April 18, 2004 Update

Update of April 18, 2004

Yesterday, I attended Cal Day at the University of California at Berkeley and heard Dan Wertheimer give an overview of SETI, and in particular, UCB's contribution to it, including seti@home. From Dr. Wertheimer's talk, apparently nothing at all has really changed in the basic quest, the signal criteria for announcement of a successful hit, or the protocol of the latter in informing the world's governmental authorities and the public. There was an unemphasized comment, however, that interest had been added, to the program, in recognizing signals that might be seen as related to living organisms of lower intelligence/complexity/egoism/whatever than humans -- maybe even some without doctorates ;-) -- and even a hint that "signals" from entities that SETI philosophers might be resigned to categorize as unliving. However, no criteria of signal complexity required for announcing any of these categories of lesser ET intelligentsia were put forth.

During the question period, I asked whether the "I" in SETI still must stand for 'intelligence'. Dan admitted that he was unhappy with this word. As he had described the huge number of people enrolled in his seti@home -- and of course, the huge sector of the public who have been told those green things out there with radio transmitters had to be intelligent -- I was nasty, and classed the SETI effort as a scene of "false advertising". . .but with a ';-)'. Well, y'know, this game is propounded worldwide as advancing SCIENCE. . .and scientists are supposed to be above playing games with the rest of the world, right? Or so they would have you believe. We know, of course, of others who have become mired in the the delusional quicksand of the concept of intelligence (a subjective notion) -- Arthur Jensen, Mensa, etc. It correlates to the mathematical concept of complexity when applied to objective-information processing, but it's not at all clear in what manner, and the mathematics of complexity is still very incomplete.

I also noted that Dan did try to play down Frank Drake's infamous equation of factors of unknowable values and unknowable interdependence. But this equation was brought up in "Contact", the movie, so of course, a member of the audience had to throw it up for discussion. That's really what SETI is -- entertainment. . .and I'm the Grinch.

My interest here is not in making any ethical accusations as to the funding of SETI infrastructure and activities, though those that thrive under the auspices of UCB can be seen as questionable use of the presently very scarce educational resources of the State of California. But 1) educational activities have funny institutionalized mantras we keep paying for under all circumstances -- you know -- like repeating the words of Shakespeare, Chaucer, etc. every generation, or banging heads every year in football practice; and 2) yes, each improvement in the technology used for SETI does advance the state of the art of applied electronics, etc. I just think the intellectual integrity of this highfalutin pursuit, at the level of its very essence, is no better than 'Mommy, I know how to talk to angels.' And yet, it is carried on by sophisticated adults, including a supposedly enlightened doctorate at yoonyversities.

And then there is the issue of How long do we keep playing this game without any success, i.e., with ' I ' = intelligence? SETI, at a sophisticated technicological level, now has quite a few decades behind it -- with nothing, really, but brute-force steps in attempts to achieve its goal. Amusingly, a member of the audience asked whether SETI hadn't maybe, by now, proved the null hypothesis of its quest: No smoking clothes by now might have proved there aren't really any emperors out there. Ah, but Daring Dan was not ready to throw in the towel (to cover the naked dark matter where the ETI should've been). . .based on such things as the fact that it takes a while to cover an infinite number of possible transmission frequencies. . .and, I suppose, an acceleratedly expanding universe, the limits of which one can never reach no matter how one fantasize (Hubble trouble). So, if you're headed up to Lassen National Park and its adjacent natural lava beds, you better get used to seeing an ever-increasing pox of those little unnatural inverted pimples around Hat Creek -- an infestation, as Dan showed in an artist's conception, that will form a fragmented distributed microwave dish antenna for communicating with. . .probably whomever our ancestors were trying to communicate with at Stonehenge. . .and some less-authorized jokers likewise today try to seek out using crop circles. Well, you know, they capped the high-energy physicists before they built the Supercollider, which would've torn up two countries. But hey, if our ancestors had been ecologically tidy, we wouldn't today have all those unnatural historical artifacts, like pyramids and petroglyph graffiti, that other national parks have been designed around, now would we? Hmm. . .sorta like using WMDs to find GWB? Yuch!