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I've been thinking on this for a while, but then ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
athelind mentioned it. So here's the essay, whee.
Have you noticed how, the further we look, the further away The Aliens keep getting? Back when Kepler was the hot science-fiction writer of the day, he had aliens living on the Moon. And indeed, why would God have made other worlds if there weren't people on them?
Then, in the 20th Century, somebody (I forget whom) offered a large money prize for the first person to contact aliens on any planet other than Mars. They excluded Mars because contacting the aliens there was considered too easy to be worthy of reward.
Back then, they proposed using huge fields full of light bulbs to flash Morse Code (which, of course, the aliens would know how to read) as a way of communication. Another proposal was to take huge areas of the globe, such as in Russia for example, and arrange to have different crops, which would have different colors, planted across entire regions to form huge geometric shapes. The aliens, observing us with telescopes, would see those geometric shapes and realize they must be artificial.
All this sounds quaint and ridiculous now. But given the technology of the day, these approaches were quite logical. The only wrong assumption was that the aliens were observing us from short distance; watching us from Mars or Venus, using telescopes, the same way we were using telescopes to look back. If the aliens HAD been that close, those methods should have worked fairly well.
I have to wonder whether our current SETI programs are falling afoul of the same problems. After all, SETI assumes (at least if we're to have any sort of real communication other than "We Are Here") that The Aliens are fairly close by-- certainly it would be hard to communicate with them if they were more than, say, fifty light years out. And if a couple thousand light years out, communication becomes completely impractical.
Then there's the technological problem. We use radio becuse it would work-- but also because it seems the logical approach to us, since it's the best one we can think of at the moment. But obviously, if The Aliens have some kind of faster-than-light communication, that's what they're using. They're not going to try to speak to us on radio because there's no point; by the time a radio signal reached us, we presumably would have advanced enough to discover Norissian Delta Tachyon Waves ourselves.
Of course I'm ignoring the possibility that we aren't considered intelligent life yet. What with the rate of computer technology evolution, we may well be building our own replacements. Once we know what consciousness is, and can create it or copy ourselves in electronics, we will create (or become) a whole 'nother species.
But that's a subject that's WAY too complex to go into until I've thought it over a bit.
athelind mentioned it. So here's the essay, whee.Have you noticed how, the further we look, the further away The Aliens keep getting? Back when Kepler was the hot science-fiction writer of the day, he had aliens living on the Moon. And indeed, why would God have made other worlds if there weren't people on them?
Then, in the 20th Century, somebody (I forget whom) offered a large money prize for the first person to contact aliens on any planet other than Mars. They excluded Mars because contacting the aliens there was considered too easy to be worthy of reward.
Back then, they proposed using huge fields full of light bulbs to flash Morse Code (which, of course, the aliens would know how to read) as a way of communication. Another proposal was to take huge areas of the globe, such as in Russia for example, and arrange to have different crops, which would have different colors, planted across entire regions to form huge geometric shapes. The aliens, observing us with telescopes, would see those geometric shapes and realize they must be artificial.
All this sounds quaint and ridiculous now. But given the technology of the day, these approaches were quite logical. The only wrong assumption was that the aliens were observing us from short distance; watching us from Mars or Venus, using telescopes, the same way we were using telescopes to look back. If the aliens HAD been that close, those methods should have worked fairly well.
I have to wonder whether our current SETI programs are falling afoul of the same problems. After all, SETI assumes (at least if we're to have any sort of real communication other than "We Are Here") that The Aliens are fairly close by-- certainly it would be hard to communicate with them if they were more than, say, fifty light years out. And if a couple thousand light years out, communication becomes completely impractical.
Then there's the technological problem. We use radio becuse it would work-- but also because it seems the logical approach to us, since it's the best one we can think of at the moment. But obviously, if The Aliens have some kind of faster-than-light communication, that's what they're using. They're not going to try to speak to us on radio because there's no point; by the time a radio signal reached us, we presumably would have advanced enough to discover Norissian Delta Tachyon Waves ourselves.
Of course I'm ignoring the possibility that we aren't considered intelligent life yet. What with the rate of computer technology evolution, we may well be building our own replacements. Once we know what consciousness is, and can create it or copy ourselves in electronics, we will create (or become) a whole 'nother species.
But that's a subject that's WAY too complex to go into until I've thought it over a bit.
