Apr 03 2008
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Mac Rethinks ET
Over at his new SETI Blog, Mac Tonnies says:
“I’ve always been frustrated by the prevailing assumption that aliens will eschew interstellar travel in favor of radio transmission due to the presumed cost of space travel. While aliens might suffer from constraints posed by limited access to resources, the notion of ‘cost’ is rooted in our own brief, limited experience as social primates. We humans might bemoan the seemingly prohibitive price of manned spaceflight, but a more far-sighted intelligence might possess vastly different priorities. Spared the hurdle of terrestrial economic imperatives, I would expect aliens to prove surprisingly resourceful.”
Mac always makes good, thought-provoking posts; and this one doesn’t disappoint.
Here’s the link to the rest of his post.
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April 3rd, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Wait. What is “cost” but the expenditure of limited resources? Unless a society has unlimited resources, or does something which doesn’t consume resources, anything they do will “cost” them something.
It “costs” fish to swim. Otherwise why would they bother eating and breathing?
I do think Tonnies has a point. Since the only thing we actually know about interstellar travel is that we don’t know how to do it, how can we estimate its cost for another civilization? And why would we assume it’s ever going to be resource-effective for a civilization to shout at random into infinity on the off-chance someone will accidentally hear it, and will then bother to exchange messages that will take years if not centuries to arrive?
April 3rd, 2008 at 5:58 pm
I’ve always been frustrated by the prevailing assumption that aliens would attempt to communicate by radio.
I don’t think the eyes of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations will turn toward us until we learn to communicate the way they do.
Until then the best we can hope for is contact with aliens as backward as we are.
April 4th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
“I’ve always been frustrated by the prevailing assumption that aliens will eschew interstellar travel in favor of radio transmission due to the presumed cost of space travel”
Be frustrated no more. The prevailing assumption that aliens will eschew interstellar travel in favor of radio transmission due to the presumed cost of space travel went out of favor in the 70’s. It would be a case of using the logical fallacy of the strawman to assume that claim is used in general anymore.
April 5th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
From The Space Review article “SETI politics,” by Gregory Anderson, Tuesday, September 6, 2005:
“Dr. Shostak argues that interstellar travel will always be so expensive that societies will always elect to explore deep space through some version of SETI—by communicating through radio transmission or other long-distance means with other civilizations.”
Pretty durable for a straw man.