Terry Blanton wrote:
If you consider that the source of the WOW signal might be the same type of narrow beam, fixed antenna. And the planet source is in the same motion as the earth. It's no surprise that you might get a brief burst of intelligence but never see it again due to the motion of the spheres.
I assume you are suggesting it was an interplanetary signal. I do not see what use a sharply focused focused off-planet signal would serve in a planetary communication system. Or could it be an uplink to a satellite? I do not think they are that focused or strong.
If it was an interstellar communication and it happened to impinge on earth, it would have stayed pointed in our direction for a long time. Ditto for a deliberate signal to attract our attention and announce the existence of another intelligent species.
Thinking about this SETI issue some more . . . (not CETI!) . . . I assume we are only talking about signals within our galaxy. The Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 ly accross and 1,000 ly thick, with 200 to 300 billion stars (depending on the source). Based on the failure of SETI so far, I think it is safe to conclude that in our galaxy there are not millions of contemporaneous civilizations vying for our attention. That is to say:
1. "Contemporaneous" means existing long enough to reach us; a signal broadcast for thousands of years, within the last 100,000 years. That is really not such a long time. I assume that stable, intelligent civilizations usually last longer than that. Stable non-intelligent species do.
2. By "vying for attention" I mean a signal announcing their existence, in a simple format that any radio-telescope is likely to detect and recognize as artificial. I do not mean a complex communication that we happen to overhear, which might be too compressed and low-powered to recognize as a signal.
We could send this kind of "hello galaxy!" signal even now, only 100 years after discovering radio. Naturally it would cost a great deal of money and it is not likely we would do it. But I assume that a civilization that discovered radio centuries or thousands of years ago would be so advanced, the cost of setting up a broadcast would trivial. It might be something a small group of private individuals could afford. To be effective you would want to send out multiple beams from deep space, repeated for thousands of years, from an antenna orbiting the star or on the surface of an airless planet, rather than from the home planet where the species evolved. Even something as elaborate as this will eventually cost a trivial amount. It seems to me that an intelligent species would be motivated to do this as a favor to alien astronomers and biologists. To help your distant intellectual colleagues. Or just as a quixotic stunt, if you will. If I could do something like this for, let us say, $20,000, I wouldn't hesitate. It seems to me that sooner or later in the next few thousand years, a person or group of people is bound to do this.
So, based on this, I conclude that the galaxy is not filled with millions of intelligent species in civilizations that have lasted for hundreds of thousands or millions of years, and achieved much greater wealth and stability than we have. Or if there are such civilizations, the psychology of the species is not similar to ours. Not similar to mine, anyway, such that they would spend $20,000 just give a thrill to some alien biologist a thousand light years away, essentially just for the heck of it.
That is a nebulous conclusion, but I think it is meaningful and I think it is well founded. The galaxy is definitely not filled with millions of advanced civilizations that I can relate to.
That's a sad thought. I do not know what this does to the Drake equation. - Jed
