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Seth Shostak of SETI has an interesting article on the silicon-vs-carbon life thing here. Among other thing, carbon dioxide is a much nicer waste product than silicon dioxide.

Seth Shostak of SETI has an interesting article on the silicon-vs-carbon life thing here. Among other thing, carbon dioxide is a much nicer waste product than silicon dioxide.

I don't know why the much better link with more information from seti.org wasn't posted instead of this short article.

I don't know why the much better link with more information from seti.org wasn't posted instead of this short article.

They are trying to contain the situation before everyone picks it up and starts running with it.

Or, they're trying to follow their own principles. See the Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The whole thing basically takes the attitude that we can say whatever we want about whatever we saw, except that we think it might be aliens. Even if we think it might be aliens. Only when it can be "confirmed as indicating the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence" do we say 'they're out there.'

Optical (ie: laser detection) SETI has been up and running for a while now (see Optical SETI overview for example). Drake ought to declare an interest though, since he's one of the investigators on the project.

It's a reasonable argument, but it's far harder to set up optical "listening" posts than radio ones. It cost me about 1000 uk pounds (WHY is the pound symbol banned from /. ?) to set up a SETI listening post, including all the costs from dish/low-noise-amplifier through receiver and PC. Setting up an optical one is waaay more expensive. Optics in general are far more expensive than radio components, and large-scale ones are extortionate :-(

The counter argument of course is that to detect laser light, the remote civilisation have to be pointing their laser at us, whereas with radio it doesn't matter since it's not a directed beam. Against that you have to offset the time-period over which transmissions of either kind could be made...

The chances of getting a radio contact may be a few orders of magnitude lower than getting an optical contact, but since the chances of me setting up an optical SETI station are precisely 0, the chances of getting 'the' signal with radio is infinitely greater than with optics, at least for me :-)

Simon

I think they did broadcast a signal with the Arecibo telescope when they first built it.

quote from here:

The broadcast was particularly powerful because it used Arecibo's megawatt transmitter attached to its 305 meter antenna. The latter concentrates the transmitter energy by beaming it into a very small patch of sky. The emission was equivalent to a 20 trillion watt omnidirectional broadcast, and would be detectable by a SETI experiment just about anywhere in the galaxy, assuming a receiving antenna similar in size to Arecibo's.


Wow. So, why'd they stop? Afraid the Ur'Quan are going to stop by or something? heheh

I think the equation you're thinking of is the Drake equation.

It will be very interesting to read this paper. We had looked at the Shannon entropy of octave music compated to languages, but we were not aware of a Zipf plot of it. Much thanks!

I suspect the Allen Telescope Array will be providing quite a bit more data for SETI@Home to chew on. Not only will be it scanning a wider range of frequencies but an order of magnitude more stars. The extra data along with the enhanced processing taken from the 3.03 S@H client will likely keep the project plenty busy for a while longer. Optical SETI is also gaining some mindshare and research dollars. I don't think it will be too long before an optical scan tool is added to the new BOINC client.

By my uninformed way of thinking, Paul Allen helped found Microsoft and was therefore analogous to the guy who opened the gates of Hell for the coming apocalypse. But my opinion of Allen has changed radically. Even if he has an ultimate profit motive for commercializing space, his investment in the Scaled Composites Ansari X-Prize hardware is a very good thing. He also gets a major boost in the ratings for handing SETI a big pile of cash for the Allen Telescope Array. Soon, SETI won't need to beg for time on the Arecibo dish, and they can look where they want with the new steerable dishes, instead of where ever Arecibo is pointed.

First I am not affiliated with SETI and I am not a radio astronomer. However those of you wondering, these area's will most likely add these zones to the zones currently scanned by Project Phoenix . It would be rather foolish of them not to, no?

However, the promotion of SETI@Home by anyone demonstrates they have not looked at the problem in detail.

There is reasonably extensive documentation on the probable intelligence of advanced civilizations (for example see papers by Dr. Anders Sandberg (here) or myself (here). As I have pointed out at conferences and in papers the difference between an advanced civilization and the human civilization is ~10^24 Ops. The difference between a single human and and a nematode worm is ~10^15 Ops. We don't talk to worms and advanced civilizations don't talk to us!

Furthermore the entire SETI effort does not take into account the information content of an advanced civilization. By my estimates this is of the order of 10^50 bits (probably more). One cannot communicate even an extremely small fraction of that information content across interstellar space using radio waves. They simply lack the information carrying capacity. So the SETI Institute, Drake, Tarter, Shostak, et al have sold millions of computer users (as well as Paul Allen) a "bill of goods" without having done their fundamental homework on the limits of evolution of civilizations. Why on earth would one attempt to communicate with a civilization that is fundamentally less sophisticated than a nematode worm and with whom it is impossible to exchange a significant amount of information that one has at ones disposal?

In contrast Marvin Minsky (probably one of the leading AI experts in the world) and Freeman Dyson (a brilliant mathematician/physicist who should have won a Nobel Prize for his contribution to the Tomonaga/Schwinger/Feynman contribution to quantum electrodynamics were it not for the Prize limits of 3 individuals) had this worked out in 1971 at the conference between Russian and foreign scientists at the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory. Direct quote from the proceedings edited by Sagan:

MINSKY: Since radiation at any temperature above 3 deg. K is wasteful and a squandering of natural resources, the higher the civilization, the lower the infrared radiation. We should look for extended sources of 4 deg. K radiation. There should be very few natural such sources.

DYSON: I don't quite go along with this but to some extent you are right.

Minsky obtaining a concession from Dyson is significant. It has been ignored by the "radio waves from aliens" camp. They *will not* be trying to talk to us. But we *might* be able to observe them in the IR detection region. (Unfortunately IR detection is difficult to do from ground based telescopes.)

So the bottom line -- reallocate your spare computer resources to projects like folding or in the future to Nano@Home. SETI@Home is never going to succeed. It is based on outdated fantasies. Telescopes like the failed WIRE mission or the recently launched SIRTF *may* be able to detect alien civilizations but efforts such as SETI@Home are pointless until such time as the supporters make the case that advanced civilizations would want to waste their time communicating with sub-worm civilizations.

Robert

SETI also is deploying 1 hectare array with upto 1000 dishes to be finally deployed by 2005.

R* is the rate of formation of stars suitable for the development of intelligent life. These stars are neither too hot (too close) nor too cold (too far) for life to form. This happy middle ground is also known as the Goldilocks zone.

Fp is the fraction of those stars with planets. Planets normally form only around stars. Some solar system have no planets and hence very little chance of having life as we know it.

All life is dependent on energy is some form or another. For most life on this planet, that energy is the sun in the forms of light and heat. While other forms of energy have been found to sustain life like chemosynthesis in the deep ocean trenches, this phenomenom will be nearly impossible to detect from earth. It is far easier to detect stars, but that doesn't mean locating a signal will be a breeze.

SETI Institute Selected as Astrobiology Lead Team
The SETI Institute is proud to announce that it has been chosen as a lead team for NASA's Astrobiology Institute (NAI), the international research consortium coordinated through NAI's offices at NASA's Ames Research Center. NASA Ames is a long-standing partner of the SETI Institute in the search for life on other worlds, and we welcome this opportunity to deepen our scientific relationship.

Well, you will be glad to hear that no tax money goes to support SETI. Zero public resources are spent on it.

Everyone that contributes to SETI, from Paul Allen to Team Lambchop, is spending their own resources of their own free will. They obviously think it's not a waste.

So, what exactly are you complaining about?

Phoenix probably did not officially announce the connection between their spiffy BIOS and the similarly-named Mozilla project. To do so would have announced their project before it was more than vaporware. Sometimes companies slip up and make *ethical* business decisions...

To understand what happened and why, look at the two related events: the lawsuit and the BIOS release. Add some logical speculation, observation, and assumption: Phoenix Technologies wanted to name their brower the Phoenix Browser (speculation). Phoenix Technologies did not (AFAIK) sue the Project Phoenix, the capital of Arizona, Phoenix Contact, or any immortal flaming birds(observation). Phoenix Technologies is staffed by humans(assumption). Humans tend to be jealous and illogical(observation).

Stir until mixed. Bake until done. Remove conclusion from head. Mine looks like this: Phoenix Technologies planned to release a browser under the name 'Phoenix Browser', but someone beat them to the name. Rather than pick a different name, they convinced themselves that they had more right to the name than the other guy. Then, they send hordes of marauding Vikings to pillage and plunder. Or something like that.

Was there a connection? Probably. Will they admit it? Probably not. Am I done ranting? Reply hazy; try again.

• Asia
  
• www.tw.ioccc.org
  - Hsin-Chu, Taiwan (24 48' N 120 59' E)

• Australia and other Pacific
• www.au.ioccc.org
  - Sydney, Australia (34 0' S 151 0' E)
  

• Europe
  
• www.de.ioccc.org
  - Humburg, Germany (53 33' N 10 2' E)
  
• www.es.ioccc.org
  - Madrid, Spain (40 25' N 3 41' W)
  
• www.gr.ioccc.org
  - Athens, Greece (38 00' N 23 44' E)
  

• Extraterrestrial
  
  SETI is looking for some sites :-)

• North America
• www0.us.ioccc.org
  - Sunnyvale California, US (37 22' N 122 02' W)
• www1.us.ioccc.org
  - Saint Paul, Minnesota US (44 57' N 93 06' W)

• South America
  none
  

We are looking for more mirrors.
Do you want to mirror the IOCCC web site?

Looniness is quite natural for me, I don't mind at all. But the explanation is entertaining, so I'll share with you. (Hint: negative evidence is still evidence)

Carl Sagan said it better than I ever could. The Drake Equation posits that by now, at least 100 (or anywhere from 5 to 50000, depending on your assumptions) electronics-capable intelligent species have existed in our area of the galaxy so far.

So where are their radio signals? Their space probes? Why does SETI strain fruitless to discover any kind of extraterrestrial signal?

The possible explanations are that there either never was any other intelligent life, or that it lost its ability to send radio signals and space probes shortly after acquiring it. (The Dyson Sphere is another possiblity. So is the Prime Directive, and plain xenophobic paranoia.)

Look at the technology level on earth today. We can already send probes out of the solar system. Given this ability, within 100-300 years at most, we'll be flinging a capsule laden with data storage and solar-powered radio transmitters towards every star we can see.

If we ever manage to colonize other worlds, then over a few millenia there will be an exponential population growth, and nary a corner of the galaxy will be free of us.

But evidently, this hasn't happened yet. Where are all the alien visitors?

Again, using ourselves as an example, the most likely possibility is that whenever technology increases to the point where a species can venture into space, it also allows the species to destroy the viability of it's entire ecosystem. Looking around at the relative popularity of military activities vice space exploration, which one do you think will happen first?

Darwinian evolution dooms us- it creates a locally optimal species, which struggles violently against its peers for resources, always knowing there is a frontier to explore where more open land can be found. But when the frontiers are gone, and the planet is full, it leaves us with a competitive psychology that will be unlikely to abide cooperation long enough for us to "get off the rock".

Look at the science-fiction worlds of something like Clarke's 2001. Flight to Jupiter in 1997? It seemed reasonable then- because it was on the assumption that petty nationalist squabbles wouldn't divert our attention and resources in the meantime. Sadly, that is exactly what's been happening.

This is just plain not true. While the sun (and solar-type stars) will outshine any Earth-type civilization in the broad-band radio bandpasses, terrestrial signals can easily outshine the sun within narrow bandpasses (e.g., radio stations and radar installations). Check out the Project Phoenix webpages if you want a refresher on this topic.

We can pick up radio-type signals from stars, but these are... stars

And the fact that we can detect them proves that we have the capability to detect alien civilizations, of a technological sophistication roughly similar to our own, within a relatively small region of neaby space (about 10 parsecs, for those of you who are counting).

The Project Phoenix Parkes Observatory run of 1995 had narrow-band sensitivity down to a few tens of gigawatts (10^10 watts) for the 19 solar-type stars within that radius that they observed. There are several military-radar emplacements on Earth that exceed that threshold.

Next-generation radio antenna arrays will increase sensitivity by a factor of roughly 1000. Are you sure you still want to bet against radio-wavelength SETI?

-renard

A picture of DSS 62: The dish that picked up Pioneer 10
http://www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/div/vlbicor/pic_htm/d ss62.htm

PIONEER 10 AT ARECIBO
http://www.seti.org/science/ao-p10.html

Pioneer Home page
http://spaceprojects.arc.nasa.gov/Space_Projects/p ioneer/PNStat.html

Earth (the dot in the middle) as seen from 3.7 billion miles away by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, on 6/6/1990:
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/pale_blue_dot.h tml

A Ride Under the Arecibo Radio Telescope
http://www.seti-inst.edu/science/under_the_mesh.ht ml

My understanding is that the SETI people at Project Pheonix routinely use Pioneer as a test source, to make sure they know when they've found something extraterrestrial. (The signal from Pioneer doppler shifts in a way inconsistant with any terrestrial source)

Why not just get involved in SETI project? If money is criterion, go for RSA challenges.

This formula isn't particularly one you need to test the validity for. It's just like saying that we want stars that are as close to the sun as possible, but putting that in mathematical language so that we can quantitatively compare the stars we're looking at. We obviously pick stars which are as similar to the sun as possible, because as far as we're concerned, they're the most likely to harbour intelligent life.

Now, if you really want an equation that involves handwaving, check out the Drake equation. It's useful, in that it lays out what the factors are which contribute to the number of potentially communicating civilisations are, but as soon as you try to quantify it, you run into all kinds of problems. Different places give very different answers.

To ask which is more likely, that life forms are instigating these reactions, or undiscovered caches of inorganic catylists are... the answer fundamentally hinges on how high you think the lowest hurdle for life's emergence is, and how prevalent you think life is in the universe. (And I'm not talking "greys").

There are a good number of people looking for more basic life in the universe that are of the opinion that life can begin in places much more hostile than blue planet Earth. They're looking to test the idea that basic, basic life is going to crop up wherever possible and then evolutionarily "dare" planetary conditions to kill it off. Just think about it, when life first emerged here the rocks had just barely solidified and the only thing we really had going for us was liquid water. Most of this planet's geologic history has been the three billion years between the emergence of prokaryotes, and the evolution of cells with proper nucleii.

For all the easily disappointed posters blaring on about how this has nothing to do with the chances of extra-terrestrial intelligence, it's not that hard to decipher the science from the hyperbolic headline. This observation just allows us to infer higher values for the f p and n e terms of Drake's equation. It improves the odds a little.

(OT, but didn't we used to have <sub> tags here?)

Based on the most conservative estimates for variables in the Drake Equation, odds are we're not alone.

That's no proof, but it's not like astronomers are asking people to believe there's an invisible pink unicorn listening to their prayers. It's the best estimate we have. Without an ftl jet or a working dimensional transfuctioner or whatever the gyroscope thing was in Conact, in this case absence of evidence is not strong evidence of absence.

Minor nitpick: "SETI" is a different project than "SETI@Home". The best source for information about SETI is, of course, SETI's website.

> amongst which are mapping the Hydrogen distrobution in the milky way and searching for SETI

I know that engineers love challenges and playing with cool toys like radiotelescopes, but in this case it might be easier just to go to their web site.

(If only we could find the aliens on google too!)

For example, could you bounce an electromagnetic signal describing the discovery off a celestial body several light-years away?

It would be nice to bounce a fake "alien signal" off the planet just do screw up with the guys at the SETI program in the near future!

I looked into doing exactly this about seven years ago and the prospects were dismal.

Building such a phased array is certainly possible, but the grief you'd have to go through to get it to work would be tremendous.

1. The total area of the smaller dishes would have to be at least the area of the big dish you're replacing, i.e. you'd need at least 45 18" dishes to equal the area of a single 10' dish.

2. You will need to steer your array of small dishes together to point at the desired satellite. The pointing accuracy of each would have to be on the order of a couple of degrees.

3. You'd need a phasing network to add the signals from each of those dishes together with the correct phasing. Note that the phasing will change as you steer the dish system. The network would have to have sufficient bandwidth to cover the spectrum of interest, which is not going to be easy. The design of such a monster would probably get you a PhD and a very good job at a major corporation.

4. The low noise amplifiers used (one per dish) would have to be very low noise indeed, since their contribution to the total noise of the phased signal goes as the square root of their number. If you've got 45 small dishes, each LNA would have to be only about 1/7 as noisy as would the amplifier for the single dish system.

I could go on, but realize what a horrible mess this would be. Arrays of dish antennas are used by radioastronomers for various reasons. The Very Large Array in New Mexico uses 27 25-meter telescopes to obtain very high angular resolution images. All of those antennas combine to become the equivalent of one 130-meter antenna.

A project of interest to those reading this is the Allen Telescope Array being built by the SETI Institute. It will use 350 6-meter TVRO dishes phased together to create one large radiotelescope. The engineering issues involved are extremely complicated.

Bottom line: it would be easier and cheaper to bribe your community's zoning board to give you a variance for a big dish, than it would be to build a phased array of smaller dishes. Even if you got prosecuted, the jail time would probably end up being less than the design time.

If you go to SETI's website, the first heading you see reads Working together to continue the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Is it just me, or does cloaking the Earth's technology from worlds with possible life counterproductive to the very things that SETI stands for?
This is ingenious technology, I am just confused as to why SETI of all organizations would propose it as it seems against their very nature.

Are there any estimates of the processing power of all the worldwide computers participating in the SETI project?

I think a very good point is raised here. Considering the difficulty that even other humans have had deciphering the signal sent out by humans in Nov. 1974 (though I can't really take it as a serious attempt at communication - sent towards M13, so we oughtn't expect a hypothetical response for around 45,000 years, give or take), I wonder how difficult it will be to decipher a signal sent by anyone who is not like us, assuming we can actually FIND one (the ostensible goal of SETI@home).

In the mid 70s, a lot of science magazines created similar messages and had contests for the readers to try to figure them out (not a lot of people managed to - mainly mathematicians, as I recall). There were also a lot of articles about how scientists here on Earth tried to untangle the Arecibo message themselves - but failed (of course, I can't find much about it on the web - anyone got any good links on the subject? Most web searches now bring up the script for Contact... :-)

For fun and edification, try the following: Take the entire binary sequence of the Aricebo message, and just lay it out as one long string. From there, forget all the exlpanations you've ever read about how it's been constructed. Also try to forget you're a member of the same species. Then take into account signal degradation over distance. Then try to forget that it's NOT just random noise from a big celestial event. Then try to figure it out! This ought to give you some idea about what we're looking at as far as actually getting a message. This site has a similar disclaimer, plus a link to the message itself (just scroll down and look for the big block o' binary). Some questions that come to my mind are, "What is it? Does it mean anything? Is it a 23x79 grid, or is it 79 23-bit words? 23 79-bit words? If it's a 23x79 grid, do the images I percieve mean anything? Am I looking at it upside down? Am I reading too much into random stellar noise? Did I even receive the whole message? 1679 bits seems not random, but what if I'm missing some of it?"

That said, I think that there is a lot to be said in favor of SETI@home. The first thing is (here's more of that subjective stuff again) - I think it's cool! I personally don't have much hope for it ever finding anything really interesting or useful, but it's a really neat project. I like to consider it the first really well-handled attempt at massively distributed computing. It is something of a pioneering project and has shown many of the pitfalls awaiting future distributed projects (like the bandwidth problem!).

In a more serious vein, without SETI@home, I don't think that distributed computing would have taken off like it has. By stimulating imaginations (despite the obvious problems involved in finding a signal at all, I think most of us are still REALLY intrigued by the concept - enough to participate in a frankly goofy project with miniscule chance of success in the hope that MAYBE something interesting will turn up), it provided a good vehicle for getting the whole notion that distributed computing can actually WORK into the world at large. I don't think it matters that the proof-of-concept was applied to SETI, rather it is simply sufficient that it was a good proof-of-concept.

In all, I believe that without SETI@home, we wouldn't have all the other interesting distributed computing projects going on to the extent that they are. I'd be willing to bet that other distributed computing project groups (especially the cash-poor ones) are watching to see how the SETI@home folks handle the bandwidth crunch (aside from throwing money that they really haven't got at it). Many of the resolutions proposed in these comments seem to have a lot of validity, and I'd hope that the SETI@home folks reading them can use the suggestions to come up with something that works - and that they can afford. I'd hope, though, that they can avoid using too many commercial partnerships - I think that the research end of it would best avoid the specter of undue influence. I've known several good research projects that lost legitimacy (and I think that the driving goal behind SETI@home needs to hold on to all the legitimacy it can!) simply by being associated with a commercial entity - even though there was NO influence on the direction of research. But that would be another topic altogether.

Maybe the alien RIAA and MPAA have already done this and that is the reason that seti hasn't found anything.

interesting data on the quantities of water in the Martian crust...

You know, doesn't this mean that all this other searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence is pretty counter-productive? If there's water right there on Mars, chances are there would be intelligent life there within a few billion years too. (It's the initial part of the thing that takes awhile...once you've got cells, the growth is like, exponential man.)

Instead, we're sending probes up there when we KNOW there's no intelligent life yet. It's like barging into the prenatal ward every few minutes while your wife's about to give birth to say "are you done yet?" Believe me, when she's done, you'll know!

At this rate, within the foreseeable future we'll have groped every planet capable of sustaining life with these stupid probes. Ever consider that under these conditions, intelligent life won't want to evolve? People like to be left in peace (that's why they get all fussy about the anal probes they constantly imagine aliens violating them with)...don't you think other would-be life might feel the same way?

This is not off-topic.

It is most likely a hoax. Seth's comment about EQ Pegasus can be found here.

The Drake Equation was simply an effort to provide a standard focus for discussion of the probabilities of receiving a signal from extraterrestrial civilisation.

Project Phoenix??? You would think they could choose a more reasuring name for hydrogen powered aircraft, given people's perceptions!

Of course, by now it's also a bit of a cliché...

No such thing as a "Dyson" ring (and a ring is unstable even in literary daydreams), and a Dyson sphere is not a solid structure, but rather a myriad of habitats and other artifically constructed objects in orbit around a sun so as to capture most of the radiated energy.

If they were a blackbody, they would be invisible, but we're looking for them (do a search for "Dyson").

Obviously they would encounter the issue of radiating waste heat[...]

Actually, that's not a huge issue. Especially when you consider that you can choose the distance (and thus energy per square unit of surface), and deal with radiating that amount out the back for each section of the sphere you build.

--
Evan

Is this just a publicity grab to take attention away from the One Hectare Array (now known as the Allen Telescope Array, after a large contribution by Paul Allen)?

More SETI telescopes are great and all, but wouldn't it be nice of the SETI project had more cohesion than the Reform Party?

Kevin Fox

Is this just a publicity grab to take attention away from the One Hectare Array (now known as the Allen Telescope Array, after a large contribution by Paul Allen)?

More SETI telescopes are great and all, but wouldn't it be nice of the SETI project had more cohesion than the Reform Party?

Kevin Fox

Yeah, but what would you use as the domain name? SETI.org? ;)

The big problem with chess is that the tree is VERY large- how big isn't known but estimates vary over a large range (see netchess and wolfram mathworld). There are certainly more chess positions than there are atoms in the universe, but the lines that lead to them are mostly worthless, so they don't matter and can be pruned away. Let's pick a tree size of 10^60-10^70 for arguments sake.

This is way beyond the scope of even distributed computing like SETI. It's usually reckoned that chess is unsolvable by brute force.

Normal computer techniques can handle about trees with about 10^20 positions or so, depending on how much hardware you can throw at it, and how long you wait.

However there are a couple of approaches that can reduce the exponent by a factor of 2 each in chess:

• Quantum computing
• Alpha-Beta pruning

As another poster noted, the current state of the art is 7 bits. You would need probably need 100s of thousands of bits to do chess. And the cycle time for current computers are measured in seconds rather than nanoseconds, but then again no optimisation for speed has been done AFAIK.

Finally it depends on the actual size of the chess tree. It may very well be there is a forced checkmate at say, move 40, in which case we would find it. But if there are only draws by repetition, under perfect play, the tree probably becomes impossibly large even with quantum computers.

Still, a search that said that there were no forced wins in say, the first 40 moves would be suggestive of a draw.

The first option is public funding. This can take several forms, all of which have one thing in common: no one reaps profit from the research, except the beneficiaries of its application. When you sit at home and write freeware or participate in an open-source project, you are publicly funding research in a sense. The project you are participating in costs money, even if you don't shell out a dime, because you are spending time that you could instead be spending holding down a second (or first) job.

A second type of public funding is charitable funding, from nonprofit foundations. Often, however, this money comes with strings attached. Researchers looking at aging might get gobs of cash from nonprofit foundations funded by the geriatric, but with the understanding that the conclusions will help improve some condition or point in a certain direction. In fact, many foundations that fund research select who to fund based on each project's previous results. That means a researcher trying to prove the mental inferiority of blacks (I'm thinking of J. Philippe Rushton here) is likely to get funding from a foundation with a history of racism (as he did). Researchers trying to prove that there is a genetic cause for homosexuality will get funded by those with a vested interest in that debate. An organization trying to get funding to search for life beyond Earth will get funding from a group that belives life is out there. But some dude who wants to figure out what makes a dead frog's legs twitch will probably never find a Deceased Paroxysm Society to fund his work. (This thought consciously echoes jd's thoughtful post.)

That second type of public funding is, as you might imagine, a little tainted; you are expected to show results for your money. Occasionally, there are some foundations that will fund research without considering results necessary, but these organizations are rare - and for an understandable reason: It is not natural for people to give without expecting something in return. A few very altruistic groups will do so, but it is an unusual trait. Even the patrons and sponsors of history's greatest scientists, like the Medicis who poured rivers of cash into the coffers of Florentine researchers and artists, got paid back in a currency they highly valued: social prestige. What could be snazzier than letting the world know that you've got crazy ol' Leonardo downstairs writing backwards and drawing flying machines?

Our natural reticence for giving without expecting to receive is the reason for the third type of public funding: taxes. Taxes are a form of coercion, but often a forgiveable one. We all pay for things that will benefit all of us, or at least many of us. The mail and the military and Medicare.

But government - this should surprise no one - is not constituted of impartial wise men who are unfallible judges of the public good. Funding for research projects is the result of a treacherous process of application, rejection and (frankly) supplication. (Some of us have to use a similar process to get a date.)

The scientific projects that government chooses to fund are very selectively chosen, since government has limited funds. (It is good that government has limited funds, since that means we have kept more of our own money.) So the government will fund research that improves our collective national security - the Manhattan Project, the current missile defense projects, and even DARPANET all come to mind. The government will also fund research that improves the general welfare of the population - hence, the Genome Project and the work of the CDC. Some projects have switched between those two categories: the race to space was well-funded at first because it served national security interests; today, it only gets money because NASA points out the many mundane benefits of our space endeavors.

Do we really want government to do much more than that? Is is wise for us to allow government the power to fund whichever projects it wishes? Hasn't the long and sorry history of government abuse shown us that we should remove power from the hands of government whenever possible? And isn't this especially true in the arena of science and technology, because progress in those fields yield inordinate power - which government cannot be trusted to safeguard? Government's history of using new technologies to preserve and entrench its own power has led James Burke (among others) to describe the Internet's creation as fortuitous and accidental.

Government's appropriate role is to perform those tasks that we cannot perform ourselves. And as the innovations of private industry in the last century have shown, each day there are fewer things we cannot do ourselves; in many regards our need for government is diminishing.

And indeed, none of the three types of public funding I described above work well. Personal, sacrificial public funding leaves you with no food on your table. (Hence the completely understandable buyouts of Slashdot and l0pht.) Funding from foundations is too rare, and often tainted by bias. And government funding - which has admittedly led to many of our greatest scientific and technological triumphs - lends itself to abuse, so it should be spared as often as possible.

What about private funding, then? Strident private corporations often have the courage to tread where public foundations cannot - and for an obvious reason: while a foundation cannot hope to make serious profit from the research it funds, privately funded research can make some moolah. An side benefit of private research, then, is that it acts as a creator of wealth. If you need evidence of the positive effects of privately-funded research, all you need do is look around you. For that matter, look right in front of you: affordable and usable computers are preponderant today only because of the competition fostered by private innovation.

The last line of the article above clucks that we should despair if "science, and if biology in particular, became a victim of new monopolies." Quite right: but corporations are not all monopolies . That's one place where government's rod should not be spared; it should aggressively act to increase competition by refusing to suffer a monopolized marketplace.

We needn't sob when some inventor or innovator "caves in" to the "profit motive." We should cheer him on, since it means he has developed an idea which intrigues people enough that they are willing to pay for it. (And more importantly, he can afford to feed himself.)

I'd like to respond to a few arguments made by others in previous postings. First, Idrach wrote that "We know that proper scientific research can be done with free software - Seti At Home." Well that's simply not true; while the software is free on our end, it was created by the hard work of programmers who got paid, and their paychecks came from somewhere. (I already wrote about Seti above.)

zyqqh wrote that he would like to see "the free-market philosophy be limited when it comes to pursuit of knowledge. As long as universities prosper, we will see good research, which doesn't get hogged by some corporation, and which remains in the public domain for the good of mankind." Well, you have very little to worry about, because most universities are corporations and businesses funded by the cash flow of undergrad tuition and endowments paid for by benefactors. But even so, is it better to keep knowledge hermetically sealed in institutions of higher learning? Isn't it better to release that knowledge into the frothy and unpredictable arena of profiteering savages - who will fight over it and make it useful? Imagine if Google (or any of the other Internet start-ups that began in schools) had remained the profitless property of the universities that birthed them. What reason would Stanford have to continue operating Google after the first few years? But transition it into the marketplace, and it will be available for longer, and will be forced to improve.

I've already responded to a number of the assertions in vlax's well-considered post, I'd just like to say a little more. First, it is false that science can't function in secret. Why do you say that? Even publicly funded research can happen in secret, like the Manhattan Project and any number of government endeavors of which we only hear snippets. As for the dig at Hawking, Gould and others getting rich from their research (or rather, its popularization), so what? Good for them. I don't see how their money decreases the legitimacy of their work. I may have missed your point.

Finally, I'd like to back-track a little bit. Despite everything I said, there are still instances where public funding is wholly appropriate. I strongly believe government funding should continue to go to projects which we cannot ourselves do - which is why I am disturbed by the current lack of interest in the space program. What's more, I believe that a mix of private and public funding has great potential, especially in the spectacular race to complete mapping the three billion human gene sequences.

And I am also extremely disturbed by the ability of companies to turn bits and pieces of nature into proprietary information. Not just Celera (as was mentioned in the parent article), but Human Genome Sciences, Incyte and others are applying for patents on genes.

This is an echo of the same problem facing those involved in the copyright debate today: we have to strike a balance between protecting the public's right to have innovation and competition, and protecting the companies' right to make a buck off their work. There are no easy solutions here, except perhaps offering a special class of short-term patents that expire after a set number of years, allowing companies to deservedly profit from their work and investment.

The reckless granting of patents and copyrights, and the occasional monopolistic corporation, must not mislead us into believing corporate science is evil. Public funding is sparse, and occasionally dangerous. Far better to get our money from the deep pockets of investors willing to take a risk than to suckle at the teat of a possibly pernicious government.

I am interested in hearing your thoughts.

A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society

Had I thought of it (as if) I would have done it simply as a cute trick, or simply to see if it worked (hacker ethic?). After that, I'd just be trying to ride the publicity wave for as long as possible, while promoting things I care about (SETI & Bluetooth for me - Linux & Nashville's Table for him).

If they were a blackbody, they would be invisible, but we're looking for them (do a search for "Dyson").

Excellent link! Love the idea of searching for spectral lines indicating the dumping of nuclear waste in stars.

Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/

-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

they really do have (or have been working on) a 'screen saver' program to snatch your lonely cpu cycles. I remember reading about it a year or two ago... Oh. Apparently it's due for april 99. Seti@home its called. (sponsored by tci? heheheh)
seti.org
detroit