Slashdot Mirror
United Nations Brings You ... A Telescope
StDave writes: "It looks like the United Nations is going to set up a SETI listening station of their own to find Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. Catch it here. " Says the article: "The £800m machine, called the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), will be the most
sensitive astronomical instrument yet built. ... An agreement to build the new telescope was signed last month at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union in Manchester. Scientists will spend the next few years designing the technology, with completion due in about 2015." I hope the aliens are at least amused.
It struck me as somewheat strange that the UN is investing in a telescope for the sole purpose of fining extra terestrial life. I've never heard about the UN taking an interest in outer space affairs aside from Star Wars technology and other nuclear proliferation affairs. The Preamble to the UN's Charter reads as follows:
<UL>
WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED
-To save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and
-To reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and
-To establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other
sources of international law can be maintained, and
-To promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom
</UL>
I suppose that this telescope would fall under promoting social progress. I don't see the immediate need for it though. Imediate issues like East Timor and long term issues like building infrastructure in undeveloped countries would come before a satelite, I would think.
On the other hand, this might be an expanding branch for the UN. Maybe forming a specific committee to set policies for every country's space research is something that might happen. Forming an international organization for the sole purpose of space exploration might be a possibility too.
It's anybody's guess though.
It's alsolutely rediculous to scan the sky listening for pre FTL civilizations. If your going to broadcast from or hear a signal it makes sence to find an unusual region of space. What better place to broadcast than from say near a black hole. Build a transmitter probe and send it at a relativistic speed. Listen to places you would spend millions of dollars sending a probe to. But really it's a waste of money. If you want to spend money all that badly then invest in research to discover new and more practical ways that a civilization might communicate along the stars.
If you're interested in this, try reading "Manufacturing Consent" by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky.
I just did, and it was quite the eye-opener.
Wow, you really must feel special by trying to put down Canada's millitary. Whatever floats your boat. Just remember that our fighter pilots routinely beat yours in excercises, and your soldiers also routinely train with ours because our personnel are some of the best trained in the world.
We don't have many (much more then 5, rofl) but what we do have is extremely well trained.
As for that ship invasion, we took it back, the dispute was between two companies, not a company and the government. The ship carried millitary equiptment and refused to dock because it was trying to extort MORE money out of the second company, so we just took it.
-- iCEBaLM
All of these things may be important to some people, but are they really at the level where they affect the viability of the human race? The global population of humans currently exceeds 6 billion. Kill all you want, we'll make more.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't try to do something about the problems that you listed, just that they do not have the species killing potential of an asteroid impact.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
These places would and will continue to suck with or without the UN.
Trust me, how the nation state in those parts of the world conducts its self is directly linked to your survival or death.
And that is exactly why the UN is unable to alter the course of these dismal places - they refuse to deal with the politics. The UN is the last agency I would want working in an area that requires drastic change, because drastic change cannot happen without someone's toes being stepped on, and the UN does not step on toes.
Technology has not changed the hopelessness of poverty, and the UN is THE forum for the introvention and comminication with such nations.
The UN has not changed the hoplessness of poverty either. If the UN was audited as a charitable organization like Care or Oxfam, their scorecard would be all F's. The amount of bureaucratic waste evident in UN operations is likely unequaled by any other aid group.
Although another poster has dealt with the factual rebuttal of your insincerly idiotic comment, I feel I must provide the moral rebuttal.
Your flippant attitude just gives away the fact that this seemingly innocent factual faux pas is indeed part of a deliberate slander campaign against the organizations like the UN, that oppose, albeit timidly, the arrogant, merciless power of today's world: the military-industrial-media complex of the inadequately named United States of America.
The telescope will (at least theoretically) be looking for other planets, not just intelligent life. Finding other (possibly human-habitable) planets is a good long term goal. It should make the paranoid (who think that earth will not survive mankind) happy.
I'll be accused of repeating myself here, but I'll say this once more: imagine that, in the year 3,000, an alien civilization were to happen upon the ruins of personkind, which had disappeared hundreds of years before, due to the consumption of all their available energy sources. They explore and research this barren planet, with its countless artifacts of civilization gone, and discover and decipher this one particular phenomenon: SETI. What would you, as one of these alien anthropologists, say? "They claimed to care for life, and to value the possibility of life in other worlds. But this claim was empty, as is evidenced by how they failed to apply those resources to discovering that the love of life must start locally, and only after it conquers the local can it conquer the remote."
"Professor Peter Wilkinson, a senior astronomer at Jodrell Bank, Britain's renowned radio telescope centre, said that the SKA could enable humanity to protect itself from [asteriod's] impact." That should make the common man (not to mention the politicos) happy.
Quoth your hypothetical "common man": "Yeah, now we can go back to worrying about whether we'll die nuked."
Quoth your "politicos": "Good, back to oppressing the masses. What do we privatize next? The police, right?"
Are you adequate?
Based on the fact that the UN is usually involved with more earthly affairs and hasn't shown a real interest in the development of space or related issues, and considering that there are other groups already searching for ET (SETI) and have been so far unsuccesful, I just don't understand why they would fund something like this..
The only logical conculssion so far for my conspiratory mind is that they know exactly what they'll be looking for...maybe they know more than we do about alien life???
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
***RANT***
I'm so sick of hearing the "when people are starving in country Z, how can we justify spending Y on X" argument. People are starving because their governments are fucked up. You can spend all the money you want on foreign aid, but it will just go to feeding the military and lining the pockets of the dictators in those countries.
The only real solution would be to go in with an army, kill/imprison the dictators, impose a democratic government, occupy the country for the 20 years it took for things to settle down, and then hope that they got their shit together. A hell of a lot of people--both us and them--would die in the effort.
Would you give your life for that?
***/RANT***
That being said, money spent on SETI is NOT wasted. It advances our society as a whole by answering an incredibly deep question about our universe: are we alone?
If all we ever manage to accomplish as a species is to pollute the planet and feed ourselves for a while before the next big comet hits, well, we just plain suck. If we never pass on parts of our knowledge or culture to other civilizations, is there any point to our existence as a species?
Imagine if someone had told Columbus he was an asshole for going off on his little trip when people were starving in Europe. Exploration is vital to the advancement of human society. (Please don't get anal on me and point out how so-and-so actually discovered North America first, or how Columbus was really looking for the North-West passage to the nearest Indo-Chinese Fusion Cuisine restaurant--it's irrelevant).
I have probably just been trolled here, but what the hell, it's late, I don't care.
So, why do you have a computer instead of selling it and giving the money to the poor, hypocrite?
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
I see this as excellent recognition that ET mostlikely exists. SETI is being looked at as less of a "neat toy" and more as a vital tool in discovering that maybe we're not alone.
Organizarion such as ESA (The European Space Agency) are also listed by the UN, and a UN treaty between the member countries does exists at the UN. The UN itself does not contribute to ESA. You can find more information about this sort of things, which happen often in astronomy were costs are high and international cooperations are mandatory, by looking up the internet registration of the .int domain name.
I too was surprised a while ago to find out that I needed a copy of a UN agreement in order to register a .int domain, and that places like www.esa.int HAD such a treaty. I had forgotten, as many seem to, that the UN is THE place where international agreements can be ironed out officially.
http://www.chron.com/content/interactive/space/as
http://www.cnn.com/20 00/TECH/space/08/01/seti.telescope.reut/
http://srd.yahoo.com/goo/paul+allen+telescope/3/*
How does that one fit in?
"What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is"
Vidi, Vici, Veni
This would be sufficient to collect information on atospheric composition, temperature and the presence of life. (Dead atmospheres are comparitively inert to those needed for living matter.)
Even if no ET signal was ever detected by this giant telescope, it would be capable of mapping virtually every solar system within that 100 LY range, AND give a fairly good indication of the prevalence of living matter.
IMHO, focussing on that side of things is far more interesting than whether you'll be able to decode ET's "Playbeing" channel.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I hope the aliens are at least amused.
To be honest, I'm not really sure what that comment meant...
But anyway, it's nice to see a real large scale SETI operation like this. Even if there isn't intelligent life out there transmitting, which is entirely possible, I'm sure astronomers can think of other uses for something the article referred to as being "the most sensitive astronomical instrument yet built".
--
Let's say you've got an applicaiton that has 'maxed out' a Sun Sparc Server 1000E. Would you rather spend your $1M to try to make it better, or just purchase a Sun Ultra Enterprise 10000? In a similar matter, upgrading an existing SETI project to scale to that level wouldn't be cost efficient. Nevermind that you don't have to interface and involve yourself with the politics of even more groups when you build your own SETI.
Although I am amused/puzzled by something. They're designing something *now* for implementation in 2015. By the time it is in place, it'll be long obsolete!
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
Kevin Fox
Don't knock the telescope. After all, what other useful thing do you know that the U.N. has spent money on?
The telescope will (at least theoretically) be looking for other planets, not just intelligent life. Finding other (possibly human-habitable) planets is a good long term goal. It should make the paranoid (who think that earth will not survive mankind) happy.
It's also supposed to be useful to seek the faint radiation emitted 10-12 billion years ago when the first stars and galaxies formed after the big bang. That should make scientist happy.
But I bet the telescope was sold to the UN by the theory that "it will also allow astronomers to plot in detail the courses of asteroids and comets that threaten to collide with the Earth. Professor Peter Wilkinson, a senior astronomer at Jodrell Bank, Britain's renowned radio telescope centre, said that the SKA could enable humanity to protect itself from their impact." That should make the common man (not to mention the politicos) happy.
So, everyone is happy...
Thalia
Arecibo (the current one in use for SETI@home) is very small and it is near impracical for use in the SETI project. This new unit will probably be more streamlined for the reception of what SETI is actually looking for, which will produce more better results. Also, different frequencies may be approved for use by the SETI society on this new telescope.
http://siokaos.org/
Perhaps this is just an attempt to transmit "Single Female Lawyer" with better encoding :)
For everyone out there who bashes the UN for trying to get involved in SETI:
Who better than the UN to represent humanity when we first make contact with another (or perhaps "an") intelligent species? Isn't part of the UN's mandate to bring everyone together for peaceful and meaningful discussions? Why shouldn't that include ETs?
Also, the project has a heck of a lot of other goals. I'm not sure if asteroid detection is one of them, but, if it is, it's worth considering that a decent-sized asteroid hitting Earth would make full-scale nuclear war look like wet firecrackers...
The dinosaurs died because they didn't have a space program.
If there isn't anything out there, we need to know that, too.
Finding something isn't the only measure of success for SETI.
-
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Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
From the article:
The International Astronomical Union has a page providing information on this: here.
First off, this isn't Slashdot's fault (although sometimes the posts are woefully unresearched). The London Times screwed up by saying "United Nations" a couple of times when there's nothing anywhere to indicate that the UN has anything to do with it.
The International Astronomical Union has been around since 1919, well predating the UN, and is headquartered in Brussels. While it's a member of the International Council of Scientific Unions, as far as I can tell, they have nothing to do with the United Nations. Well, OK, they're working with the ITU (which does) and the UN working group on peaceful uses of outer space, but neither of those institutional connections impacts the separate SKA working group. There are many international organizations that operate wholly independently of the UN.
While the SKA project is still a ways from reaching the point of a firm technical plan and seeking funding, there's no evidence they're going to ask the UN for money. In fact, a lot of the funding is likely to come from participating universities (who may in turn, of course, seek grants from their national governments to support their involvement). No UN bureaucracy at all.
The moral? Don't believe everything you read in the papers. Looks to me like the editor saw "International [Astronomical] Union" and assumed it was a UN agency. Not the case.
----
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> You can spend all the money you want on foreign aid, but it will just go to feeding the military and lining the pockets of the dictators in those countries
this might be the truth for the vast number of third world countries, but there are lots of third world countries that have good leaders but ppl are still starving. (there are numerous reasons why ppl are starving there; everything from low incomes because of western corporations are not willing to pay more than few $/hour to low prices on worlds market for raw materials country is exporting)
now we should not use these countries as excuse for not persuing space exploration. we can both explore space and help those ppl. imo problem is that people/govermants in europe/n. america are spending money on useless stuff.
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
s/US/Canada/ and you have a better grasp on things.
Canada has been footing the US's UN dues since the US seems to be refusing to pay them for quite some time...
-- iCEBaLM
Syndy, Australia, 2018 -- In a surprising discovery, Dr. Jill Tarter announced through her thumb-sucking male boss, who likes to hog the credit, that "they are out there." Interlaced with the bursts of RF energy that become the first 10 prime numbers when "interpreted properly", the ETs show they are watching us by inserting a subcarrier that carries a rebroadcat of the Nixon "I Am Not A Crook" speech.
Further embedded in those signals (you'd be amazed what can be packed into those 150-ms pulses when you try!) is the construction plans for the ship Heart of Gold with its Infinite Improbability Drive, designed by the aliens when they received the BBC Radio broadcasts of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and mistook the radio play for a news broadcast.
The United Nations has retained Scott Adams to oversee the entire "Contact For Real" project because of his clearly superior grasp of management techniques and practices. Douglas Adams has been added to the project team for his ability to brew really hot cups of tea, as well has his clearly superior ability to deal with the side effects of the Heart of Gold's drive.
Co-operation has been rampent in this project. Recluse trillionare Bill Gates, from his private space station, pointed out that the space-borne construction diagrams make sense when wrapped around a model of the United States Pentegon building. Arch-rivel Steve Jobs, from his offices at Pixar/Disney, demonstrated using computer graphics generated by 4,000 Apple G6 computers connected via kite string and Dixie cups, that the diagrams made even more sense when stretched across a model of the Pentagon expanded into a three-dimensional model. Tom Clancy observed that a portion of the drawing is in error, in that it looks like some prankster grafted a giant hypodermic needle that would be used to kill The Galactic Overlord's giant space amoeba as described in the Hazel Stone space-opera series The Scourge of the Spaceways.
(more)
we would have nothing. Almost all of the really cool stuff that we have started as pure research. Research like art is good for its own sake.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Think Washington is unresponsive to you? Try New York. Although he is a repugnant geezer, Jesse Helms is correct in deriding the UN - its a completely meaningless debate society that has done almost nothing to really alter the course of world events throughout its history.
At a time when the nation state is becoming irrelevant, you have to wonder why anyone would applaud the creation and maintainence of a body that really has no useful mechanism to responding to the people who are paying for it - it is a grossly elitist body that has absolutely no mandate to listen to any individuals, because it has no constituency. It has no democratic foundations at all.
Push power down to individuals and local governments. Screw Big Brother.
While they are arguably making an effort to deliver the goods on these needs, they can't address the political issues that keep food and medicine out of the areas needed (newsflash - most of the barriers to aid are political, not economic - see 80s Ethiopian famine for a case study).
Why can't they address the political issues? The UN thinks it is above such things. This is why they are locked out of most of the useful change in developing nations.
Peacekeeping.
I'm tempted to enter a "ROTFL", but seriosuly, the UN does little to keep or create peace - mostly it puts its own soldiers in harm's way with no mandate whatsoever. As a peacekeeper, the UN is a complete failure.
Providing a forum for international diplomacy.
Sure - it creates elitist bodies that are answerable to no one, as they have no visible constituency. There is no real representation in any UN organization - its a loose thread of pseudo socialist ideals implemented by lifelong empolyees who respond to no one and have no notion of democratic accountability.
Its amazing that people think of this collection of appointed dupes as the ruling ideal - at the very best it stinks of a second-world planned-economy style operation that completely defies any efforts to further empower individuals over institutions.
Haha, nice pseudo-intellectual rant. Thank the gods that the twentieth century taught us to never trust rule to intellectuals again. Now lets get to the facts - the UN is not anti-American as you naively claim, in fact, they are the lapdog of the US. Look at the resolutions passed around the time of the Gulf War. The fact that they continue to curry favor with the US is even more amazing in light of the fact that the US regularly fails to pay its UN dues.
As for "military industrial complex", please tell me how the absurdly elitist, unresponsive, undemocratic, unaccountable UN is supposed to be an improvement over the corporate state?? You're replacing one big brother with another.
Given that if this thing's built, it'll be mostly funded by the the the US, Europe, and Japan, wouldn't it be a heck of a lot easier to dispense with the UN's famous bureacracy and fund it through agreement between just those countries that want to come on board?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)