We seem to deem it mainstream to look for radio signals from Little Green Men (BEMs). I suggest we look for their craft as well. A spacecraft (if it exists) may leave a detectable trace of it's passage. If a high speed RAMA object interacts with particals in space, it may leave an EMP-like wake behind. This wake may be detectable with antennae. Or it may leave other electo-magnetic evidence of it's passage. A simple and inexpensive detector would perhapse pay large dividends to the curious. I would invision an array of four or six listening posts in our solar system that might detect speed, distance, and direction of movement. Think how simple it would be to reverse-engineer from these four bits of data. :-)-- CButts, Aug 03 2000 Nah, let's find their planets first. If you open the search to objects travelling (presumably) between the stars, then you end up looking ]everywhere[. Right now (according to me), we do look everywhere, but we look most closely at stars and stellar systems. Besides, it might be difficult to distinguish the passage of a ship from natural phenomena, whereas leakage of planetary communication or radar systems should really stand out as non-natural.-- centauri, Aug 03 2000 This seems as amusing a place as any to put my views on SETI. I cannot easily envision other sentient species having a need for the gynormous (pronounce the first syllable with a soft "G" and a long "Y" as in Girrafe and gynocologist respectivly. origin, a mixture of giant and enormous) radar arrays we've been beaming the cosmos with these past few decades. Admittedly this view comes from SF; Alan Dean Foster's 'Call to Arms' specifically. IN CtA, the multiple-species group that makes first contact is stunned by human culture and divirsity until they are able to figure out that the major differences in human cultures are a product of their geographical isolation. Most terrene worlds in the book have singular supercontinents. What if this, or something similar is true? Singal loss over lightyears is atrocious. Our best expert-like people figure that it would be really unlikely that _anyone_ further than 4-6 light years away will ever see "I Love Lucy" without a VCR. However, the pings from various nations anti-ICBM should be discernable as the byproduct of sentience up to 100 LY distant. What if there is a sentient race within 10-30 light years living on a planet of a singular supercontinent? Unless they tried to signal us, we'ld never see them.-- bear, Aug 25 2000 bear, since my last annotation, I've done a little research. A lot of SETI depends on some other race being socially responsible, curious, and carefree enough to signal us deliberately. No one I've found seriously believes that ETIs might be able to watch our TV shows.
As for needing giant antennae, any race interested in radio astronomy will have those.-- centauri, Feb 20 2001 Rods_Tiger: who's to say it hasn't already or that we'll be any more than neurons to it when it does? Ever try to talk to one of your neurons?-- centauri, Apr 27 2001, last modified Jun 18 2001 The semantic web would have to exist, first.-- egnor, Apr 28 2001 An even scarier thought? What if _we_ are the most technologically advanced beings in the universe?-- phoenix, Jun 18 2001 Worse yet--what if cats are? I've always suspected this, actually. ("Sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic" bit, cats always staring into space at something humans can't even see, etc.)-- Dog Ed, Jun 18 2001 [DE] Good point. They have us trained pretty well, don't you think?-- phoenix, Jun 18 2001 random, halfbakery