Grand Strategy Annex

9th January 2012

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Alien hunters: Searching for life →

The BBC is having a two part presentation on SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence), “Seti: the past, present and future,” which is here introduced in a article by Jason Palmer.

All the big names of the field are quoted here: Seth Shostak, Frank Drake, and Paul Davies. At the present moment they don’t have a happy tale to tell, not because they haven’t found any good signals lately, but rather because funding is difficult to find given present financial circumstances, which is giving a whole new twist to what Paul Davies called “the eerie silence”: the silence in this case not being the silence from the sky, but the silence from the earth end, where SETI efforts are being shut down for lack of money.

While the search for extraterrestrial signals is in a “valley” for lack of money, the science of searching for extraterrestrial life, and for the conditions under which extraterrestrial life might be possible, is doing better than ever. New technology and new satellites with remarkable abilities and resolution are revealing much more about the cosmos that we ever supposed that we would know about it without being out among the stars ourselves.

This is yet another example of how wrong our past futurism has been. The only way in which our futurism looks even remotely accurate is when we cherry-pick particularly prescient predictions while forgetting the bulk of our assumptions of what the future (including the future of our knowledge) would be like.

Tagged: SETIfuturism