3 October 2024 – Club Meeting Presentation
— Thursday night, 7:00 – 8:30 p.m.
This free speaker presentation will be offered in-person at the UNC-Asheville Reuter Center and virtually online. Registration is not required; use this Zoom link to watch the presentation remotely.
An Astronomy Guest Speaker Series Event – a collaboration of the Astronomy Club of Asheville and UNC-Asheville
The Search for Intelligent Life in the Cosmos
– presented by Seth Shostak,
Senior Astronomer and Institute Fellow at the SETI Institute
It has been nearly 60 years since the first attempt to sift the skies for radio signals that would betray the existence of intelligent beings beyond Earth. So far, nothing has been heard. Why? Could it be that we simply need to give these experiments more time to examine additional star systems? Or should we put more emphasis on other strategies?
In this talk, we discuss the fundamental assumptions that underlie our current SETI searches, and how we might expand our efforts to lessen their inherent limitations. What else should we be doing to look for E.T? We will also consider the anthropocentric nature of the experiments so far, and suggest how our conservative assumptions about E.T.’s nature and behavior may be hindering our attempts to find him.