It’s a crazy thing, SETI – the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. If I’ve got the right handle on it, it’s a massive across-the-world collaborative effort among some of the hyper-imaginative denizens of the Unconventional Periphery (since it’s no longer fashionable, or legal, or safe, to refer to them as the Lunatic Fringe). What they’re doing is quite mind-expanding, even heroic: each member of SETI, and you can become one too, contributes a part of the processing capacity of his personal computer to SETI. This gives SETI access to his computer in order to run on it a small part of a minor module of a much larger program. This much larger program is engaged in processing humongous amounts of data / electronic signals received from non-earth sources. In more romantic words, you become a cog in the unified and exalted global effort to establish contact with intelligent aliens.
Now this gives rise to some very serious questions, such as
1) If these aliens are really intelligent, won’t they prefer to have nothing whatever to do with us? And in that case wouldn’t they take great care to make sure that not even the faintest whiff of their existence comes within an elongated light year of our fumbling detective efforts?
2) If they are so dumb as to actually respond to our clumsy overtures, wouldn’t we be much better off staying away from such inter-galactic losers?
3) If they are intelligent and still want to get in touch with us, shouldn’t we be asking ourselves why? What’s in it for them? Why should a bunch of super-smart space-dudes be willing to risk being infected by HIV, parliamentary democracy and Britney Spears unless they have plans of killing us, enslaving us or making a lot of money from us?
4) Wouldn’t it be easier to find intelligent non-aliens?
5) Wouldn’t it be easier to find intelligent non-aliens?
Introducing the Search for Non-Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence
Of course it would have been straighter to call it the Search for Terrestrial Intelligence, but much less cool. Acronyms are everything, and SNETI sounds so much more important than STI. You can pronounce SNETI (snetty, see?); you can have pronounceable members (“I’m a Snettian, how about you?”); and, if you really work at it, you could, one day, even make it into a successful TV series (‘The Snets’, ‘Son of Snet’, ‘The Snets – Season 2’, etc.). The point, of course, is that SNETI is going to need all the importance it can get.
And that’s because the Search for Non-Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence is an uphill task, almost completely vertical, in fact. Look around you, man. Take a long, hard look. See any signs of intelligence? Ah, you’re catching on already. Those guys of the former Lunatic Fringe aren’t a bunch of thicko-s, you know. They’ve tried this. They looked long and hard, they searched around and about, and then, when the net result was a big fat zero, reluctantly migrated fringe-wards.
So what is it that’s getting in the way of intelligence? It isn’t as if there aren’t any intelligent people any more. Of course they’re there. It’s just that they
1) aren’t displaying all that much intelligence right now, and/or
2) are using up their current cranial capacity to get to non-intelligent destinations (such as tops of corporate ladders and presidencies of Residents Welfare Associations).
The theory at work is something called ‘Survival Of The Fattest’. It just means that the fat cats get all the cream. This makes them fatter and hence capable of getting even more cream. And while these cats were intelligent enough to begin with, they are now caught in the self-propagating Creamy Cycle. Meanwhile, the non-fat intelligent guys have observed the opulence of the fat cat’s lifestyle (fatulence) and are concentrating all their brain power in devising ways that will help them attain fatness themselves. And so they plunge willingly into what is wrongly called the rat-race (cat-race, or perhaps fat-race, would be the more accurate descriptor). They claw their way up sundry ladders – corporate / bureaucratic / political / any other - trying their best to kill off all the other rats (ratricide) that they may encounter en route.
To be continued…
