I love SETI. I was one of the first wave of internet peeps to download the data analyser software that ran when one's computer was idling. A brilliant idea and very practical. It was an early example of crowd/cloud computing.
What motivated me, as well as all the other contributors, is a fascination with the idea that there are other intelligent creatures out there ... somewhere.
The thought struck me tonight that we're on to a hiding to nothing. The reason that we haven't found anything out there is not that we don't have the technology, nor that we don't have the right ethos. It's just that those civilisations we're searching for have died out.
The obvious answer to this question was posed many years ago - any civilisation able to develop nuclear power would be able to develop weapons of sufficient power to annihilate themselves entirely! It's plausible, but hasn't happened (thankfully) on Earth (yet). But the argument goes that all those planets out there must have blown themselves up. That's why we can't see them!
My thinking on this is different. The research/thinking that I've been doing in the last year has led me to a profound place that I'm still exploring, however one thing that occurred to me tonight is this: any civilisation able to develop sufficient cognitive power will realise the futility of existence and therefore die out through choice. I'm sure this isn't a new idea, but in the current context of what's flying around my head it makes some sense.
I imagine that the first impression upon reading this would be to think that the individual is simply bored of existing, and that this is comparable with the apathy and lethargy we currently feel in the West with the corporate, capitalist treadmill many of us have to deal with every day ... until we die. This is not the point.
I'm thinking of something different. Once we have, as a species, developed enough cognitive power that we can conceive of far more than currently imagined, it may be such that any individual will start to wonder what the point is. It will be apparent to them that their conceptions and perceptions are futile and irrelevant, but, more than this, they are false. They do not reflect "reality"; there is no such thing as "reality" - only conception and perception.
It's a bleak outlook in our current age, however if I imagine a civilisation a thousand years in advance of ours then it must seem very dark and depressing. Surely the only thing to live for is to enjoy life?
This is the prevailing mantra in the West. "Enjoy your life" (usually at the expense of many others).
Once, however, a species realises that enjoyment is, too, part of the conception and perception mechanism, and is equitable to all other emotions - as transitory and flaky as they can be - then I might argue that the species would simply do the sensible thing and end it all. There is no point and there is ACTUALLY NO POINT! It's not that the point simply isn't relevant - it's that any POINT that can be thought of is actually non existent in any extrinsic sense that would, presumably be the focus for an intelligent species.
This is a heavily biased text. It's very possible that many other species would develop methods of thinking and perceiving that weren't like ours. Perhaps they wouldn't have any sense whatever of purpose or existence like ours.
Anyway, that's my thought for the day. There are no SETI signals because all other species with sufficient technology simply realised that existence is futile. That doesn't mean we shouldn't enjoy our lives though, does it?
Hmmm.
