Join 700,000+ Future fans by liking us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Instagram. “An answer to ‘yes there’s intelligent life in the Universe’ has profound implications for us and that alone qualifies Seti to carry on.” “I think Seti should generalise its search as much as possible,” he says. “What you can say is that there’s something wrong with our approach so, for me, it’s very, very early days to think about giving up.”Ĭlark agrees. So are we any closer to discovering whether we are the lone intelligence – AI or not – in the Universe? “I don’t think you can ever say there’s nothing there, you can’t prove that negative,” Shostak says. “But Seti has no broadcasting capability and the other thing about broadcasting is that even if you do it, it might be a very long time before you get a response – depending how close the aliens are.” "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet,” he warned in 2010. It is a controversial strategy that Stephen Hawking has warned could leave the Earth vulnerable to attack and exploitation. “But,” says Shostak, “over the course of time if we can come up with some ideas of where you might find synthetic intelligence, I think they’ll be more and more experiments aimed at doing that.”Īnother approach would be to broadcast messages from Earth to target regions of the cosmos. In the short term, Seti is likely to continue its search for life on Earth-like planets. When Jocelyn Bell discovered the first of these oscillating signals in 1967, only half-jokingly did the University of Cambridge team label it LGM1 for Little Green Men. We now know that pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars. The technology might, however, reveal some other surprising astronomical discovery. Whether every observatory would agree to host a Seti sensor is a matter for debate.
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