The SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute’s Director of Research proposed a broader, multidisciplinary approach to the SETI search, beyond radio and optical modalities, in an article published in the journal Astrobiology. “Are we alone in the universe?” is the provocative question that inspires the scientific search for life beyond Earth. Today, we know definitively of only one planet that hosts life, and that is Earth. How can we find life, and in particular, intelligent life beyond our world?
Advances in planetary and space sciences, astrobiology, and life and cognitive sciences, combined with developments in communication theory, binaural computing, machine learning, and big data analysis, create new opportunities to explore the probabilistic nature of alien life. Brought together in a multidisciplinary approach, they have the potential to support an integrated and expanded Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), a search that includes looking for life as we do not know it. This approach will augment the odds of detecting a signal by broadening our understanding of the evolutionary and systemic components in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), provide more targets for radio and optical SETI, and identify new ways of decoding and coding messages using universal markers.
The Kepler mission and ground-based observatories have revealed thousands of exoplanets in small sectors of our galaxy alone, thus providing powerful evidence that our solar system is not an exception but simply one out of countless others in the Universe. What remains unanswered, however, is whether life—simple or complex—exists beyond Earth.
For nearly 20 years, astrobiology has brought a multidisciplinary vision to this quest through three fundamental science questions: (1) How does life begin and evolve? (2) Does life exist elsewhere in the Universe? (3) What is the future of life on Earth and beyond? In the 2008 version of its roadmap, astrobiology proposed a global approach to these questions through a broad research program with the goals to understand the formation and evolution of habitable planets, to explore and characterize the evolution of planetary environments favorable to life's development in the Solar System and beyond, and to find methods to detect the signatures of life on early Earth and other worlds.
Thirty-five years before the creation of astrobiology, a very similar intellectual approach had been articulated by Frank Drake in the “Drake equation” but with a different intent. The Drake equation provided a probabilistic model to estimate the number of actively communicating extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way, and was formulated around a technological imperative (radio astronomy) and a philosophical question: Are we alone?
Decades of perspective on both astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) show how the former has blossomed into a dynamic and self-regenerating field that continues to create new research areas with time, whereas funding struggles (Garber, 1999) have left the latter starved of young researchers and in search of both a long-term vision and a development program. A more foundational reason may be that, from the outset, SETI is an all-or-nothing venture where finding a signal would be a world-changing discovery, while astrobiology is associated with related fields of inquiry in which incremental progress is always being made.
Yet in the same way astrobiology approaches the understanding of life in the Universe, SETI carries in its quest fundamental and unique questions that are central to the understanding of who, what, and where intelligent life is, and how to find it. While Are we alone? Is their philosophical and popular expression, their scientific formulation can be expressed in these questions: How abundant and diverse is intelligent life in the Universe? How does intelligent life communicate? How can we detect it? If understanding life is the thread woven through the astrobiology roadmap, understanding how intelligent life interacts with its environment and communicates information is central to SETI.
Source: SETI Institute
Advances in planetary and space sciences, astrobiology, and life and cognitive sciences, combined with developments in communication theory, binaural computing, machine learning, and big data analysis, create new opportunities to explore the probabilistic nature of alien life. Brought together in a multidisciplinary approach, they have the potential to support an integrated and expanded Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), a search that includes looking for life as we do not know it. This approach will augment the odds of detecting a signal by broadening our understanding of the evolutionary and systemic components in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), provide more targets for radio and optical SETI, and identify new ways of decoding and coding messages using universal markers.
The Kepler mission and ground-based observatories have revealed thousands of exoplanets in small sectors of our galaxy alone, thus providing powerful evidence that our solar system is not an exception but simply one out of countless others in the Universe. What remains unanswered, however, is whether life—simple or complex—exists beyond Earth.
For nearly 20 years, astrobiology has brought a multidisciplinary vision to this quest through three fundamental science questions: (1) How does life begin and evolve? (2) Does life exist elsewhere in the Universe? (3) What is the future of life on Earth and beyond? In the 2008 version of its roadmap, astrobiology proposed a global approach to these questions through a broad research program with the goals to understand the formation and evolution of habitable planets, to explore and characterize the evolution of planetary environments favorable to life's development in the Solar System and beyond, and to find methods to detect the signatures of life on early Earth and other worlds.
Thirty-five years before the creation of astrobiology, a very similar intellectual approach had been articulated by Frank Drake in the “Drake equation” but with a different intent. The Drake equation provided a probabilistic model to estimate the number of actively communicating extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way, and was formulated around a technological imperative (radio astronomy) and a philosophical question: Are we alone?
Decades of perspective on both astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) show how the former has blossomed into a dynamic and self-regenerating field that continues to create new research areas with time, whereas funding struggles (Garber, 1999) have left the latter starved of young researchers and in search of both a long-term vision and a development program. A more foundational reason may be that, from the outset, SETI is an all-or-nothing venture where finding a signal would be a world-changing discovery, while astrobiology is associated with related fields of inquiry in which incremental progress is always being made.
Yet in the same way astrobiology approaches the understanding of life in the Universe, SETI carries in its quest fundamental and unique questions that are central to the understanding of who, what, and where intelligent life is, and how to find it. While Are we alone? Is their philosophical and popular expression, their scientific formulation can be expressed in these questions: How abundant and diverse is intelligent life in the Universe? How does intelligent life communicate? How can we detect it? If understanding life is the thread woven through the astrobiology roadmap, understanding how intelligent life interacts with its environment and communicates information is central to SETI.
Source: SETI Institute
