An Astronomer's Unhistorical Description of the Search for Extraterrestrials

 An article at the site BigThink.com is entitled "David Kipping on how the search for alien life is gaining credibility." We have an interview with an astronomer who claims that the search for life on other planets is gaining credibility. Kipping fails to give a single decent reason backing up such a claim. The reality is that the credibility of astrobiologists may be dwindling, because some astrobiologists keep "crying wolf" announcing false alarms, by wrongly insinuating that they found signs of extraterrestrial life or extraterrestrial intelligence when no such signs were found. Examples of this are discussed here and here and here and here.  

We have this exchange in which the interviewer (Adam Frank) refers to the Fermi Paradox, the "where is everybody?" paradox that despite the existence of so many planets revolving around other stars, no extraterrestrial life has been found. The mention of SETI refers to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which has been primarily conducted by using big radio telescopes to search for radio signals from civilizations on other planets.  

Frank: Let’s pivot to the Fermi paradox: If life is common, where is everybody?

Kipping: The key is to stick to ground truths. We haven’t detected technosignatures, but SETI has been woefully underfunded and has only scratched a tiny fraction of the sky. So we can’t conclude much yet.

SETI has been woefully underfunded? SETI has "only scratched a tiny fraction of the sky"? These statements are very false. 

The fact is that by now SETI has been very well-funded. The fact is that SETI searches for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations have scanned the sky so thoroughly that every portion of the sky has been searched multiple times. Below are some of the SETI searches that have occurred over the past 65 years (some of the observation time figures are taken from the source here):

• The SERENDIP I project, which from 1979 to 1982 surveyed a large portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 4 of the paper here, a project which a Sky and Telescope article tells us surveyed "many billions of Milky Way stars."

• The Southern SERENDIP project lasting 1998 and 2005, which surveyed for some 60,000 hours a large portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 2 of the paper here.

• The SERENDIP II project from 1986 to 1988, involving some 17,000 hours of observations. 

• The All-Sky Search at Ohio State University from 1989 to 1996 (Childers, Dixon and Bolinger), involving 60,000 hours of observations, 

• The Astropulse and Fly's Eye SETI projects surveying a significant portion of the sky, the portion depicted in Figure 2 of the paper here. 

• The SETI@Home project, which according to the source here covered 20% of the full celestial sphere, and 67% of the sky area observable from the Arecibo observatory. 

• The Harvard BETA all-sky SETI survey discussed here, which operated continuously for more than four years (1995-1999), scanning the whole part of the sky observable from Massachusetts, USA, and doing 35,000 hours of observations. 

• Years of SETI searches using the Allen Telescope Array, involving 12 hours a day of SETI searches, 7 days a week, for years (such as 2007 to 2010), resulting in 95,000 hours of observations (discussed here). 

• An optical search for extraterrestrial intelligence, searching 577 nearby stars that might have habitable planets, looking for laser signals.

• All of the optical searches for extraterrestrial intelligence listed on the three pages you can view here, including three searches each involving more than 7000 hours of telescope time, and one search involving 200,000 objects and other searches involving thousands of stars. 

• The two-year southern sky SETI search discussed here, which observed for 9000 hours and "covered the sky almost two times."  

• The five-year META SETI project discussed here, which between 1988 and 1993 spent about 80,000 hours of telescope time searching for extraterrestrials. 

• A META II SETI project between 1990 and 2010, involving 9000 hours of observations of the southern sky.

• All of the radio telescopes searches listed on the seven pages of search results you can review at the link here, including a Dixon, Ehman and Raub search from 1973 to 1986 involving 100,000 hours of telescope time, 

• A failed search of 10 million stars using what in 2009 was the latest and greatest technology.

• A SERENDIP III project from 1992 to 1997, involving 40,000 hours of observations, and surveying 30% of the sky. 

• Extensive SETI searches carried out by the 500-meter FAST radio telescope in China. 

• The ASTROPULSE project discussed here, involving 21,000 hours of observations from 2006 to 2010. 

• The SETI-Italia project discussed here, involving 30,000 hours of observation from 2006 to 2010.

• The Breakthrough Listen project described here, which began in 2015, and has run for 10 years with 100 million dollars in funding, involving thousands of hours each year of dedicated SETI searching, on two of the world's largest radio telescopes.

• A failed search of 1300 galaxies, reported in 2024, using low frequencies and the  Murchison Widefield Array (MWA).

So what on Earth was Kipping doing claiming that "SETI has been woefully underfunded and has only scratched a tiny fraction of the sky"? Let us be charitable, and not say Kipping was lying. We'll just speculate that maybe he had a fleeting case of what we may call "astrophysical amnesia," and that he forgot very badly about the history of SETI searches for extraterrestrials. 

Maybe severe frustration caused a recall problem

Astrobiologists will not gain credibility when they misspeak so very badly about the history of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And astrobiologists will not gain credibility by repeatedly  "crying wolf," and doing thing such as trying to get people excited about unimpressive rock results on a planet such as Mars where amino acids (the building components of the building components of one-celled life) were never even discovered. 

It's not rare for scientists to speak as if they had amnesia about previous research efforts. Scientists routinely speak as if they had the most severe retrograde amnesia regarding research efforts in parapsychology. Such efforts searching for evidence of paranormal phenomena have been producing positive results for 200 years, with serious research on the paranormal stretching back all the way to the 1825-1831 commission of the French Royal Academy of Science, which found resoundingly in favor of the reality of clairvoyance, a result replicated by innumerable later observations of physicians and professors in the 19th century and early 20th  century.  Innumerable papers and books written by distinguished doctors and scientists have thoroughly documented the reality of paranormal phenomena. Extremely convincing experiments carried out by university professors have well-proven the reality of things such as telepathy and ESP, as discussed here, here and here.  But a large fraction of scientists seem to have a severe retrograde amnesia about such research. For a typical scientist of this type, it is as if every word he heard about research results on this topic simply went in one of his ears and out the other. 

Astronomers very often make very bad misstatements when talking about extraterrestrial life, statements as false as the statement I recently read in which a well-known and frequently misspeaking astronomy figure claimed that everyone who has studied the topic of extraterrestrial life agrees that extraterrestrials exist. To the contrary, among those who have deeply studied the vast amount of organization and functional information needed for even the simplest life and the stratospheric additional level of organization and fine-tuned information-rich anatomy and biochemistry engineering needed to produce large mobile organisms, very many have concluded that we should not expect extraterrestrials to have arisen by unguided processes anywhere else in the observable universe. Again and again we hear astronomers making senseless insinuations that the question of whether intelligent extraterrestrials exist all boils down to the simple matter of how many solar systems there are. That is a hugely ignorant type of thing to insinuate, as that question involves very many other extremely deep and complex matters, such as the accidentally unachievable component interdependence within organisms as complex as human bodies, whether there is a superhuman intellect working in the universe to overcome the seemingly insurmountable odds against the accidental appearance of a species such as ours, and the very deep topic of whether any possible arrangement of matter in a brain can explain the appearance of creatures with the type of mental capabilities that humans have (capabilities far richer than just memory, intelligence and creativity). The latter topic is one of oceanic depth, and the typical astronomer barely even wades his feet in that ocean.