Joseph Lazio wrote:

"PB" == Paul Bramscher <brams006_nospam@tc.umn.edu> writes:

PB> Linda wrote:

What's SETI looking for? Life forms able to communicate with us?
Life intelligent enough to communicate with other similar life
forms? Life that can communicate with my dog?  How are the various
SETI projects defining what they are searching for?

PB> I see this thread is a week old, but I like to insert my two bits
PB> here. SETI, I think, should really be caused SETB or the Search
PB> for Extra-terrestrial Behavior.

Jill Tarter often says something similar (search for extraterrestrial
technology or technomarkers).  The problem with changing the term is
not scientific, it's sociological.  Everybody already knows the term
SETI.

True.  We might suggest that "intelligence" is overly subject to philosophical wrangling (and therefore less readily quantified or qualified), whereas "behavior" can be cleanly selected in functional terms as a specific sort of behavior (radio or optical transmitting, for example)

That is, it's concievable that an intelligent species (whatever the operative definition for "intelligence") does not opt to transmit, or uses some other communications technology.  So the search for "intelligence" will fail, automatically, in both cases against a given search methodology -- whether or not the intelligence exists.  But a search for a particular sort of behavior will not fail in the same sense -- since it's not purporting to find intelligence, but rather a particular "residue" we might associate with a particular train of intelligence.

This is probably just semantic nit-picking.  Though it's interesting to examine the anthropological term "material culture."  It's not merely a shortcut to describe artifacts, but it also suggests that cultural generalizations might be derived from material remains.  With SETI I suggest that the "I" in SETI enjoys a parallel problem in archaeology. Archaeologists don't search for culture directly, but rather the search for (physical) artifacts which might reveal something about culture that produced them.

If only we aactually could search for intelligence directly, bypassing the behavioral "residue" requirement.  In archaeology there's also a parallel.  By finding skeletal remains we might examine the cranial capacity and make some generalizations about the state of cognitive advancement.  Not the same thing, but quite useful nonetheless.

So if there was some chemical marker in the cosmos which allow us to find advanced organisms directly (not indirectly, via technological or chemical markers of behavior) we might open up a whole new aspect to SETI.  Would be nice to have a hypothetical "DNA telescope."