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What do we do if SETI is successful?

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174 points leephillips | 1 comments | 20 Oct 25 17:13 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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alganet ◴[20 Oct 25 17:32 UTC] No.45646642[source]▶
We can make it so it's never aliens, or always aliens. Public and science opinion has become a free for all lately.

People are so caught up in the 3I/ATLAS stuff, for example. Should we beam a message to it? What should we think of it? It's a circus.

Let's go back to Boyajian's Star instead. Can we really be sure the dimming is not caused by a mothership coming from that direction? It explains everything, right? Maybe that's how they communicate, by sending a paper plane and opening a large occlusion origami that says "we come from this general direction" (I'm cosplaying Avi Loeb here, satirically).

There's something about interpretation in all of this. Space is full of radio signals. We determine lots of them to be natural (with good reason).

I'm afraid proposing "we should answer" (in case of electromagnetic signals) could lead to a scenario in which people are encouraged to believe something without the means to verifying it. Some idiot group could do it just to increase the popular optimism about space in order to induce a favorable perception on the development of space technologies with the ultimate goal of just bumping some industry with money. It's the kind of world we live in right now, unfortunatelly.

If we want to be serious about humanity's place in the universe, first we need to be serious about our home right here. I don't think we're mature enough to have responsible control over technologies that could be used to send a powerful signal into space.

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wijwp ◴[21 Oct 25 19:35 UTC] No.45660604[source]▶
> People are so caught up in the 3I/ATLAS stuff, for example. Should we beam a message to it? What should we think of it? It's a circus.

Is it really a circus? Seems almost everyone who knows what they're talking about says it's just a natural object.

Anything can be a circus if you listen to people who don't know what they're talking about.

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1. alganet ◴[21 Oct 25 22:07 UTC] No.45662347[source]▶
I think Avi knows what he's doing, and he wants other scientists to dismiss him in public, so he gets an audience.

However, there is a chance he could be underestimating that audience, or at least part of it.

Finding a new type of comet is a scientific breakthrough, and I think his work points in that direction (still a guess from him though, but an educated one). He is trying to cake up those potential genuine discovers with sloppy sensacionalist makeup on top, and that's why I call it a circus.

If in a few months we confirm that 3I/ATLAS is a new kind of comet, he could use the papers he wrote to say he found evidence of that new type first, and also described its landmark characteristics. It would "legitimize" him. But the alien stuff would probably continue to be garbage. He can then say the scientists were skeptics, but he was right.

Now, what angle the aliens narrative serve? Why would a scientist subject himself to being a clown? I don't exactly know. In his case, I don't think it's good stuff.

I chose Tabby's Star to satirize him because my description of a mothership deploying an origami-like occluder matches the overall conclusion from the research at the time (a disturbed exomoon). It's an object from that system that changed is shape. In fact, "disturbed exosatellite" and "unfolding mothership from a planet" are quite compatible descriptions. What matters here is epistemology (we can't know if it's natural or not). Also, it's a good demonstration that we (general public non-astronomers) don't need his antics to imagine things.