The invention of the radio is somewhat hard to pinpoint to one single inventor or even one single year. From what Wikipedia tells us, the most important aspects of the history of the radio happened between ca. 1860 and 1910. This link gives an interesting table of the men involved and what they did.
The first transatlantic (and thus very useful) transmission occurred on 12 December, 1901 so let's use that year for all intents and purposes.
Modern man is thought to have appeared around 100,000 years ago (give or take 50,000 years) according to the "out of africa" theory. This essentially means that in a geological blink of an eye (100k years) we went from apes to apes with long distance communication. Within 100 years of the invention of the radio SETI started searching the skies and broadcasting into space. However, few know about what happened in 1924. On August 22, Mars was in closest opposition since 1804. The Army and the Navy were ordered to scan the skies and report any findings. Even though only static was found, it signals a pretty amazing feat of mankind and our grasp of science seeing that this was only about 25 years since we had invented functional radios.
The Drake equation has factors for the fraction of planets that can support life, develop intelligent life, develop civilizations with technology to broadcast into space, and the durations of those signals. What I want to know is this: did we develop outrageously quickly? Or are we slower than normal? Should these questions be factored into the Drake equation? It looks like Wikipedia beat me to it:
...this model has a large anthropic bias and there are still zero degrees of freedom. Note that the capacity and willingness to participate in extraterrestrial communication has come relatively "quickly", with the Earth having only an estimated 100,000 year history of intelligent human life, and less than a century of technological ability.Be that as it may, I still find it amazing how quick it all happened and hope that for all the other planets with life out there, that it happens even quicker.
Good stuff McMahon, and I think our posts have similar concerns with the Drake Equation. We have no way of knowing how common our curiosity and, going back to my post in July, competition are in the rest of the universe. One could imagine a technologically advanced civilization that has found an equilibrium in life and simply does not care about advancing or exploring any further. In my best Zapp Brannigan voice: "How very neutral of them..."
ReplyDeleteI never knew we actually thought Mars could sustain intelligent life. I guess back then it couldn't have hurt to try it out.