I occasionally play the lottery. I know the odds are against me in a very large way and that it's viewed by many people as a dollar wasted, but that doesn't matter. What detractors don't seem to get is that playing the lottery is not about winning the lottery. Rather, it's about getting to take the time from your ticket purchase until the drawing to imagine how great it's going to be to when you have your $1,000,000 white trash speed boat out on the lake, seeing your friends on shore, noticing that they're beckoning you over (they really like you now that you're loaded), driving your speed boat over to them, slowing down on the approach as though you're going to stop to let them on, and then gunning it at the last second, arcing the boat around to create a wave that crashes on shore and soaks everybody, driving off before they even realize what's happened, sipping Cristal, laughing to yourself, and shouting "SO LONG, SUCKERS!" as you perfect your speedo thong tan and eat another dollop of caviar off the belly of a topless super model on the first of many sunny days that will last until the day you die.
The fantasy of winning is what the lottery is all about. You can rest assured that somebody, somewhere, will eventually win, but you never truly expect it to be yourself (unless under the influence of early morning sleep confusion).
I suppose that's why it was with mixed feelings that I read about Seth Shostak, SETI's senior astronomer, declaring that SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) would detect radio waves from extraterrestrials within twenty years. His reasoning seems to be straight from the "We just make this stuff up as we go along" department. He bases his assumption on assumptions that are based on other assumptions that are based on even more assumptions that are tied very closely to an "equation" which itself is nothing but a string of very large assumptions based on still more assumptions about intelligent life and the universe.
It's almost like buying a lottery ticket just to buy a chance to buy a chance to buy a chance to win the "real" lottery. Having to have a fantasy about fantasizing about a fantasy of what could really be.
On the one hand, Seth is engaging in that satisfying lotto fantasy about soaking his friends with his super speed boat, but at the same time it's somewhat disappointing to think that he's basically desperate for SETI to succeed. I've always enjoyed SETI because it keeps me thinking about the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere (and let's not have the dolphin argument right now - you know what I mean). I'm waiting for SETI to win the lottery, but I don't truly expect that it will happen in my lifetime. Why, just a few decades after we've begun listening, should we suddenly receive a radio transmission? It doesn't make much sense. It's not like the aliens are saying, "OK - the humans have hooked up their space radios - let's start broadcasting."
It's sad, too, because I would like more than anything, and certainly much more than winning the lottery, to know that there's intelligent life someplace else. I get romantic and teary eyed when I think about it. I fantasize about how cool it would be if another race of intelligent beings came here and enslaved us. I'm into kinky stuff like that. I think about the slinky space-outfits they'd make us wear while mining for dialithium crystals on asteroids in the Forbidden Zone - I dream of the day when Earth finally gets involved in the intergalactic slave trade.
But that's all - just dreaming. I don't really expect it to happen anytime soon, and I certainly don't expect us to hear from our future captors within twenty years. Just seems a bit outlandish.
After Blog Mint [?] :
If you're into reading about other people's problems to feel better about yourself, then don't miss out on grouphug.us. I had an idea for a site just like this about a year ago, but didn't have time to get it together - I'm glad someone did, though, because it is some seriously sordid reading.