inherency: status quo solves -...

Minnesota Urban Debate League SETINegative

Index

Inherency: Status Quo Solves......................................................................................................................2

Solvency: SETI Technology Inefficient..........................................................................................................5

Solvency: Alien life highly improbable.........................................................................................................8

Solvency: Communication Impossible.......................................................................................................11

A2: Alien Contact → Advanced Technology...............................................................................................13

A2: Alien Contact → Cultural Advancement/Exchange.............................................................................14

Author Indict: Exopolitics..........................................................................................................................16

Impact Turn: Alien hostility.......................................................................................................................17

China Counterplan Solvency......................................................................................................................20

Politics Links..............................................................................................................................................21

Impact Calculus: DAs Outweigh.................................................................................................................22

1


Inherency: Status Quo Solves

China's FAST observatory better than SETI, newly constructed, larger, and fully funded

Quick--11[Darren Quick, “China building world’s biggest radio telescope”, Gizmag, 16 June 2011, http://www.gizmag.com/five-hundred-meter-aperture-spherical-radio-telescope/18930]

Since its completion in 1963, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, with a diameter of 305 m (1,000 ft) and a collecting area of 73,000 square meters (790,000 sq ft), has been the largest single-aperture radio telescope ever constructed. But Arecibo is set to lose its title with construction now underway in Guizhou Province in southern China of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST). Upon its expected completion in 2016, FAST will be able to see more than three times further into space and survey the skies ten times faster than Arecibo.FAST was first proposed by China for the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), which has since opted to combine the signals of thousands of smaller antennae spread over a distance of more than 3,000 km (1,864 miles), combining for a total collecting area of approximately one square kilometer (0.38 square miles). The SKA will be built in the southern hemisphere with South Africa and Australia currently vying for the right to host the project. Despite this, an international review and advisory conference on the science and technology of FAST held in Beijing in 2006 concluded FAST was feasible. In the following year funding for FAST was given the green light and the approved budget now sits at CNY700 million (approx. US$107.9 million). Construction in the Dawodang depression in south Guizhou commenced in March. Unlike Arecibo, which has a fixed spherical curvature focusing radio waves into a line above the dish where they are focused to a single point by more mirrors, FAST's cable-net supporting structure will be able to deform the surface in real time through active control. As PopSci explains, this will allow a subset dish's 4,400 triangular aluminum panels to form a parabolic mirror anywhere within the larger bowl that is nearly the size of the entire Arecibo dish. Using FAST's unparalleled sensitivity and high surveying speed, the project is expected to enable the surveying of neutral hydrogen in the Milky Way and other galaxies, the detection of new pulsars (both galactic and extragalactic), the search for the first shining stars, and of perhaps most interest to many people, the search for extraterrestrial life. It is expected to be able to detect transmissions from over 1,000 light years away.

2


China's FAST has higher chances of finding extraterrestrial life

O'Neill--11[Ian O’Neill, “Monster Chinese Telescope the Next ET Hunter”, Discovery News, 21 June 2011, http://news.discovery.com/space/monster-chinese-telescope-the-next-et-hunter-110621.html]

Not only will the adaptive shape of FAST enable astronomers to direct this powerful radio antenna with ease, its sensitivity will be second to none. It will be able to "see" three times deeper into space than Arecibo and generate the sharpest ever radio observations of interstellar gas, pulsars, supernovae, black hole emissions and join the effort to hunt for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. In 1995, the SETI Institute launched Project Phoenix, an attempt to survey 1,000 nearby sun-like stars, listening out for any artificial radio "beep." With the inclusion of FAST, the scope of this project could be increased, allowing SETI to survey 5,000 of the nearest sun-like stars. FAST could theoretically detect ET "phoning home" up to 1,000 light-years away. Could FAST be the radio eye we need to spot our transmitting intelligent extraterrestrial neighbors? We'll have to wait another five years to find out.

SETI isn’t dead; multiple partners are using a telescope in Virginia to continue research

Shiga--11[David Shiga, “SETI’s new focus,” New Scientist, 21 May 2011, LexisNexis7]

SETI targets 'Goldilocks' planets Previous searches for alien radio signals have focused on stars deemed benign –; now astronomers are targeting planets in the habitable zone of their stars Funding woes may have shut down a major SETI observatory, but the search for extraterrestrial intelligence isn't dead. In fact, it's more focused than ever. Previous searches for alien radio signals focused on stars considered friendly to life, based on how often they experience violent flares. On 8 May, astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, the SETI Institute of California, and the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory started SETI scans that target stars thought to have planets in the "habitable zone", which could host liquid water. They plan to point the powerful Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia at 54 of these star systems, plus 32 others deemed interesting. The SETI Institute's own array stopped listening for signals in April because of a funding shortage.

3


Private donations will solve now; a new funding program hopes to tap into SETI’s donor base

Darling--11[Dylan Darling is a multimedia journalist, “SETI scours Earth for cash; donations sought to restart deep space search,” Redding Magazine, 27 May 2011]

Since mid-April, the Allen Telescope Array, a collection of radio dishes about 75 miles east of Redding, has been in hibernation after the state and federal government steeply cut funding. To bring the array back online, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute is trying to find $2.5 million a year in support, said Tom Pierson, CEO for the nonprofit organization in Mountain View. "We are basically trying to tap our donor base," he said. So far SETI has about $100,000 for the array, but it's about to launch a new fundraising program called SETI Stars in the next two weeks to a month, Pierson said. While he was tight with details, Pierson said the new program will feature social networking designed by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. He said the idea is to have donors have a sense of personal participation and feedback. SETI already has "tens of thousands" of supporters and more than 110,000 followers on Twitter, Pierson said.

Public SETI cooperatives solve

Tarter--01[Jill Tarter is the Director of the Center for SETI Research, “The search for extraterrestrial intelligence”, p533, http://astro.wsu.edu/allen/courses/astr450/annurev.astro.39.1.511.pdf]

The time had definitely come for other backyard SETI. The nonprofit SETI League incorporated and launched Project Argus in 1996 to coordinate the efforts of radio amateurs in an attempt to listen to the entire sky at all times (requiring about 5000 small antennas) for strong transient signals. They now have 105 stations operating in 19 countries. The public has also become involved in SETI data reduction via the UC Berkeley screensaver (SETI@home). This is by far the most successful distributed computing project ever undertaken. More than 2.9 million people in more than 226 countries have downloaded this screensaver!

4


Solvency: SETI Technology Inefficient

SETI uses a completely inefficient method of communication; better alternatives exist

National Geographic Magazine--04[National Geographic Magazine, “Alien Contact More Likely by ‘Mail’ Than Radio, Study Says,” 3 September 2004, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/09/0901_040901_alien_contact_2.html]

A new study suggests it is more energy efficient to communicate across interstellar space by sending physical material—a sort of message in a bottle—than beams of electromagnetic radiation. Solid matter can hold more information and journey farther than radio waves, which disperse as they travel. The institute listens for radio signals in interstellar space. So far, it has not detected any signs of alien life. That, however, does not prove there is no alien life. Instead, it could be because radio signals get diluted as they travel across great distances in space, says Rose, whose research grew out of his work at the Wireless Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB) at Rutgers University. He learned that the "energy budget" required for sending a radio signal increases with distance. Beams of radiation are cone-shaped and grow in size as they travel outward, meaning the great majority of their energy is wasted. Potential recipients may not even be capable of receiving the message. "There's no guarantee that there's anything out there that is evolved that can listen to the message, hear it, and decode it," Rose said. A far more energy efficient way of communicating over great interstellar distances is to send a physical object with encoded information, Rose said. Such a package is not diluted as it travels across space. It also stays where it lands. "Our calculations suggest that it's not only more energy efficient to send a package than radio waves," he said, "it's outrageously more efficient."

Even humans have moved past radio; we can’t expect intelligent aliens to utilize outdated technology

The Guardian--10[The Guardian, “Aliens can't hear us, says astronomer,” 27 January 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/jan/27/aliens-cant-hear-us-astronomer]

US astronomer Frank Drake – who has been seeking radio signals from alien civilisations for almost 50 years – told scientists that earthlings were making it less likely they would be heard in space. "The trouble is that we are making ourselves more and more difficult to be heard," said Dr Drake. "We are broadcasting in much more efficient ways today and are making our signals fainter and fainter." In the past, TV and radio programmes were broadcast from huge ground stations that transmitted signals at thousands of watts. These could be picked up relatively easily across the depths of space, astronomers calculated.Now, most TV and radio programmes are transmitted from satellites that typically use only 75 watts and have aerials pointing toward Earth, rather than into space. "For good measure, in America we have switched from analogue to digital broadcasting and you are going to do the same in Britain very soon," Drake added. "When you do that, your transmissions will become four times fainter because digital uses less power." "Very soon we will become undetectable," he said. In short, in space no one will hear us at all. What is true for humans would probably also be true for aliens, who may already have moved to much more efficient methods of TV and radio broadcasting. Trying to find ET from their favourite shows was going to be harder than we thought, Drake said.

5


6


Aliens are more likely to harness the power of neutrinos over radio waves—Radio is a Random and Unlikely Guess

Discovery News--11[Discovery News, “Do Aliens Speak Particle-Tongue?” 18 April 2011, http://news.discovery.com/space/aliens-neutrinos-communications-seti-110418.html]

Extraterrestrials may have a better way to communicate across space than radio waves or optical beams . A team of scientists suggests ET could encode neutrinos, for example. These particles of matter are similar to electrons, but since they have no electric charge, they can pass through anything. This makes them ideal for long-distance travel, as neutrinos are undisturbed by gas, dust and other matter that can block radio waves and other types of electromagnetic radiation. Astronomers have been scouring the galaxy for decades for alien-produced radio signals -- and more recently for non-naturally occurring light pulses, as well -- to no avail. "We really have no clue as to how some advanced civilization might want to transmit to us, nor do we have any really good idea why they would want to transmit to us," physicist John Learned, with the University of Hawaii, told Discovery News. "Everything that we're doing is exploratory science: You don't know the game; you don't know if you're in the game; you don't know the rules of the game... which is what makes it so much fun," said Learned, who, along with colleagues, has written a series of articles about how neutrinos could be used for communication. ET could, for example, send out a neutrino beam at precise (and non-naturally occurring) energy levels that would be sure to catch a scientist's eye. "If there's a civilization, like our civilization, which is at the stage of setting up large neutrino detectors, then one would see this signal of a unique signature and you would right away say: 'What the heck is going on here? This is certainly not a natural signature.' This is something that would really get your attention on the very first (detection.) And then on the second one you'd be saying: 'Huh? What in the world is going on here?'" Another possible communications technique is to use neutrinos to shift the blink rate of a commonly known type of pulsating star called Cepheid variables, which are used to help determine the distances between galaxies.

It will be difficult to adapt to civilizations that have advanced technology

Harrison and Dick--2000[Albert A. Harrison and Steven J. Dick, “When SETI Succeeds: The Impact of High-Information Contact", The Future Foundation, July 2000, http://www.futurefoundation.org/documents/hum_pro_wrk1.pdf]

Perhaps the most common expectation is that ET civilizations will be technologically advanced (White, 1990 ). Given present search procedures, we are unlikely to encounter a civilization that is below our current technological level, since such a civilization is unlikely to use powerful radios, engage in space travel, or under take other activities that we can detect. It seems statistically unlikely that we would encounter a civilization that is exactly at our level of technological maturity; hence, we expect to encounter civilizations that, compared to us, are technologically advanced. Astronomer Ray Norris (1998) calculates that the average civilization may be two billion years older than our own. Human experience suggests that technological advances accelerate over time; we have seen more technological advances during the last one hundred years than in the preceding two million years . What are the chances that we could identify, never mind understand, such a society? It might be much easier for prehistoric man to grasp cellular telephones, computers, lasers, and jet transports.

7


8


SETI’s techniques have been useless for over half a century

Shostak--10[Seth Shostak has a PhD is Astronomy, Sky & Telescope Magazine, “Closing on ET,” November 2010]

Despite half a century of SETI experiments, we still don’t know if there’s anyone out there as clever as we are. That sounds discouraging until you examine the context. Frankly, modern SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) has barely scratched the celestial surface. While it’s true that radio reconnaissance of broad regions of space have been made, these sky surveys have spent little time observing in any given direction. The consequence is that they’re often considerably less sensitive than targeted searches, in which stars are checked out individually. The number of star systems deliberately examined by SETI, looking for very weak transmissions over a wide swath of the radio dial, is only about 750, and they only received brief looks at any given frequency. Optical searches, which hunt for very short, very bright fl ashes of light, have checked out roughly 5,000 stars, also briefly. Clearly, in a galaxy of several hundred billion stars, those are skimpy samples. The failure so far to trip across any evidence for E.T. is akin to a search for kangaroos in Australia that gives up after examining one acre of the Outback. So the lack of SETI success tells us a lot about the limitations of our experiments, but says virtually nothing about the galaxy’s population of sentient beings. Fortunately, the SETI game is changing, and there’s reason to hope we might pick up a signal in no more than a few dozen years. Runners in the race to find the aliens could be closer to the finish than the starting line.

9


Solvency: Alien life highly improbable

If there were advanced aliens, we should have seen then already

Michael--11[George Michael, “Extraterrestrial Aliens, friends, foes, or just curious?” Skeptic magazine- a journal of the skeptic society, an academic and educational organization, 2 June 2011]

Alas, so far, the SETI project has not yielded any tangible evidence of alien civilizations. SETI uses scientific methods to scan the galaxy for electromagnetic transmissions from civilizations on other planets. Supposedly, a Type II or Type III civilization would leave a detectable footprint in the galaxy, such as radio transmissions or infrared emissions. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, an advanced civilization would generate large quantities of waste heat which would be detected by our instruments. Almost certainly a device such as a Dyson sphere would dramatically alter the light spectrum of the enclosed star, and in doing so, create a noticeable infrared glow that could be identified by peering astronomers, even on the far side of the galaxy. Nevertheless, no telltale signs have yet been detected. Kardashev countered that alien civilizations have not been found because they have not been properly searched for."

Expansion and Colonization is a Natural Process; If There Were Intelligent Life in the Universe it Would Be Nearby

Space Review--07[The Space Review, “The other side of the Fermi paradox,” 19 February 2007, http://www.thespacereview.com/article/810/1]

There is a significant connection between the categories of “We Will Exist On Earth Only” and “We Will Not Exist”. Webb explained the strong motive for all civilizations—both extraterrestrial and human—to pursue colonization: “…in any case it seems a wise idea for a species to expand into space to guard against the possibility of planetary disaster”. Remaining on a single planet increases the risk of extinction, as Stephen Hawking and many others have stated.The Fermi paradox is based on the premise that it is natural, logical and right for extraterrestrial civilizations to colonize space. The other side of the Fermi paradox is that it is natural, logical, and right for human civilization to colonize space. Anti-human-spaceflight advocates tend to hold the contradictory idea that colonization is alright for extraterrestrials, but wrong and immoral for us. However, colonizing and populating space is advantageous for every civilization; whether it happens to be extraterrestrial or terrestrial is beside the point. Webb’s 50th solution is the one that he believes is the most likely. Unfortunately for extraterrestrial enthusiasts, the solution is depressingly pessimistic: “…the only resolution of the Fermi paradox that makes sense to me—is that we are alone.” Webb’s preferred solution is highly controversial, but it satisfies Ockham’s razor; out of all the Fermi paradox explanations, it is the simplest one. On the other hand, the solution is only as good as the evidence it is based on. New evidence could lead to a different solution to the paradox.If extraterrestrial civilizations do not exist, it is even more important for humans to survive and colonize space. If we do not do it, then no one else will. If extraterrestrial civilizations exist, the task will be shared. In any case, the ultimate goal for all civilizations is to spread life throughout the galaxy, to transform a largely dead galaxy into a living one.

10


11


The sheer number of coincidences necessary for a planet to support life create mean we are alone; negative probability outweighs all affirmative advantages

Mullen--01[Leslie Mullen, “Cosmic Evolution”, Astrobiology Magazine, 18 May 2001, http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/139/galactic-habitable-zones]

"I think this is a very, very interesting idea," says Dr. William Borucki, a research scientist in the Planetary Studies Branch of the NASA-Ames Research Center. "I'm delighted to see this theory. I like how Gonzalez has imagined the consequences of planets existing at different parts of the Galaxy. Now scientists need to check the math to make sure it all adds up." Our Milky Way Galaxy is structured much like billions of other spiral galaxies. The galactic disk contains a lot of interstellar matter (like dust and gas), as well as young and intermediate-age stars. While young stars can be found scattered throughout the Galaxy, the stellar population tends to be older in the bulge around the galactic center. Many of these older stars are gathered together into globular clusters , which orbit the nucleus of the Galaxy in a region known as the galactic "halo." Strong emissions of infrared radiation and X-rays from the galactic center indicate clouds of ionized gas rapidly moving around some sort of supermassive object, quite possibly a black hole . There are billions of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, and some are more metal-rich than others. Part of this is a condition of age: The older a star, the more metal-poor it tends to be. That's because the most ancient stars formed from just hydrogen, helium, and lithium. When the most massive of these stars exploded, nuclear reactions fused these light elements into heavier ones. These heavier "metals" became part of the raw material from which a second generation of stars formed. Each stellar explosion led to a greater abundance of available metals. A metal-rich star, therefore, has material that came from many previous generations of stars. Our Sun is unusually metal-rich for a star of its age and type. Scientists aren't sure why. It could be that the Sun formed in a part of the Galaxy that had an abundance of metals, and then migrated to its present position. Based on studies of extrasolar planets, metal-rich stars are more likely to have planets orbiting around them. One reason for this may be that a certain minimum amount of metals is needed to form rocky bodies (including the cores of the gas giant planets). A metal-rich interstellar cloud that collapses to form a star would therefore be more likely to form planets than would a metal-poor cloud. Besides requiring a metal-rich star, a Galactic Habitable Zone excludes stars too close to the galactic center. Our Sun is a nice distance away from the galactic center, about 28,000 light years. Being in the outer region of the Galaxy protects our Solar System from the huge gravitational tug of stars clustered near the galactic center. If we were closer in, the combined gravity of all those stars would perturb the orbit of comets in the Oort cloud. The Oort cloud, which circles the outer perimeter of our Solar System, contains trillions of comets. The gravitational disturbances caused by other stars would send many of those comets in our direction - increasing the rate of comet impacts and endangering - if not eventually wiping out - life on Earth.Staying away from the galactic center has an additional advantage. The center of the Galaxy is awash in harmful radiation. Solar systems near the center would experience increased exposure to gamma rays, X-rays, and cosmic rays, which would destroy any life trying to evolve on a planet. "Large, complex organisms are much more sensitive to environmental perturbations than simple life," says Gonzalez. "Our hypothesis deals exclusively with complex life, more specifically, aerobic macroscopic metazoan life. The effects of radiation would damage the ozone layer, as well as increase radiation levels at the surface of a planet from secondary particle cascades in the atmosphere." Keeping out of the way of the Galaxy's spiral arms is another requirement of the Galactic Habitable Zone. The density of gases and interstellar matter in the spiral arms leads to the formation of new stars. Although these spiral arms are the birthplaces of stars, it would be dangerous for our solar system to cross through one of them. The intense radiation and gravitation of a spiral arm would cause disruptions in our Solar System just as surely as if we were closer to the center of the Galaxy. Luckily, our Sun revolves at the same rate as the Galaxy's spiral-arm rotation. This synchronization prevents our Solar System from crossing a spiral arm too often. "At our location, our orbital period is very similar to that of the pattern speed of the spiral arms," says Gonzalez. "This means

12

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/phyla/metazoafr.html

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/phyla/metazoafr.html

http://www.solarviews.com/eng/oort.htm

http://www.obspm.fr/encycl/encycl.html

http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/Bima/Movies/StarForm.mov

http://www.historyoftheuniverse.com/gas.html

http://www.encyclopedia.com/articles/06426.html

http://www.arc.nasa.gov/


that the time interval between spiral arm crossings will be a maximum, which is a good thing, since spiral arms are dangerous places. Massive star supernovae are concentrated there, and giant molecular clouds can perturb the Oort cloud comets leading to more comets showers in the inner solar system." The unusually circular orbit of our Sun around the galactic center also tends to keep it clear of the spiral arms. Most stars the same age as our Sun have more elliptical orbits. "If the Sun's orbit about the galactic center were less circular," says Gonzalez, "the Sun would be more likely to cross spiral arms." Thus, thanks to a lot of unusual characteristics of our Sun, our Solar System is lucky enough to lie in a Galactic Habitable Zone. Gonzalez argues that these characteristics made it possible for complex life to emerge on Earth. More than 95 percent of stars in the Galaxy, says Gonzalez, wouldn't be able to support habitable planets simply because their rotation is not synchronized with the rotation of the galaxy's spiral arms. Add all the other factors involved in keeping a solar system habitable, and it seems that the odds of finding another solar system in a Galactic Habitable Zone are close to impossible. "This is a good theory," says Borucki. "I think this idea is a spark that will initiate similar research. Like a spark plug, it can't drive the car, but it provides the necessary impetus to get the car moving."

SETI will not lead to discovery Shostak--01 [Seth Shostak has a PhD is Astronomy and was a Radio Astronomer at the SETI Institute, "The Future of SETI," Sky & Telescope Magazine, Volume 101, Issue 4, April 2001]

Planets inhabited by high technologies (if they exist at all) are surely much rarer than planets inhabited by bacteria. After all, microbes were Earth's most advanced life forms for nearly a million times longer than the span of written human history. But a tantalizing prospect fires the imagination: the rare technological worlds may actually be the easiest to find. Unlike bacteria, intelligent creatures could make themselves known across vast interstellar distances. They could do it with radio transmitters or lasers not much bigger than our own. Maybe they are doing it right now. Searches for extraterrestrial intelligence (abbreviated SETI) have no obvious hunting ground and no clear route to discovery. Instead, after 40 years researchers have amassed a mountain of speculation and only a small hill of experiment. If sentient beings exist among the stars, they have remained beyond the grasp of our instruments.

13

http://www.kepler.arc.nasa.gov/


Solvency: Communication Impossible

No contact solvency; communication is impossible

Tough--2000[Allen Tough is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, “When SETI Succeeds: The Impact of High-Information Contact,” Foundation for the Future, 2000, 21 July 2011www.futurefoundation.org/documents/hum_pro_wrk1.pdf , p. 11]

Or, we could discover an alien probe or artifact that we could not understand. Maybe we will intercept a communication that has high information content but that is indecipherable to us. Given that our two civilizations may be separated by millions of years of evolution, translation and interpretation could be very difficult. Perhaps whole careers and institutes will be devoted to these processes, but with very little progress and very little impact on our descendants’ daily lives. How well could we communicate with humanity of the year 3000, much less with even more advanced beings from entirely different genetic and cultural backgrounds? There may be ethical as well as linguistic barriers to communication . Among the many reasons listed for our current “absence of evidence” are that ETI civilizations consider it unethical to alter the course of a developing civilization, or consider it desirable to preserve some civilizations for future study (Ball, 1973). Our ability to learn from ETI may depend on their perception of our readiness to acquire advanced information or to meet entrance-level requirements for the Galactic Club. We must be prepared for the possibility that we are not considered worth talking to, or that we will receive limited information that does not put the continuity of our physical, scientific, and moral evolution at risk. Despite the fact that we may have little or no information beyond knowledge that the other civilization exists, confirmation would have two profound implications. First, it would tell us that we are not alone in the universe, that the rise of intelligent life is not a unique event. This, by itself, could have a major impact on our philosophy, science, religion, and views of ourselves. Second, confirmation would tell us that civilizations can survive their period of technological adolescence and achieve a level of technology that makes interstellar communication possible. It would strengthen hope that we can work our way through population growth, environmental decline, war, and the other threats that cloud humanity’s future.

There is a communication gap between humans and aliens that would prevent information and technology sharing

Folger--11 [Tim Folger is an Editor at Discover, "Contact the Day After,” Scientific American, Volume 304, Issue 1, p40-45, January 2011]

"We run into an irreducible problem with communication that isn't face to face, and that is the problem of establishing a referent," Denning says. "If you and I speak different languages, and we're in the same room, I can point to a table, and I can say 'table,' and you infer that 'table' is my word for that thing, and then we can go from there. That's the time-honored way of learning languages. If you're not in direct contact, if you can't do that kind of pointing exercise, there's always this question of what you're referring to in these initial communications. Scientists--physical scientists and mathematicians in particular-tend to be more prone to thinking that because we'll be dealing with the same physical structures in the universe, we can use those as our Rosetta Stone, so to speak, and build up from there-send each other the value of pi, and then we're off to the races. But anthropologists tend not to be so comfortable with that. Errors can take place right at the get-go. For example, if I give you a signal--beep, beep, beep--is that three or two? Are we counting the beeps or the spaces? We have fundamental assumptions built in."

14


Contact wouldn’t solve; impractical for advanced civilizations to communicate with Earth

Tough--2000[Allen Tough is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, “When SETI Succeeds: The Impact of High-Information Contact,” Foundation for the Future, 2000, 21 July 2011www.futurefoundation.org/documents/hum_pro_wrk1.pdf , p. 11]

On the other hand, we might question whether or not advanced civilizations would have, or at least use, some of the technology that we impute to them. For example, Dyson spheres and omnidirectional beacons may be avoided because they constitute needless expense, squander resources, and manufacture pollution as well as being irrelevant to their life forms. Additionally, we may not be judged “ready” to receive such information. After all, would you give a child the secret code of ballistic missiles just so he or she could enjoy playing with them? Finally, information that is practical to them may or may not be practical to us, especially if they were radically different from us, such as would be the case if they were “machine intelligence.” Their ideas may seem very “academic” to us, depending on the problems that confront us at that future time. Perhaps the most exciting prospect is that we will learn how ET civilizations survived their technological adolescence. Perhaps they will have a developed empirical field of study that can define critical bottlenecks in civilizational advances and elaborate ways of navigating them (Tough, 1986). In the very long run, the challenge will be outliving one’s star, by building one’s own “world” or using giant transports to migrate to another solar system. As far as we can tell, there are no phenomena suggestive of astroengineering in the vicinity of stars about to become red giants.

Resources do not exist to interpret information from extraterrestrial messages

Folger--11 [Tim Folger is an Editor at Discover, "Contact the Day After,” Scientific American, Volume 304, Issue 1, p40-45, January 2011]

Even if the signal is confirmed as an authentic transmission from an extraterrestrial civilization, it is unlikely that astronomers would be able to extract any information from it for many years. SETI's instruments are designed to search for steady, periodic narrowband radio pulses--carrier waves powerful enough to be detectable across many light-years. The pulse itself would yield no information, other than its artificial nature. Any message content would likely be in the form of changes in amplitude or frequency buried within the pulse. Even a large radio telescope would need to repeatedly scan a small patch of sky to build up the signal pulse above background radio noise. In doing so, it would average out modulations on finer time-scales that might contain a message. Resolving the message would require an antenna far more powerful than Earth's largest, the 305-meter dish at Arecibo, Puerto Rico. "You would need something on the order of 10,000 times bigger than Arecibo," Shostak says. Rather than a single enormous dish, such a telescope would probably consist of many smaller antennas spread across a large area and linked electronically. Constructing such an instrument would require international collaboration and funding, with no guarantee that the message--if the signal contained one--could ever be deciphered. "That's not something you'd do overnight," Shostak observes. "That's a big project. I think we would do it, because--gosh darn it--we would want to know what they're saying."

15


A2: Alien Contact → Advanced Technology

We overestimate the technological capabilities of extraterrestrials

Harrison--2000[Albert A. Harrison is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at UC Davis, "When SETI Succeeds: The Impact of High-Information Contact," p11, Google Books]

In our attempts to envision ETI science and technology we must be wary of slipping from science to science fiction. As we look into the future, we should ask if our projection conflicts with known theories and facts. Years of conditioning by science fiction may lead us to expect technologies that are not only beyond our own current grasp, but are forever beyond anyone’s grasp.

ETI will have either no effect or a detrimental effect on humans

Chaisson--2000 [Eric J. Chaisson is a Research Associate in the Director's Office of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, “When SETI Succeeds: The Impact of High-Information Contact”, p75, Google Books]

My hypotheses are that there will likely be no positive effect from contact with ETI during the next thousand years. Yes, it would be nice to know if ETIs exist in space; the “commission” that astronomers have from the public to keep an eye on the universe demands that we strive to inventory cosmic life in all its forms, just as we do for matter and radiation. However, in the long run, electromagnetic (indirect) contact will probably have negligible effect on us, and physical (direct) contact will probably be harmful to us . Should contact with ETI be limited to electromagnetic means, and there be little chance of ETI travel- ing to Earth (or us to their home) within the next millennium (owing largely to light-speed restrictions), then the impact of ETI on our civilization will be minimal, perhaps virtually zero, given the steady stream of “in-house” global problems inevitably confronting humankind while pushing out along the arrow of time . Of course, we shall study ETIs’ signals, decipher their messages, perhaps even learn some things from them (since any ETI initiating contact with us will be, essentially by definition, more advanced and knowledgeable than we). Earth’s academics will publish scholarly analyses of ETI data in the specialized cyberspace journals; commentators will propagate opinions among the bits and bytes of the new Net; and the media hype of each new ETI finding and its cultural vicissitudes will cause the mainstream press of the third millennium to resemble the tabloid press of the late-second millennium. But indirect contact alone will likely be of meaningful concern only to a small minority of Earth’s citizens—essentially an ensemble of future people statistically indistinguishable from those currently interested in SETI. As long as contact remains solely electromagnetic, Earth-based global issues of (mostly) our own making will dominate our lives, indeed drive our future evolution during the next thousand years.

16


A2: Alien Contact → Cultural Advancement/Exchange

Extraterrestrials could cause culture shock and a cultural divide

Squeri--04[Lawrence Squeri is a Professor of History at East Stroudsburg University, “When ET Calls: SETI Is Ready,” Journal of Popular Culture, 37:3, p. 478, February 2004]

SETI activists assume that extraterrestrials have the best of human traits, especially altruism, and have outgrown the negatives. The reality may not be so sanguine. Creatures that have evolved in different physical contexts may have different body chemistries and modes of thinking. Contact with these creatures may not be pleasant. How will humanity react if extraterrestrials inform us that their religion mandates the eating of first-born children? Even a gentle extraterrestrial culture may cause problems. Earth's history shows that technologically superior people can inflict enormous culture shock on backward societies. Contact between the West and non-Western peoples have resulted in loss of confidence, enervation, and cultural despair. Will the knowledge that human science and medical knowledge are clearly inferior to ET's make us feel that our culture is also inferior? Will humans split between those who wish to adopt "alien" ways and those who believe in traditional culture? The different forms of stress that contact can precipitate are endless.

Humans culture may not be reconciled with ETI habits and norms

Tough--2000 [Allen Tough, PhD, is a Professor at the University of Toronto, "An Extraordinary Event," When SETI Succeeds: The Impact of High-Information Contact, Ed. p. 4, 21 June 2011, http://ieti.org/tough/books/succeeds/sectI.pdf]

If we incorporate extraterrestrial knowledge and advice into our human society, we may experience severe disruption, at least for a short time. We might suffer from enormous culture shock, temporarily feel inferior, or lose confidence in our own culture. Massive and rapid change could occur in the sciences if extraterrestrial science is deeply different, in business and industry if we learn about new processes and products, in the legal system if we move toward cosmic or universal laws, and in the armed forces and their suppliers if we eliminate the threat of war. Probably all of this should be regarded as simply the major cost we have to pay for incorporating new knowledge and possibilities. But will the short-term chaos and conflict be so severe that the negative consequences continue for decades or centuries?

17


Detection of ETI’s bad; leads to panic of the human race

Tough--2000 [Allen Tough, PhD, is a Professor at the University of Toronto, "The Role of Social Sciences in SETI," When SETI Succeeds: The Impact of High-Information Contact, Ed. p. 4, 21 June 2011, http://ieti.org/tough/books/succeeds/sectI.pdf]

Social scientists can help us forecast, understand, and guide human reaction to contact. As Mary Connors was the first to point out, very different issues are likely to come to the fore right after detection and then later on (Connors, 1976). Short-term impact begins as soon as news is released. It is measured in minutes, hours, and days. Short-term impact includes initial reactions to the news, first impressions of the extraterrestrials, attitude perseverance and change, rumor, and collective behavior, including possible panic. Here, expertise on demographic and cultural differences, human information processing, social influence processes, and collective behavior will help.

18


Author Indict: Exopolitics

Exopolitics Authors are Self-Serving, Non-Falsifiable Tabloid Journalists

Komarek--09[Ed Komarek, ET Investigator, Author and Researcher, “Exopolitics Dispute,” 23 July 2009 http://exopolitics.blogspot.com/2009/07/exopolitics-dispute.html]

Michael Salla has also brought similar issues of exopolitical peer review and policing in the exopolitical field that suggest that academics, himself included, are the more qualified to sit in judgment as to the qualifications of exopoliticians and the vetting of contactees. Dr. Michael Salla offers through the Exopolitics Institute courses on exopolitics and how to qualify to be an extraterrestrial ambassador. Dr. Salla charges a considerable sum of money that has elicited recently an article by Billy Cox in a mainstream Florida newspaper. In turn Dr. Salla has vigorously attempted to refute allegations. I briefly entered the fray with an, I told you so email, not being able to resist my better instincts. Michael Salla says, "As for the Billy Cox and criticism of the Certification program, my rebuttal is here: http://exopolitics.org/Exo-Comment-84.htm. Dr. Michael Salla also offers the following link for publication in regards to his position on Alex Collier: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/exopolitics/message/916. Alfred Webre was singled out by Michael Horn for publishing tabloid like articles in the Internet media that have little evidential basis like, NASA to Bomb the Moon, Reverse Speech proves Obama to Disclose, and One Billion Abductions Worldwide. Other investigators outside of exopolitics have expressed to me their dismay over this sort of behavior from Alfred who can write very well written articles involving the UN and UFOs. Alfred Webre vigorously disputes this accusation. "I would take issue with the characterization in your article - that my articles for Examiner.com are "tabloid-style"These articles are intentionally written in popular journalistic style for a mass media on-line newspaper and vary between 750 and 3000 words. I stand behind all of the science in the articles. I am reaching the mainstream with these articles and last month my verified statistics showed over 100,000 readers. My articles were the highest ranked Political Examiner articles in the USA." Michael Salla has also been accused of writing articles with little evidential backing that serve to compromise the credibility of some good scholarly articles that he has written and published. This all raises the minds of many the issue of the ability of some exopolitical investigators to discriminate between well documented UFO/ET cases and cases with dubious value that are most likely hoaxes."

19


Impact Turn: Alien hostility[DO NOT run with the China CP]

Scientific consensus states that aliens are highly likely to be more advanced than humans and hostile, leading to slavery, colonialism or extinction; this turns the case

Michael--11[George Michael, “Extraterrestrial Aliens, friends, foes, or just curious?” Skeptic magazine- a journal of the skeptic society, an academic and educational organization, 2 June 2011]

Popular culture continues to reflect our fascination with extraterrestrial aliens. For instance, in March 2011, a new film—Battle: Los Angeles—was released which depicts yet another hostile alien invasion of Earth. The purpose of the offensive is to eradicate the human population so that the aliens can harvest our planet's resources. Just a few months before in the film Skyline, aliens use massive force fields to vacuum humans into their craft whereupon the space invaders remove their victims' brains. Adding a sense of verisimilitude to the film's trailer was a clip created for the film of a television news program featuring Dan Rather reporting on Stephen Hawking's warning. In April 2010, the Discovery Channel broadcast a documentary in which Hawking speculated on the existence of extraterrestrial life. In his mind, the multitude of billions of star and galaxies implies that life in other solar systems is almost a certainty. Hawking pondered an important question: Could visitors from extraterrestrial civilizations pose a threat to Earth? In the documentary, an armada of massive space ships roams the galaxy as interstellar nomads, who having exhausted all the resources on their home planet, search for other planets to conquer and colonize. He concluded that making contact with aliens is "a little too risky." Moreover, drawing upon the experience on Earth, he mused that "if aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans."' Hawking is not the first scientist to warn of the potential hazards of alien contact. In his book. The Third Chimpanzee, t he noted geographer and evolutionary theorist Jared Diamond offered an essay on the perils of attempting to contact alien civilizations, observing that whenever a more advanced civilization encountered a less advanced one, or species that have evolved from different ecosystems, came into contact with each other, the results have often been catastrophic for the weaker party, including slavery, colonialism or extinction . He once described the 1974 Arecibo message, which was aimed at the globular star cluster M13 some 25,000 light years away, as suicidal folly, comparing it to the Incan emperor describing the wealth of his kingdom to the gold-crazed Spaniards. Sending out radio signals, he concluded, was "naïve, even dangerous."' Even the late astronomer, Carl Sagan, who was generally sanguine about the prospects of interstellar comity, once counseled that a relatively young civilization such as Earth's should listen quietly, "before shouting into an unknown jungle that we don't understand."

20


Aliens will kill us. They are out there and are a threat we should be worried about. Be afraid

Leake--10[Jonathan Leake, "Don’t talk to aliens, warns Stephen Hawking”, The Times, 25 April 2010http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article7107207.ece]

The aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact. The suggestions come in a new documentary series in which Hawking, one of the world’s leading scientists, will set out his latest thinking on some of the universe’s greatest mysteries. Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain t o exist in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even floating in interplanetary space. Hawking’s logic on aliens is , for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved. “To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” he said. “The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.” The answer, he suggests, is that most of it will be the equivalent of microbes or simple animals — the sort of life that has dominated Earth for most of its history. One scene in his documentary for the Discovery Channel shows herds of two-legged herbivores browsing on an alien cliff-face where they are picked off by flying, yellow lizard-like predators. Another shows glowing fluorescent aquatic animals forming vast shoals in the oceans thought to underlie the thick ice coating Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter. Such scenes are speculative, but Hawking uses them to lead on to a serious point: that a few life forms could be intelligent and pose a threat. Hawking believes that contact with such a species could be devastating for humanity. He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.” He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.” The completion of the documentary marks a triumph for Hawking, now 68, who is paralysed by motor neurone disease and has very limited powers of communication. The project took him and his producers three years, during which he insisted on rewriting large chunks of the script and checking the filming. John Smithson, executive producer for Discovery, said: “He wanted to make a programme that was entertaining for a general audience as well as scientific and that’s a tough job, given the complexity of the ideas involved.” Hawking has suggested the possibility of alien life before but his views have been clarified by a series of scientific breakthroughs, such as the discovery, since 1995, of more than 450 planets orbiting distant stars, showing that planets are a common phenomenon. So far, all the new planets found have been far larger than Earth, but only because the telescopes used to detect them are not sensitive enough to detect Earth-sized bodies at such distances. Another breakthrough is the discovery that life on Earth has proven able to colonise its most extreme environments. If life can survive and evolve there, scientists reason, then perhaps nowhere is out of bounds. Hawking’s belief in aliens places him in good scientific company. In his recent Wonders of the Solar System BBC series, Professor Brian Cox backed the idea, too, suggesting Mars, Europa and Titan, a moon of Saturn, as likely places to look. Similarly, Lord Rees, the astronomer royal, warned in a lecture earlier this year that aliens might prove to be beyond human understanding. “I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive,” he said. “Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there are aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.

21


Aliens Will Consider Us Low-Level Life Forms; We Will Be Colonized or Destroyed

Henderson--10[Trilby Henderson, Independent Journalist, “Space Colonization or Extinction of the Human Race Says Hawking,” Suite101.com, 10 August 2010 http://www.suite101.com/content/space-colonization-or-extinction-of-the-human-race-says-hawking-a272555#ixzz1Lj5di7IK]

As part of his “Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking” television series, Hawking recommends the human race take precautions to avoid contact with so called aliens during any future space travel or space exploration. His theory uses the behaviour of the human race to predict what aliens might do should we come in contact with them, or vice versa. Hawking predicts aliens “would be only limited by how much power they could harness and control”, adding “if aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.” Hawking’s theories are supported by several academics, including Dr. Blair Csuti, a research associate at Oregon State University. “Professor Hawking’s trepidation about the wisdom of overtly seeking contact with them is well-founded. We have no way of discerning the intent of alien visitors except after-the-fact. The Darwinian concept of natural selection supports the assumption that aliens visiting newly discovered planets, like Earth, would place their own interests above those of unsophisticated indigenous residents,” said Csuti, according to the Journal of Cosmology. Professor Robert Ehrlich of George Mason University agrees, pointing to the attitude the human race has historically taken to Earth’s other species. “Given the probability that the gap in intelligence between alien visitors and humans would be far greater than that between humans and our close relatives on Earth, how could they not think of us as a very lowly life form, certainly not worthy of treating as equals?”

22


China Counterplan Solvency

China creating largest radio telescope in world

Trei--11[Michael Trei, “China starts construction on the world’s largest radio telescope”, DVICE, 15 June 2011, http://dvice.com/archives/2011/06/china-starts-co.php]

If you want to search the universe for extraterrestrial radio signals, you're going to need a pretty big antenna, so China has just broken ground on what will become the world's largest radio telescope. The Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) will have nearly three times the surface area of the dish at Puerto Rico's Arecibo Observatory, the current record holder, and will be capable of receiving signals from as far as 1000 light years away. While FAST will be joining SETI in the search for ET and his pals, China's main goal is to check out pulsars, supernovas, and other interesting things happening in deep space. Building something this freakin' huge takes time (FAST is 1,640 feet across), so China says they won't be firing this sucker up until 2016. That means they will be right on time to pick up some hot signals that started their journey way back in 1016.

China and South Africa creating and hosting new radio telescopes, better equipped than SETI

Defence Web--11[DefenceWeb, “China building world’s largest radio telescope”, 28 June 2011, http://www.defenceweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=16653:china-building-worlds-largest-radio-telescope&catid=90:science-a-technology&Itemid=204]

China has begun construction of the world’s largest single aperture radio telescope – the Five hundred metre Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), which will be completed in five years time. It will be able to see more than three times further into space and view the skies ten times faster than the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which holds the title of the largest single-surface radio telescope ever built. According to New Scientist magazine, FAST came about when China unsuccessfully entered the global Square Kilometre Array (SKA) competition for a radio telescope with a collecting area of one square kilometre. FAST’s surface will be able to change shape to help it survey the sky, allowing it to examine objects seven billion light years away. In contrast, the Arecibo dish is fixed and focuses radio waves on a point above the dish, where they are analysed. However, this means that not all of the collecting surface is being used. The FAST telescope overcomes this issue by allowing its 4 400 triangular aluminium panels to move, changing the dish’s shape. The telescope is being

23


constructed in a remote region of the Guizhou province in southern China, to avoid disruptive man-made radio interference.

24


Politics Links

SETI Support risks losing overall support for NASA

Triplett--01[William Triplet is a Washington based reporter, “Search for alien life reasserts its credibility,” Nature, 8 July 2001, http://www.biology.ualberta.ca/courses.hp/biol361/LecOutl-05/pdfs/caulerpa.pdf]

Michael Meyer, a senior scientist at NASA’s astrobiology programme, says that as a result of the congressional language used in removing SETI from the federal budget, the agency is effectively prohibited from funding SETI-specific activities even through grants, which are awarded only to proposals involving “good science”. SETI critics have argued in the past that SETI does not constitute good science. But Lamar Smith (Republican, Texas), whose enthusiasm for the project led to the hearing taking place, noted that SETI’s track record has improved markedly in recent years. Indeed, Chyba points out that successive decadal reviews of astronomy by the National Academy of Sciences have endorsed SETI. The most recent one singled out the project for pioneering new technology that will have other useful applications. But whether NASA is ready to offer astrobiology grants to SETI is another matter. “The SETI Institute has been very successful and they do some good stuff,” says Meyer. “But there’s the issue of once burnt, twice shy. We’re growing an astrobiology programme that seems to be fantastically popular with not only the public but with the White House Office of Management and Budget and with Congress and even within NASA. But there could be concern that if we include SETI in this, while intellectually it fits within the programme, all of a sudden the enthusiasm you had gets turned back into why are we looking for little green men?”

25


Impact Calculus: DAs Outweigh

Possible achievements though SETI do not justify its cost

Benford & Benford--11 [Gregory Benford is an astrophysicist and in the department of Physics and Astronomy at UC Irvine, James Benford is an expert in high powered microwaves, “Smart SETI,” Analog Science Fiction & Fact, 131:4, p.33, April 2011]

But are there any galactic social universals? Possibly, there are none in common between aliens and us, so why should any arguments inspiring SETI have any weight? SETI assumes the opposite—that we can have similar motives. Are aliens unknowable, and beyond economic arguments? We’ll call this the Altruistic Alien argument -- that aliens of great ability, near-infinite resources and benign intent will transmit to us without taking any consideration to the cost (which would be high in our terms). Even if Earth economics generally works similarly in other technological societies, why should it apply to their transmitting beacons? Even on Earth, larger goals often override economic dictates, such as military security, aesthetics, religion, et cetera. But two aspects of SETI undermine this intuition: 1. SETI assumes long time scales for sender and receiver. Still, while cultural passions can set goals, economics determines how they get done. Many momentary, spectacular projects such as the pyramids of Egypt lasted only a century or two, then met economic limits. The Taj Mahal so taxed its province that the second, black Taj was never built. The grand cathedrals of medieval Europe suffered cost constraints and so, to avoid swamping local economies, took several centuries of large effort. Passion is temporary; costs remain. 2. We found that the optimum cost strategy leads directly to a remarkable cost insensitivity to the details of economic scaling. The ratio of costs for antenna area and transmitter power is about one. The two costs are usually equal and their ratio does not depend on the details of the technology and varies on Earth by only a factor of two. Both these costs may well be related principally to labor cost; if so, labor cost cancels out. This means fashions in underlying technology will matter little, and our experience may robustly represent that of other technological societies. Our quantifying approach is sobering, as it forces trad-offs on otherwise open-ended speculations. But it also advances the subject, which many beacon ideas do not do. It's simply much clearer to pick a major organizing principle - economics - than generalize from a special design, or guess at alien ideas. What if we suppose, for example, that aliens have very low cost labor, i.e., slaves or automata? With a finite number of automata, you can use them to do a finite number of tasks. And so you pick and choose by assigning value to the tasks, balancing the equivalent value of the labor used to prosecute those tasks. So choices are still made on the basis of available labor. The only case where labor has no value is where labor has no limit. That might be if aliens may live forever or have limitless armies of self-replicating automata. But even such labor costs something, because to support it demands resources, materials and energy, which are not free. Smart SETI, we feel, should take account of this basic constraint.

26

inherency: status quo solves -...

Documents