Saw Dr. Tartar speak...

Dr. Tartar gave a talk tonight at the University of Minnesota and I
enjoyed it quite a bit. I especially liked her comment that SETI is a
misnomer, what we're really searching for is like technology.

I commented something along similar lines here back in 2000
(http://groups.google.com/groups?q=%2...umn.edu&rnum=1)

But I found a couple areas where she should clarify her presentation:

(1) The notion of finding another "life genesis" beyond earth. I agree
that this would immediately strengthen the cause for life being a cosmic
imperative, however I don't think the Earth itself represents only a
single experiment with life, and the paleontological evidence supports this:

(a) Extremophiles live in wildly differing environments. Might it not
be plausible that such (relatively primitive) life developed
independently in various extreme environments? This seems to make more
sense than a wild diffusionist theory, which seems to postulate a sort
of super-bacterium which can adapt to any environment.
(b) Whenever chemicals mix in a reaction, we never speak of "the first"
resulting molecule in the new compound. It is, by default, something
that happens chaotically and for all practical purposes simultaneously
by millions, billions (or far more) molecules.
(c) If conditions for a particular compound are present in two totally
isolated "laboratories", then it can be said that when they are combined
in similar ways that both resulting mixtures were independent.
derivations. So to argue that life originated only once on Earth would
require establishing that there was only a single place, with unique
conditions (not particularly reasonable).

Thus, I conclude that the Earth does not represent a single experiment,
and that the "genesis" mode of thinking is a vestigal artifact of a
religious Creation, more so than what probbaly occured.

Secondly, I don't think that the search for extra-terrestrial signals is
about hunting for signals "not found in nature." As Homo sapiens, we
are fully a part of nature. Nothing we do violates any laws of nature,
and no laws of nature were violated in our coming into being. Thus, the
signal search approaches to SETI are not at all about finding
"unnatural" signal origins but, rather, signals from a special subset of
natu what we believe to require sentient nature.

These may be "technicalities", but I think they're important milestones
in SETI philosophy: (1) The Earth is not a single experiment and (2) We
as Homo sapiens are fully a part of nature, and exist because we have
reached a sort of natural economy (to couch things in anthropomorphic
terms) with regard to the laws of biology, chemistry, and physics.