EXTRA – sexta-feira 25/02/2005 – 11h – Auditório Principal Bloco G – IAG/USP
Dr. Robert Rood
Universidade de Virginia – EUA
Título/Title: TWITs, Unicorns, and Extraterrestrial Civilizations
Resumo/Abstract:
| While there are many
ways in which the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) could
be proven to exist, there is no way to prove the opposite. This lack of
falsifiability sets the search for ETI (SETI) apart from most other scientific
questions. There is a historical analog, the search for unicorns, which
can illustrate how progress can be made. Unicorns “existed” for
almost 2000 years even in the minds of scientists. No one ever proved that
unicorns do not exist, yet there is now general agreement that that is the
case. (At least unicorn searches are not funded.) This consensus was reached
in part by considering the question from the unicorn's point of view. SETI can benefit from the same type of analysis. What are the likely habits of ETCs? The one thing we can be sure of concerning extraterrestrial civilizations is that they will conserve energy. Discussing “them” in this way leads to 2 problems: energy is typically measured in units that don't make sense on human-related scales and large numbers are involved and we (scientists included) have no intuition about numbers like a billion. Using “sensible” units one can infer a surprizing amount about the nature of truly advanced (compared to us) civilizations (for example, they cannot live on planets). |
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