The Drake Equation’s variables continue their maddening variability:
Frank Drake, who conducted the first organized search for alien radio signals in 1960, said that the Earth – which used to pump out a loud tangle of radio waves, television signals and other radiation – has been steadily getting quieter as its communications technology improves.
Drake cited the switch from analogue to digital television – which uses a far weaker signal – and the fact that much more communications traffic is now relayed by satellites and fiber optic cables, limiting its leakage into outer space.
“Very soon we will become very undetectable,” he said. If similar changes are taking place in other technologically advanced societies, then the search for them “will be much more difficult than we imagined.”
Didn’t think of that in 1960.
Also, just let me say that the absence of Fred Hoyle’s name in this panspermia-heavy article is deplorable.
For decades, scientists have scanned the heavens in search of extraterrestrial life. Perhaps they should have looked closer to home. Variant life forms – most likely tiny microbes – could still be hanging around “right under or noses – or even in our noses,” Paul Davies, an award-winning Arizona State University physicist, told a group of scientists Tuesday.
“How do we know all life on earth descended from a single origin?” he said, speaking at London’s Royal Society, which serves as Britain’s academy of sciences. “We’ve just scratched the surface of the microbial world.”
Here we’ve got Paul fucking Davies saying what Fred Hoyle got ridiculed for saying 30 years ago. At least give the guy a mention. The fact that Hoyle was wrong about chemical evolution doesn’t make him wrong about evolution from space. At least, when Paul Davies says there’s alien microbes in your nose, it sounds great. But Fred Hoyle, not so much.
It really is funny when an armchair scientist like myself says “duuhhhhh” to so many things these big-wigs are finally saying outloud.
Comment by Matt — January 28, 2010 @ 8:14 pm
It just seems like the normal process of science is to shamelessly rip people off who said the same thing but were shot down, but once they’re dead, just take their stuff!
Comment by Jim — January 30, 2010 @ 11:12 am