Additionally, of all the pure science research we do with public money, the discovery of alien intelligence would have probably the greatest impact on human day-to-day life.
Many of the other commenters seem to believe the research would fail. .... something we obviously cannot possibly know without doing the research.
The only thing prior SETI research has demonstrated is that no one is purposely beaming a signal right at us. ...which is actually pretty informative. ...after all, being totally alone in the universe seems somewhat less plausible than the opposite.
We don't have to be totally alone, we just have to be rare enough that there's no detectable civilization in range at this time. If you multiply the probabilities of complex, intelligent life evolving that happened to be broadcasting signals into space a few decades to centuries ago (depending on how many light years away they are), then it's a reasonable conclusion that what we're looking for is rare.
If the closest ETs are 20,000 light years away, would we ever find out about them? Space is vast and time is deep. We could have missed the most recent civilization in range of detection by a million years.
They're not going to be 1, so you're multiplying fractions. Start with us being the only radio broadcasting life out of 3.5 billion years of species on this planet, or how long it took to get to multicellular life on a relatively stable world with only occasional mass extinction events that doesn't turn the planet into a Mars or Venus.
I would use “biggest” to remove the ambiguity. The impact wouldn’t necessarily be positive; we’ve had enough movies to remind us that. I can’t think of another area of research where there’s a significant chance that the eventual outcome is completely uncontrollable.
Btw, I’m a high energy physicist and I totally believe there are other intelligent beings in the universe, simply because I don’t think we’re special. We’re just dusts in the who happen to be able t peek a little into the laws of the universe, that’s all. (As a aside, despite all the particle accelerator generating black hole nonsense, my field is pretty safe for humanity.)
Many of the other commenters seem to believe the research would fail. .... something we obviously cannot possibly know without doing the research.
The only thing prior SETI research has demonstrated is that no one is purposely beaming a signal right at us. ...which is actually pretty informative. ...after all, being totally alone in the universe seems somewhat less plausible than the opposite.