[Interview+] How Good Was Our Search for Extraterrestrial Life, Really?

Great interview, kind of died-down at the end with a back-and-forth than an interview, but good enough nevertheless. Thank you for sharing.

excellent interview, thank you. One factor I haven't heard discussed, except in a couple of old sci-fi stories, is that of alien life/civilizations operating at an entirely different physical and / or time-scale, such that we might not identify any patterns in any signals they might be giving out. This could be an interesting question to put to future guests on this topic. I hope you've enjoyed your holiday in UK, by the way, the Cotswolds are beautiful.

Very interesting interview. Thank you for sharing Fraser.

i like this guy, just the facts. When Fraser is bantering into silence post his answer.. also shows how good of an interviewer, how much care is put into the audience perspective by filling dead air as well the attention to the person being interviewed and their 'just the facts' mindset. fun stuffss

I really think the answer isn't "we are the only one ever"; it's "we're the only one NOW". If we are any sort of example, a technological civilization will consume resources at a rate far outstripping the replenishment rate, and it's a race to achieve some sort of energy/material "breakout" before collapse back into agrarian (or equivalent) pre-technological conditions. And "rising from the ashes" won't be a thing because all of the resources necessary for a technological/industrial revolution will have been consumed and no longer be recoverable by the means available to an agrarian civilization. The intelligent species isn't gone, it's just forever stuck behind a non-technosignature-emitting non-metallic plow. I speculate that civilizations likely have a half-life measured in hundreds to thousands of years at best. I imagine "shells of detectability" in which the signals that a civilization exists, commencing with industrial-scale pollution and radio, ending a few thousand years after collapse as the pollutants break down, propagate outward. There is a window during which a technological civilization is detectable which, on cosmological scales, is infinitesimal. There may well have been a thousand civilizations within a thousand parsecs already, but the photonic evidence of their existence has washed over Earth well before our ability to detect it. Others may well be out there on their way up, but we will be "fallow" by the time the shell passes through the solar system. It certainly seems likely that we won't turn that corner, given how things are going. And getting ahead of the resource-consumption spike-and-cliff to that true breakout may well be the final Great Filter which is extremely unlikely. Never say "never", but if it's one-in-ten-thousand and there have been a "mere" thousand technological civilizations, that makes a great deal of sense to me.

In the 19-Hundreds there was talk of burning giant geometric shapes in the Sahara to signal the Martians. That’s pre radio. We’re already push away from radio to laser for communications, so we’re probably looking at a couple of hundred years over the course of thousands (millions) of years of civilization where quaint little radio being the signaling technology. So I’m not sure how much the lack of repeatable signal detected in the sixty-odd years we’ve been listening means much. As for probes. Think about what Breakthrough is already contemplating – probes that are just a gram in mass. Good luck detecting any of them. You could have ten burnt out alien probes in your back yard that look like dead moths. But it was great to hear from someone who is still contributing and thinking about big questions at his age.

If a civilization uses fiber optic cables for planetary communications and lasers for interstellar communication it would be much more difficult to detect them. Maybe they had their radio/IR phase earlier in our history.