again in a pattern, but also not naturally occurring. However, there is a problem. In less than 200 years of communicating over the air, we are now encrypting our communication so that they cannot be intercepted and deciphered. We do this for security and privacy. The more it looks random, the better. With the latest advanced encryption on our signals, you can't really tell if it is random noise or a real intelligent signal. If you look at how earth's technology evolved, things are getting more "random" rather than having patterns.

Another example: lets look at radio waves. It is good for sending communication, but it is too slow, and weak. So we go towards microwaves, and even later, light waves. Eventually we will use the fastest possible that is not damaging: light, or ultraviolet technology. While SETI may be looking at radio waves, perhaps the alien species are communicating using light waves because they are so advanced, and it would look like starlight to us. We only used radio waves for less than 200 years, and we are already starting to use microwaves (WI-FI anyone?). If we evolve for more than a million years, 200 years is such a short timespan, I don't think even aliens look for our intelligence will have a chance to pick it up using radio waves. Also, AM and FM radio broadcast stations don't work outside of a few hundred miles, so that means by the time our radio waves they reach other stars, they are so weak and attenuated that it would be impossible to pick them up. The aliens would have to have by chance (luck) aimed their antennas on us during those few years that we use that technology. Also, we are already encrypting all our signals to provide digital rights management, essentially making all our signals random looking. It would be like finding a needle in a haystack... You not only need to decipher the encryption (which is getting stronger and stronger each passing year), but also have luckily picked up the signal during the particular century out of the millions of years of our existence (before we switch out of radio waves for communication). I have serious doubt that we can even decipher many of our own encryption routines in foreseeable future (one-time pads for example).

So unless the aliens are purposely beaming a "hello, anybody out there?" signal for millions of years in a signal that is not easily distorted and can travel very far, I don't think we will find them. Perhaps we should be doing the beaming, to let their superior technology find us instead. We would need to do it for millions of years, perhaps using light waves, as powerful and bright as the sun, or else it would be like finding a needle in a haystack. Probably the cheapest way is to send a large shield just beyond the distance from earth (we don't want to shield our own energy source), in-between our sun and the stars/planets that we want to communicate to, then make the shield transparent and not transparent at certain time intervals, sort of a binary code telling the aliens something using a language similar to morse code. Probably difficult (but not impossible) to create a whole new language from it, or use it as a way to send images (like all the on and off dots of a big black and white picture like how our old CRT television worked).