SETI is short for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence which makes ETI short for extraterrestrial intelligence. SETI had its roots in 20th Century technological innovation, starting with the radio, with its transmitters and receivers, and the evolution of the receiver into the radio telescope. The logic was infallible. If we, as intelligent life, could devise means of sending radio transmissions out into the cosmos, then any intelligent life that occupied other planets would in turn be doing the same thing. While turning a radio telescope to a bright object in the sky resulted in a jumble of random signals, radio transmissions were orderly. The notion was therefore to search the sky with radio telescopes in the hopes of picking up non-random signals.
There were a number of obstacles to overcome, not the least of which was convincing anyone that there was extraterrestrial life. In true empirical fashion, a conference of interested scientists was called in 1961 at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. Dubbing themselves the Order of the Dolphin, the Dolphin selected as representative of TI, or terrestrial intelligence, the group came up with an equation with the appropriate complexity to completely obfuscate any challenges to its conclusion, that there was in fact, extraterrestrial intelligence out there. This equation created symbols for such things as the rate of star formation, the fraction of stars that form planets, the number of planets hospitable to life, the number of hospitable planets on which life actually evolves, the percentage of the planets on which life actually evolves that evolve intelligent life, the fraction of the planets evolving intelligent life that evolve communications technology and the length of time such technological civilizations could exist.
Notice how precise empirical science is in its endeavors. Here it is collecting specific information which is absolutely unknowable and then putting it into an equation which, according to the Green Bank Dolphins, results in there being 10,000 planets in our galaxy alone that were sending out non-random signals dealing containing local episodes of I Love Lucy and Gunsmoke.
There is no mention in the Green Bank record whether or not the participants addressed the real subject they were facing, the fact that reports of unexplained aerial phenomena were coming in from all sectors of the globe, that the military was on the constant defensive against allowing any real information about the situation from becoming public knowledge for fear of creating a panic similar or greater to one fostered by an earlier broadcast of War of the Worlds, which was presumably on its way to other star systems and galaxies in the form of a non-random radio transmission. Nor is there a record of how the recent Soviet success of Sputnik and our own recent failures might have played into the equation, which, after all, could have accommodated any number of terms so long as they were both meaningless and unknowable (the latest including the number of nonrotating planets with just the right temperature in the twilight zones and even planets without stars that generate their own internal radiation to support life).
The Green Bank Dolphins were able to carry the ball clear into NASA, which eventually earmarked funds to set up an official SETI program in 1991, only to see it canceled the following year. SETI, however, wasn't dead, its momentum moving right along, and it was picked up by private funding interests. Today, with the advent of the Internet, signals picked up by SETI radio telescopes are fed into millions of participating desktop computers whose owners have downloaded a simple program that will allow the computers to constantly scan signals, enhancing significantly the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Or not.
Our concept of radio waves results from our inability to understand the nature of light. By the time radio waves were discovered in the latter half of the 19th Century, light had been firmly determined to be a wave phenomena. Because waves, picture water waves, do not have an independent existence, they are merely disturbances in a medium, water, light waves were considered to be a disturbance of something our intrepid empiricists, empirical meaning based on observation or experience, made up, a medium called aether.
Around the time that radio transmissions were discovered, two empirical experimenters undertook to do what all good empiricists do, verify the actual existence of their made-up concoctions. Michelson and Morley created a complex piece of scientific apparatus designed to prove conclusively the existence of aether, in the process determining the absolute motion and direction of the Earth. The experiment, one of the greatest failures of all time, led to the notion that space and time are not only actually physical things, but physical things that change their nature, the 20th Century equivalent to the Aristotelian notion that we were at the center of the universe and everything revolved around us, with the exception that we were nowhere and nothing was anywhere else.
The reality of the Michelson Morley debacle, however, was its failure to prove the existence of the made-up aether through which light waves were supposed to propagate. Without aether, light waves couldn't propagate and we were left with no explanation of how light got from here to there.
Fortunately, a guy named Maxwell had been fiddling around with the relationship of electricity to magnetism, and had formulated something called the electromagnetic spectrum, with spectrum reflecting the still current notion of light as a wave. Even though Maxwell's equations indicated that light could travel without a medium, and thus prior experiments proving light to be a wave were being misinterpreted, empirical science focuses only on what it wants to prove, not on whether its proof is consistent with anything else it has determined to be a reality.
Thus, in Maxwell's world, light was the interaction of transverse waves of electric and magnetic energy. While I can't visualize what this means, and I doubt anyone else can, and while Maxwell viewed these transverse waves as occurring in some sort of medium, alas, the aether, it's pretty simple to say that light is actually propelled through empty space by the interaction of the magnetic and electric fields of which it is a part, the electromagnetic spectrum that is made up of the interaction of the magnetic and electric fields.
As with all of empirical science, its explanations are just words designed to match a failure to comprehend the phenomena being described, but for purposes of SETI, we don't really have to immerse ourselves into the empirical wonderland of light as a wave and a particle, a part of the electromagnetic spectrum which is also a frequency, and a part of that frequency which, wonder of wonders, compresses itself in such a manner that multiple frequencies are carried as a single frequency, which is to say all the colored frequencies are actually carried in the single frequency of white light, light which, of course, travels at a rate that limits the rate all matter can travel because, even though light is merely a disturbance, the result of the electrons orbiting atomic nuclei bouncing up and down in orbit, can actually convert itself to matter, slowing time as it speeds up.
No, we don't have to deal with all this empirical whoopteedo to get at the real problems involved in the search for extraterrestrial life.
That's because we have been able to measure the nature of light, and along with it, the range of electromagnetic frequencies of which light is a part, for many years, in fact for more years than all the sophisticated empirical blather had been around. Although rarely mentioned, other than in passing, in textbooks and dissertations, light behaves in a very specific way.
First, light expands. This is because it is emitted from something that is undergoing a physical process that produces the light, and as long as there is nothing to block light's expansion, it expands out and away in all directions.
Next, light diminishes as it expands. This is so obvious, it is not of merit to empirical science, and certainly of no interest to astronomers. Any of us can easily determine that light diminishes. Watch an airplane's light disappear in the night. Light a match and see how far it can be seen in the dark. It's not rocket science, which is to say, it's a real fact of physical reality that light diminishes. Not only does light diminish, it does so in a measurable way. Because light expands in all directions if it is not impeded from doing so, it expands in a sphere. We know how to measure the surface of a sphere. It's 4 times pi with the distance squared. Thus, eliminating the common terms, the surface of a sphere expands with the square of its distance. The light that is expanding over the surface of an expanding sphere is therefore diminishing with the square of its distance.
It has more surface to cover and thus, less light to cover each point in the surface.
The reason that astronomers don't like this fact of reality is simple. They claim to be able to see light from the beginning of time to the end of the universe and for this to be possible, light has to be able to travel forever.
However, because light diminishes, it diminishes out of existence, and we can see only so far. Astronomers like to imply that their telescopes bring them closer to the stars, but all improved telescopes are capable of doing is collecting the light that is present, and if the light has diminished out of existence, then it simply is no longer present. We could link a million Hubbles together and still not be able to see what simply isn't there.
The implications for the fake astronomical distances our empirical fantasists like to claim are, well, astronomical, but that is not the current discussion dealing with SETI, whose multiple variables, for some strange reason, talk about star formation and not about the number of stars around.
And the implications for radio astronomy are even more astronomical. While it is fairly obvious that stars generate sufficient light to be seen for very long distances, putting a radio or television transmitter next to a star's output clearly shows the relationship in the signal output of the two. Radio and television transmissions are simply a part of the electromagnetic spectrum and as such, they also diminish inversely with the square of the distance over which they travel.
Claiming that a radio telescope can pick up radio and television transmissions from a planet circling a distant sun is similar to claiming that a flashlight held by an astronaut would be as visible in another star system as our sun would be.
It's pure fantasy.
Thus, SETI, the attempt to differentiate non-random signals from the electromagnetic noise picked up by radio telescopes is nothing more than a ruse. It might be a clever piece of misdirection, an effort to convince the public by consistent failure that there is no other life in the universe and that therefore, by implication, the unexplained craft we measure in our skies performing feats impossible in light of the made-up explanations of our empirical scientists simply don't exist, or it may simply be one of the many empirical scams designed to bilk money from an unsuspecting public who have misplaced their faith in a group of people they think have provided them with the actual answers about physical reality.
I won't even bring up the embarrassing fact that when the Order of the Dolphins were performing their empirical magic, digital communications were a thing of the future. Now all of our communications are going digital. Digital signals require unique compression methods and thus would be indistinguishable from any other background noise. This means that another factor would have to be added to the equation, the time the identified civilization was dependent on analog signals.
One thing, however, is apparent. While there is little question that there is intelligent life in the universe, it's doubtful that it's located here on Earth.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com