S.E.T.I. – Boondoggle or Deception?

It is not often that the government or the scientific community take great efforts to search for the potential of intelligent alien life. Most often, these organizations tend to ridicule and debunk theories about extraterrestrial civilizations, so, when a multitude of projects are undertaken by them, it is best to look a little closer and seek ulterior motives.

The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) projects consist of various methods of examining the electromagnetic frequencies seeking a patterned signal that would indicate the intelligent use of EMF for communication. This would include both what we know of as radio (both short and longwave) and television bandwidths.

The first SETI project was undertaken in 1960 by Cornell University astronomer Frank Drake. Project Ozma used a 26-meter radio telescope to scan Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani using a single channel receiver. Nothing of any great interest was picked up. With a $71,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, the "Big Ear," a flat plane radio telescope with a parabolic reflector was constructed at the Ohio State University. This listening post became the first continuous SETI project.

Throughout the 1970's other SETI projects were either planned or implemented including an attempt at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, to send a message toward the M13 star cluster twenty-five thousand light years distant. The University of California, Berkley has performed five SETI efforts beginning in 1979 and last using the Arecibo radio telescope for an all-sky survey in 2009.

Government SETI projects include the US funded program in 1992 that utilized the NASA Microwave Observing Program while Harvard University is included as another of the scholarly programs that have scanned the heavens for an extraterrestrial radio message. Even after government financing ended, SETI has grown with private funding and the development of interlinked organization.

All these searches stand on the principle that electromagnetic energy travels at the speed of light and is not impeded by distance. A popular theory is that our own radio and television transmissions are traveling out to other worlds and that alien listeners may be learning about us through such programs as Groucho Marx's "What's My Line" or being horrified by news of the Second World War.

Now comes the reality of physics as applied to such electromagnetic signals. All EM waves in free space conform to the inverse-square law. The power density of the wave is proportional to the inverse square of the distance from source. Basically doubling the distance from the transmitter will decrease the power density of the radiated wave by one fourth its previous value. As the wave travels from source, it spreads much like ripples in water until the point the density of the transmitted wave has broken down into indecipherability and ultimately to the level of background static, especially as it is acted upon by other waves such as are propagated by neutron stars and the background microwave radiation of the universe.

It has been calculated that even our strongest clear-channel transmissions are not likely to travel more than four or five light years before becoming indistinguishable from the overall background radiation. It cannot be expected that alien radio transmissions used for planetary or intrasystem communications would be any more effective over interstellar distances.

So, are the great SETI projects an expensive diversion that give "official" deniability to the potential existence of extraterrestrial life and civilizations or are they in reality listening instead for something much closer to our home planet?

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