A researcher says that that’s because “space is really, really big”:
A radio telescope in outback Western Australia has completed the deepest and broadest search at low frequencies for alien technologies, scanning a patch of sky known to include at least 10 million stars.
Astronomers used the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope to explore hundreds of times more broadly than any previous search for extraterrestrial life.
The study, published today in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, observed the sky around the Vela constellation. But in this part of the Universe at least, it appears other civilisations are elusive, if they exist…
“With this dataset, we found no technosignatures — no sign of intelligent life.”
Professor Tingay said even though this was the broadest search yet, he was not shocked by the result.
“As Douglas Adams noted in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, ‘space is big, really big’.”
“And even though this was a really big study, the amount of space we looked at was the equivalent of trying to find something in the Earth’s oceans but only searching a volume of water equivalent to a large backyard swimming pool.
“Since we can’t really assume how possible alien civilisations might utilise technology, we need to search in many different ways. Using radio telescopes, we can explore an eight-dimensional search space.
International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, “Australian telescope finds no signs of alien technology in 10 million star systems” at ScienceDaily
Space is not as big as the human imagination though.
Paper. (open access)
See also: Seven reasons (so far) why the aliens never show up. Some experts think they became AI, some that they were killed by their AI, and others say they never existed. Who’s most likely right? Science fiction writer Matt Williams delves into seven hypotheses into which scientists and science fiction writers have put a lot of thought.
Presupposing naturalism, (as these SETI researchers do), there is no reason to presuppose that any life, much less intelligent life, is ‘out there somewhere’.
While the odds against a life supporting earth arising ‘naturally’ in the universe are bad enough,,,
While the odds against a life supporting earth arising ‘naturally’ in the universe are bad enough, when the odds of ‘simple life’ arising ‘naturally’ on that life supporting earth are added onto that, the odds become exponentially worse for Atheistic Naturalists,
Moreover, the odds against intelligent life ‘naturally’ evolving from that hypothetical simple life are even worse yet for the Atheistic Naturalists.
William Lane Craig, after reviewing Barrow and Tipler’s book, ‘The Anthropic Cosmological Principle’, stated, “They estimate that the odds of the evolution (by chance) of the human genome is somewhere between 4 to the negative 180th power, to the 110,000th power, and 4 to the negative 360th power, to the 110,000th power. Therefore, if evolution did occur, it literally would have been a miracle and evidence for the existence of God.” ”
Moreover, there is something that is fundamentally at odds with the presupposition of Atheistic naturalism in this entire search for ‘alien technologies’.
Namely, to presuppose that Intelligent life can be differentiated from the natural causes of the universe is to presuppose that there is something uniquely and profoundly different about intelligent life that is not reducible to the natural causes of the universe.
As Paul Nelson explained, “To explain the effects you bring about in the world — such as your email, a real pattern — we must refer to you as a unique (and intelligent) agent.,,, some feature of “intelligence” must be irreducible to physics, because otherwise we’re back to physics versus physics, and there’s nothing for SETI to look for.”
Leading Darwinists, as they themselves have honestly confessed, simply have no clue how human language and/or intelligence could have possibly ”naturally’ evolved.
The late best selling author Tom Wolfe was so taken aback by this honest confession from leading Darwinists that he wrote a book on the subject. Here is a general outline of his main argument;
That humans should master the planet due to his unique ability to communicate information, or more specifically, to infuse immaterial information into material substrates, is completely contrary to the ‘survival of the fittest’ thinking that undergirds Darwinian thought.
That is to say that although humans are fairly defenseless creatures in the wild compared to other creatures, such as lions, bears, sharks, etc.., nonetheless, humans have, completely contrary to Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ thinking, managed to somehow become masters of the planet, not by brute force, but simply by our unique ability to communicate information and also to, more specifically, infuse information into material substrates in order to create, i.e. intelligently design, objects that are extremely useful for our defense, basic survival in procuring food, furtherance of our knowledge, and also merely for our pleasure.
And although the ‘top-down’ infusion of immaterial information into material substrates, that allowed humans to become ‘masters of the planet’, was rather crude to begin with, (i.e. spears, arrows, and plows etc..), this top down infusion of immaterial information into material substrates has become much more impressive over the last half century or so.
Specifically, the ‘top-down’ infusion of mathematical and/or logical information into material substrates lies at the very basis of many, if not all, of man’s most stunning, almost miraculous, technological advances in recent decades.
For instance,
What is more interesting still about the fact that humans have a unique ability to understand and create information, and have come to ‘master the planet’ through the ‘top-down’ infusion of immaterial information into material substrates, is the fact that, due to advances in science, both the universe and life itself, are now found to be ‘information theoretic’ in their foundational basis.
As Vlatko Vedral, who is a Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, states,
It is hard to imagine a more convincing proof that we are ‘made in the image of God’, than finding that both the universe and life itself are ‘information theoretic’ in their foundational basis, and that we, of all the creatures on earth, uniquely possess an ability to understand and create information, and have come to ‘master the planet’ precisely because of our ability to infuse immaterial information into material substrates.
I guess a more convincing proof that we are made in the image of God could be if God Himself became a man, defeated death on a cross, and then rose from the dead to prove that He was God.
And that happens to be precisely the proof that is claimed within Christianity.
Verses: