Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [131]
So far, the NASA SETI Program has found nothing. In fact, all the decades of SETI research have found no confirmable signs of extraterrestrial life.
Even with the current NASA version of SETI, I do not think many of its scientists would be willing to guarantee that we are likely to see any tangible results in the [foreseeable] future …
Scientific research rarely, if ever, offers guarantees of success—and I understand that—and the full benefits of such research are often unknown until very late in the process. And I accept that, as well.
In the case of SETI, however, the chances of success are so remote, and the likely benefits of the program are so limited, that there is little justification for 12 million taxpayer dollars to be expended for this program.
But how, before we have found extraterrestrial intelligence, can we “guarantee” that we will find it? How, on the other hand, can we know that the chances of success are “remote”? And if we find extraterrestrial intelligence, are the benefits really likely to be “so limited”? As in all great exploratory ventures, we do not know what we will find and we don’t know the probability of finding it. If we did, we would not have to look.
SETI is one of those search programs irritating to those who want well-defined cost/benefit ratios. Whether ETI can be found; how long it would take to find it; and what it would cost to do so are all unknown. The benefits might be enormous, but we can’t really be sure of that either. It would of course be foolish to spend a major fraction of the national treasure on such ventures, but I wonder if civilizations cannot be calibrated by whether they pay some attention to trying to solve the great problems.
Despite these setbacks, a dedicated band of scientists and engineers, centered at the SETI Institute in Palo Alto, California, has decided to go ahead, government or no government. NASA has given them permission to use the equipment already paid for; captains of the electronics industry have donated a few million dollars; at least one appropriate radio telescope is available; and the initial stages of this grandest of all SETI programs is on track. If it can demonstrate that a useful sky survey is possible without being swamped by background noise—and especially if, as is very likely from the META experience, there are unexplained candidate signals—perhaps Congress will change its mind once more and fund the project.
Meanwhile, Paul Horowitz has come up with a new program—different from META, different from what NASA was doing—called BETA. BETA stands for “Billion-channel ExtraTerrestrial Assay.” It combines narrow-band sensitivity, wide frequency coverage, and a clever way to verify signals as they’re detected. If The Planetary Society can find the additional support, this system—much cheaper than the former NASA program—should be on the air soon.
WOULD I LIKE TO BELIEVE that with META we’ve detected transmissions from other civilizations out there in the dark, sprinkled through the vast Milky Way Galaxy? You bet. After decades of wondering and studying this problem, of course I would. To me, such a discovery would be thrilling. It would change everything. We would be hearing from other beings, independently evolved over billions of years, viewing the Universe perhaps very differently, probably much smarter, certainly not human. How much do they know that we don’t?
For me, no signals, no one calling out to us is a depressing prospect. “Complete silence,” said Jean-Jacques Rousseau in a different context, “induces melancholy; it is an image of death.” But I’m with Henry David Thoreau: “Why should I feel lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?”
The realization that such beings exist and that, as the evolutionary process requires, they must be very different from us, would have a striking implication: Whatever differences divide us down here on Earth are trivial compared to the differences between any of us and any of them. Maybe it’s