Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence - Criticism

Criticism

As various SETI projects have progressed, some have criticized early claims by researchers as being too "euphoric" or "optimistic." For example, Peter Schenkel, while remaining a supporter of SETI projects, has written that "n light of new findings and insights, it seems appropriate to put excessive euphoria to rest and to take a more down-to-earth view ... We should quietly admit that the early estimates — that there may be a million, a hundred thousand, or ten thousand advanced extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy — may no longer be tenable." Clive Trotman presents some sobering but realistic calculations emphasizing the timeframe dimension.

SETI has also occasionally been the target of criticism by those who suggest that it is a form of pseudoscience. In particular, critics allege that no observed phenomena suggest the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, and furthermore that the assertion of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence has no good Popperian criteria for falsifiability.

In response, SETI advocates note, among other things, that the Drake Equation was never a hypothesis, and so never intended to be testable, nor to be "solved"; it was merely a clever representation of the agenda for the world's first scientific SETI meeting in 1961, and it serves as a tool in formulating testable hypotheses. Further, they note that the existence of intelligent life on Earth is a plausible reason to expect it elsewhere, and that individual SETI projects have clearly defined "stop" conditions. Many detractors have not considered the collection and processing of data, the first order of business, and the refining of those data streams, in the case of SETI through algorithm optimization. To justify SETI projects does not require an acceptance of the Drake equation. Science proceeds through hypothesis. If one were to only take what was at face value observable, many scientific phenomena never would have been discovered.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is not an assertion that extraterrestrial intelligence exists or are visiting earth, and conflating the two can be seen as a straw man argument. There is an effort to distinguish the SETI projects from UFOlogy, the study of UFOs, which many consider to be pseudoscience. In Skeptical Inquirer, Mark Moldwin argued that the important differences between the two projects were the acceptance of SETI by the mainstream scientific community and that "he methodology of SETI leads to useful scientific results even in the absence of discovery of alien life."

Some in the UFO community, such as nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman, say there is no basis for the search and it is therefore unscientific. Friedman has challenged SETI specialists to debate the issues, with no takers so far. Examples of objections to SETI include questioning energy requirements as well as why advanced civilizations would use radio.