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.

Comments

Re:Better use of funds

[tbo]

***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.

UN involvement is normal...:

[Uncertain Bohr]

I just wanted to comment that it is not clear at all that the UN is funding this at all. The UN is just were the international agreement is signed and registered.

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.

The REAL Value of This Telescope

[jd]

At 1 square kilometer, it will have a collecting area sufficiently large to actually detect Earth-sized planets 1AU away from their star, up to 100 light years away, according to the head of the SETI Institute, in a recent lecture I attended.

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.

A big telescope may even be useful...

[Thalia]

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

Re:A big telescope may even be useful...

[bph]

I am going to include the obligatory link to the science goals of the square kilometer array. If you read the outline, you will see that SETI is only one of many. In fact, this is the first I had heard of using the SKA to do SETI. Most people talk about 21 cm studies out to high redshift, not LGMs....

Re:A big telescope may even be useful...

[nomadic]

After all, what other useful thing do you know that the U.N. has spent money on?

• Hunger relief.
• Refugee relief.
• Vaccinations.
• Education.
• Peacekeeping.
• Election monitoring.
• Land mine removal efforts.
• Environmental protection.
• Disarmement
• Facilitating international treaties.
• War tribunals.
• Providing a forum for international diplomacy.

And I probably missed some.
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Single Female Lawyer

[CukO]

Perhaps this is just an attempt to transmit "Single Female Lawyer" with better encoding :)

Who better to talk to ET

[tbo]

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.

Straight from the IAU

[martyb]

From the article:

An agreement to build the new telescope was signed last month at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union in Manchester.

The International Astronomical Union has a page providing information on this: here.

The IAU is not the UN.

[DHartung]

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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Please, the UN is a farce

[Ars-Fartsica]

Hunger relief. Refugee relief. Vaccinations. Education.

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.

Re:Please, the UN is a farce

[nomadic]

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).

They have problems addressing the political issues because their actions are done through consensus, which is very hard to get in the international community.

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.

The UN has trouble with the political issues because the member states want it that way.

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.

UN peacekeeping failures get a lot of press; successes don't. Check here for a listing of what they've accomplished. In my opinion, even if they don't succeed in a mission, I think it's important to have tried.

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.

The UN's power rests partially with the general assembly, and mostly with the security council. Representatives are ambassadors; their job is to represent their own countries interests, and the bureacracies answer to them. Their budgets are at the mercy of the member states, and in general they're severely underfunded.

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.

The UN isn't meant to be a ruling body, and nobody, myself included, thinks it's any sort of ideal. What it is is simply two things; a forum for different nations to interact with each other, and a collection of what are essentially humanitarian agencies administered by it. The total amount of money spent by the UN to maintain itself and run it's operations is around 10 billion a year. This is less than half the budget of it's host city of New York. Last year a little over a dollar of your taxes (assuming you're an American) went to it. Money from the UN that enters the American economy (through expenditures, employees, etc) is more than what we spend on it. Personally, I think the work that the WHO and UNICEF does is worth that dollar a year by themselves.
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Is the UN the appropriate vehicle?

[Goonie]

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?