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Teoria inteligentnego projektu

Where's the Monolith?

December 27, 2000
Web posted at: 11:58 a.m. EST (1658 GMT)

In this story:

Ears to the sky

The Fermi Paradox

"I Want To Believe"
-- UFO poster on the set of "The X-Files"

(CNN) -- One of the central characters of "2001: A Space Odyssey" is
neither a person nor a computer. Instead, it's a giant, black, rectangular
slab called the Monolith. It has a knack for showing up just as things
start to get really interesting in the history of human evolution. Because
of when and where it appears, the Monolith also serves as proof that
there's intelligent life beyond our Earth.

Finding a real Monolith hasn't turned out to be so easy.

One person trying to find one is Paul Horowitz, head of the SETI (Search
for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program at Harvard University. Horowitz
doesn't really expect to fine an alien artifact buried somewhere on the
Earth or moon. He's looking for other signs, such as radio signals or
laser beams from other planets.

"The way I look at is the following," Horowitz says. "It's plausible that
there are other civilizations. It's entirely plausible that they wish to
communicate. After all, we got where we are by being curious and
communicating among ourselves. It's hard to imagine turning that off."

Horowitz says space travel is far more difficult and requires much more
energy than space communication.

"If you wanted to take a trip to the nearest star with the technology we
have now it would take you 50,000 years," he says.

"It may simply be that these advanced civilizations, being composed of
reasonably smart folks, have decided they're going to do the efficient
thing, and send messages, rather than do the inefficient thing and send
objects and do the risky, inefficient thing and send moving creatures over
these distances."

Ears to the sky

Horowitz's search for extraterrestrial signals is similar to the work
being conducted at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. The
Institute's best-known program is called Project Phoenix. For about five
weeks every year, Project Phoenix uses the world's largest radio telescope
in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, to locate alien transmissions.

Another program called, Project SERENDIP, relies on a separate receiver
that's attached to the same radio telescope. It's available year round,
but most of the time SETI Institute researchers have no control over where
it's pointed. The information collected by SERENDIP is used by the
Institute's wildly popular SETI@home experiment. The data is broken down
into packets and sent via the Internet to some 2.6 million personal
computers, where it's analyzed. Anyone with a computer and an internet
connection can help search for ETs.

Physicist Andrew LePage has written extensively on the various SETI
programs around the world. He believes researchers are doing the best they
can with the technology that's available.

"Even with this best technology we couldn't detect 'I Love Lucy' reruns
from the next star system over," LePage says. "The signals from very
powerful TV transmitters would still be too weak for us to be able to
detect.

"We have to search for civilizations much more advanced than ours, ones
capable of handling millions, billions, even trillions times more energy
than our civilization is capable of manipulating."

LePage says current SETI programs have only looked at a fraction of the
frequencies available for interplanetary communication, or have examined
only a small number of the nearby stars. He concludes, "There could easily
be millions of civilizations just like our own scattered throughout the
galaxy and we'd never know it based on our searches to date."

The Fermi Paradox

The skeptics believe the reason that we haven't made contact with
extraterrestrial beings is that these creatures probably don't exist.

This argument was best expressed by the late Nobel Prize winning nuclear
physicist Enrico Fermi. In 1950, Fermi is quoted as asking if
extraterrestrials are commonplace, why haven't we made contact with them?
This question became known as the Fermi Paradox.

In the July issue of Scientific American, astronomer Ian Crawford of
University College London explains the problem this way. He says that if
there were at least one other
Earth-like civilization in the Milky Way, it could have easily populated the entire
galaxy by now.

Crawford's argument is based on the following scenario. A society with
rocket technology colonizes two other planets. Several hundred years
later, the two colonies each send out two more colonies of their own. At
that rate it would take from 5 million to 50 million years to colonize the
entire galaxy. That's a long period of time, but when compared to the age
of the Milky Way, it's a mere snap of the fingers.

If advance civilizations are abundant throughout the universe, then
Crawford wonders, "Would none of these billions of civilizations, not even
a single one, have left any evidence of their existence?"

Horowitz admits it's something he worries about. But he thinks the math
works in his favor.

"How can it be," he wonders. "We're talking about odds of advanced life in
the galaxy, and we say the odds are so small that there's only a chance of
one civilization and guess what? We're it! It only happened here. You
know. I think the odds of that being right are something like one in a
hundred billion. That's the only number in town."