Looking for aliens in all the wrong places

Science-fiction fans may fondly recall writer-physicist David Brin`s

"Uplift Saga," in which cranky old alien races reliant on super-
powerful computers are outsmarted by crafty humans who count on
cunning to survive. Fun stuff, but also the sort of idea that may
point to where real-life searches for aliens have gone wrong,
suggest a pair of extraterrestrial-minded astronomers.

In the last decade, space has become much more crowded, note Milan Cirkovic of the
Astronomical Observatory Belgrade, and his colleague, Robert Bradbury, in a recent
edition of the journal, New Astronomy. About 200 "exoplanets" - planets orbiting nearby
stars - have been discovered, including as many as 16 lately observed by the Hubble
Space Telescope in another arm of our Milky Way Galaxy. This suggests that Earth-like
planets, relatively small, rocky and orbiting a star, must be relatively common.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, biologists have been setting back the dates of life`s earliest
appearance to nearly 3.9 billion years ago, close to the planet`s beginning. They`re
finding more and more "extremophile" microbes capable of living in freezing, boiling or
otherwise nasty conditions once considered inhospitable to life.

So why hasn`t SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, heard any alien radio
signals yet, ask the report authors? The question is best known as "Fermi`s Paradox,"
first posed by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950, when he asked, "Where are they?" Even a
modestly sophisticated alien species could likely colonize every star in the galaxy within
10 million years, Fermi reasoned, based on technologies understood more than half-a-
century ago. Ever since, Fermi and his successors have been asking why we haven`t
heard from any aliens yet.

SETI has long searched for signals from aliens in radio transmissions. The focus has been
on nearby sun-like stars, which may have life like our own, says astronomer Seth Shostak
of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. The effort has been privately funded since
1994. So far, no alien signals, which some argue calls for a change in direction.

"The need for such reassessment is fueled not only by the failure of SETI thus far, but
also by great advances recently made in astrophysics, astrobiology, computer science
and future studies," say the New Astronomy report authors. One reason for the failure,
they contend, may be that we are looking for the wrong aliens in the wrong part of the
galaxy. Just like humanity today, any reasonably intelligent aliens will quickly develop
and become dependent on computers, or "machine intelligence," they argue, following a
suggestion made by science historian Steven Dick in 2003.

That matters, because, "as almost anyone having practical experience with computers
will have experienced, heat is an enemy of computation," they note. So, they argue,
since the stars where these computer-dependent aliens arose will slowly be burning up
(our sun will turn into a red giant in 5 billion years, for example), the places where
extraterrestrials will slowly migrate to, and perhaps build space colonies, is the place
where computers are most comfortable. That would be in the cold depths of space at
the edge of galaxies, far from the fiery stars.

SETI, Cirkovic and Bradbury charge, is "fundamentally flawed" because it looks for
signals from aliens from nearby sun-like stars. "Outward migration of advanced
technological species should be taken into account in future practical SETI projects,"
they write. "The true test here would be to detect signs of astro-engineering efforts at
the outskirts of nearby spiral galaxies."

Shostak, of the SETI Institute, agrees that intelligent aliens likely are dependent on
computers, or are computers themselves. But the assumption that computational
efficiency will drive aliens ever outward, overriding any other goal, is a big one, he
says. "It`s a clever idea, but more than likely to be wrong."

After all, finding some place cold in space to do computations isn`t the biggest problem
that aliens will likely face, he says, compared to the energy lost in migrating outside the