Apr 16 2008
Searching for intelligence, here and abroad
On Monday night Alan Penny came down from St Andrews University to talk about SETI. In particular, he wanted to convince us that spending money on searching for intelligent aliens is a good thing.
He didn’t really achieve this aim. Over the course of his talk he diminished his expectations and ended up stating that searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence would happen anyway, so that was that. He certainly didn’t convince me, and I don’t think anyone I was with changed their mind after hearing him speak either.
He spoke about the general arguments for and against the existence of intelligent life — such as the anthropic argument — which mostly served to highlight the futility of the search. Then he tried to convince us that it was worthwhile anyway. His arguments boiled down to two things, which I will render in a deliberately mocking and provocative fashion just because I can:
- Where’s Your Logic Now, Science Boy?
- People aren’t going to stop looking for aliens so it doesn’t matter what we do. This isn’t actually an argument for anything, more a statement of the romantic outlook of many people with cash to burn.
- But Think Of The Children!!!
- SETI is an easy concept to grasp and (because of the aforementioned romanticism) people are always interested in it. But it also requires science, so — in the absence of a real space programme — we can get kids interested in science by hunting for aliens.
He changed his mind during the talk from emphasising government-sponsored science (“should we spend money on SETI?”) to private foundations, so his first point is doubly irrelevant. No one is actually going round to billionaires’ houses and telling them how not to spend their money.
The children argument is interesting. It makes me uneasy, since it seems to beg the question that SETI is science1 in the first place. The primary means by which SETI does its work is by examining signals picked up by radio telescopes to find “artificial signals”. Unfortunately I don’t know what an “artificial signal” looks like, since the only definition we have of one is a signal created by an intelligent being.
The speaker didn’t bother going into the detail of what they actually look for, which is a shame. The Discovery Institute have spent years telling people that they have means by which they can identify “design” (see “irreducible complexity” and “specified complexity”), all of which have been bunk. By what means do SETI discriminate natural from artificial? What, exactly, does the SETI@home program do when it churns through radio data?
So the way I see it, search for extra-terrestrial intelligence is as scientific as the hunt for Big Foot or Nessie — involving lots of fancy James Bond toys but requiring us to ignore the fact that there is no evidence to suggest these things exist to be detected. In that respect, getting people interested in science with SETI is a bit perverted. There’s no lack of exciting work which both starts with some reasonable evidence and produces results all while using fun kit.
Meanwhile, in that other world which claims to know artifice when it sees it, Scientific American got a look at the creationist propaganda film Expelled in a private screening put on by the film’s associate producer, Mark Mathis. They then recorded a conversation/interview with Mark Mathis.
You can listen to the guy (part one, part two) repeatedly digging himself into rhetorical holes and then weaseling his way out. It’s remarkable how many times he used the argument “ah, well I wasn’t actually responsible for that bit” whenever a good point is raised. I began to wonder (and I’m sure the SciAm folks did too) what he actually did do.
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I suppose you could argue that the Apollo project wasn’t science either, but engineering, and yet it did a great deal to generate excitement about science. I’m not sure how to counter this argument, other than saying that neither did NASA pretend that putting man on the moon was about science. ↩
I think the comparison with Nessie is rather unfair. We know how to look for creatures living in Lochs - we’ve looked, and there isn’t anything there. If life exists beyond our planet it’s probably quite hard to detect - we’re not entirely sure how to do it (but we have some ideas), and doing it is very hard. SETI’s mission has only just begun, whereas the search for Nessie is basically over.
The existence of Nessie would be interesting, but would have relatively little impact on our understanding of various scientific disciplines or society as a whole. The discovery of an alien civilisation would have wide reaching and serious implications.
SETI funding has side effects anyway, the money spent on radio telescope time subsidises these things that are used in perhaps more directly useful ways - and the data collected by SETI is useful for other purposes.
Strangely enough this guy seemed to reckon that neither of these were the case — that no-one was willing to pay for SETI data gathering because it was otherwise useless, and that existent data was just as hard to repurpose for searching for aliens.
I don’t agree that the side effects of funding SETI should be celebrated. Surely it just suggests that we should be funding the useful things directly? SETI should be the ones tagging along behind waiting for the technology to suit their purpose not the other way round.
Standing in a field at night pointing a torch up at the night sky is a fruitless activity even if you do keep saving up and blowing your cash on a new, bigger torch. Invest in giant AI torch technology and you can come back to alien hunting later! Glib I know, but you get the idea.
Anyway he didn’t help his cause by making four racist comments and saying that the “people from the tenements” should give their money to SETI. Yikes is all I’m saying.
I think what he actually said was that “people from the tenements” wouldn’t want their money going to SETI. I’d also disagree that he said anything outright racist (unless I’ve forgotten one)… there were a few badly thought out comments, though.
I think SETI is one of those instances where science is like sex. It has a practical purpose, but that’s not why people do it…
I believe, over the course of the evening he referred to a “Jewish meeting” (I think it was meeting; it was a phrase I’d never heard before anyway), “pygmies” (I don’t know if he meant people or animals at that point), short Japanese people and “crazy Russians”. I think that was it but there may be more. No racism but he definitely gave an impression of not liking Johnny Foreigner.
Of course he wasn’t supporting some kind of nazi eugenics scheme or anything so he wasn’t technically a racist but as you and Dougal both agree he was certainly making some uncomfortable generalisations. I can forgive my fat grandfather making remarks like that when he gets pissed (because I don’t like him anyway) but a public speaker should be a little more careful methinks. If he wants to compromise himself and therefore his cause that’s up to him I guess!
Well if he wants to have sex with aliens that’s fine, but I’m not paying for it.