Stephen Hawking To Out-Do SETI

by JASmius



Seth Shostak must be soooooooo jealous:

British cosmologist Stephen Hawking on Monday launched the biggest-ever search for intelligent life in the universe in a ten-year, $100-million (143-million-euro) project to scan the heavens.

The Breakthrough Listen project, backed by Russian Silicon Valley entrepreneur Yuri Milner, will be the most powerful, comprehensive and intensive scientific search ever undertaken for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligent life.

"In an infinite universe, there must be other occurrences of life. [emphasis added]

Sounds like a faith-based statement to me.

Somewhere in the cosmos, perhaps, intelligent life may be watching," Hawking said at the launch event at the Royal Society science academy in London.

"Either way, there is no bigger question. It's time to commit to finding the answer, to search for life beyond Earth. We must know."

Even though that same Professor Hawking has warned against attracting the attention of intelligent alien species because he believes they're likely to be predatory and wipe us out.  I guess he's not a Star Trek fan.

Oh, wait.....



Not to rain on Professor Hawking's parade, but SETI has been listening for five times that long with the biggest, most powerful radio telescope on the planet and come up with a single discredited anomaly and a ton of static.  Plus pseudo-scientists of his evolutionist worldview have long theorized that whatever numbers are pumped into the Drake Equation, it is a virtual certainty that in terms of advanced technological civilizations, we have to be "the new kids on the block," and are therefore almost certainly not capable of detecting the far more advanced means of interstellar communication that civilizations thousands or millions of years more advanced than we are would be using.  And what if far more advanced alien cultures do not wish to reveal themselves to us?  What if they have a Prime Directive?  Surely they would be able to conceal their existence from us, and we wouldn't be able to penetrate that wall of static.  Then there's the scenario in which there are very few technically advanced alien civilizations in the galaxy, and even if we were able to detect their signal traffic, those signals, traveling as the speed of light, haven't had enough time to even reach us yet.  I mean, if, say, the Vomnin Confederacy or the Carnelian Regnancy wanted to give us a ringy-dinghy using "primitive" EM carrier wave technology, and they were our technological contemporaries, their signals wouldn't arrive for another millennium at least, and may have degraded so much over that distance that they'd be indistinguishable from galactic background static.

In short, it doesn't much matter if "we must know," because we simply don't have the knowledge, technical know-how, and time to accomplish what Professor Hawking seeks barring fluke, blind luck.

But it's always possible that "God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them," and, aside from angelic beings, that's it.  But that would require Professor Hawking to read his Bible.  And that's a culture that is even too alien for him to fathom.