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New and Improved SETI
nomrniceguy writes "The new year is sure to be memorable for SETI, as glossy new instruments come on-line.
At Harvard University, a survey telescope designed to sweep massive swaths of the sky in a hunt for extraterrestrial laser flashes is becoming a reality. In Puerto Rico, the famed Arecibo telescope is getting a new feed that will speed up searches by seven times. And in California, the SETI Institute and Berkeley's Radio Astronomy Lab will soon be scanning the star-clotted realms of the inner Milky Way with the first-stage implementation of the Allen Telescope Array (ATA)
and will eventually boast 350 antennas, each 20 feet in diameter. This impressive antenna farm will be spread over about a half square-mile of terrain."
~fitzprrklpop~ople of Earth, can you hear us now?~fwopzzwwep~
Direct link to seti.org press release without all the crapola popups etc.
So do they expect to be able to see space battles between Klingons and Romulans or something?
None other than Paul Allen. Yep, of Microsoft fame. Boo, hiss, where are the groups of objectors now?
Not that I'm being a jerk about it, but it is only fair to note that without him, most of this would probably not be possible. Not only did he contribute millions to SETI, but also funded the Alien Telescope Array which the Slashdot blurb mentions.
A blog like any other.
Why not wait quantum computers to make this job? For the moment the distribued project should be only used to calculate things urgent to people, as the whole processing power we have now is a joke if we compare to nextgen ways to design CPUs. Research for health is IMHO a priority for what we can do at the moment on earth.
The all-sky optical SETI system at Harvard receives its funding from The Planetary Society and the Bosack-Kruger Charitable Foundation.
Well, Paul Allen funds a lot of good research.
I was part of Project Halo/Digital Aristotle, an AI project which aims to learn (and solve) conceptual problems in physics which was funded by Vulcan ventures.
In fact, Vulcan Capital funds a lot of really cool stuff.
In my opinion, Bill Gates and Paul Allen are doing the world a favour - they are businessmen who make money off one industry, but help in the progress of several others. When was the last time any of the CEOs of Walmart or Oil Magnates helped fund such things as research and the like?
And not to mention the fact that places like MSR do a lot of awesome research in and of themselves.
As far as I am concerned Paul Allen is the very best thing *ever* to come out of Microsoft.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
None other than Paul Allen. Yep, of Microsoft fame. Boo, hiss, where are the groups of objectors now?
Guess what... One may dislike what Microsoft does and whatever that guy is responsible for doing there, but still like what he's doing here. Why is that so hard to imagine?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Now we can detect new and improved aliens, not those scrappy ones who crash saucers in New Mexico, poke people in the ass for kicks, and gobble up Beagle Mars probes.
Table-ized A.I.
Are Americans, or most people in the world, "hungry and unsheltered" because of a lack of money? I don't think so. Politics, and other issues, are the major obstacles. SETI, and astronomy in general, is pretty cheap in the grand scheme of things. It's ridiculous to prioritize the problems of the nation, or the world, and then apply all resources to solving the first one, then the second one, ad infinitum. That's not a wise thing to do.
One of the things that makes human civilization great, in my opinion, is that we care about this sort of knowledge. We value it for it's own sake. There are ways to determine the nature of the universe and our place in it. A culture that fails to look past its immediate physical needs of food and shelter is a short-sighted one that isn't any greater than a troop of babboons.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
And what if they're just waiting for us to be able to deal with it.
Thus, I think the better question is not "Are we alone?" but rather "Do you REALLY think we'd be able to deal with it, right this minute, if we (on a mass scale) realized we weren't?" and the related but important "If 'they' were 'further along' than us, and not just microbes in wet sand, could we deal with that too?"
A while back I emailed some of the SETI founders about this and got back a "We have procedures in place for proper dissemination of the information if it is discovered", which says NOTHING about how we are prepared to handle the emotional/psychic impact, which cannot of course be ignored. Thus, I no longer support SETI, choosing to spend my CPU cycles on something more practical like Folding@home. Discovery that we are not alone is not "usual" news, and due to its uniqueness has a high unpredictability of mass emotional/psychic impact, and I don't believe it will be something that will be treated by publishing the results in Physical Review Letters, so to speak.
Two other quick things-
For a distantly plausible workaround to the speed-of-light problem/argument against intelligent life already being here, google Miguel Alcubierre.
One last tidbit. I read somewhere (take with a huge grain of salt of course) that "they" like our music and actually owe us a lot in royalties, and are holding onto this for now (and some other things) as a good-faith gift in the event of public contact. Wouldn't it be ironic, the RIAA being a major supporter of a public First Contact?
> as good as all their charitable things are, they can easily afford it,
> and more.
If it's my hard earned money, what I do with it is upto me. Nobody has an obligation to give away their money just because they can afford to, no matter what the voices in your head tell you.
> and it doesn't remove the fact they are fucking up
> the IT industry and now keeping society back
>years, maybe even decades.
Excuse me? That is *such* a blanket statement to make. But guess what? You said it yourself - IT industry. When you are in any industry, you're in the business of making money. Do not like their methods? Fight them on their turf but do not blame them for chasing profit.
You're an idiot if you think Microsoft hasn't contributed to technological progress in the IT industry. Perhaps you disagree with their methods, technology and ideas -- that does not mean they are wrong or that they are detrimental to progress.
In fact, I laud Microsoft because they have been one of the few people responsible for bringing computers to the masses. They have proven that software as an industry can sustain independently and have contributed a real lot to IT and computer science, but then you're probably too blind to see it.
Yes, they're a company that have had buggy softwares. Do you think building complex software is easy? It's a fine line between usability, security and stability and it's one that Microsoft has learnt to walk quite well. Funny, people still make fun of Microsoft products crashing but their products have become increasingly stable, reliable and secure over the years. Perfect? No. Better? Yes. Give credit where it is due.
Yes, they're guilty of a few questionable acts - but they are a business with an obligation to their share holders. You've apparently not stepped to the inside of a boardroom, so I'll not even bother telling you what or how hard business is.
And if you were a really genuine techie concerned about technology, you'd realize that progress is independent of who makes it -- it will ultimately happen no matter what. Not to mention that places like Microsoft Research quite possibly contribute much more to IT than you can ever possibly imagine.
> plus, true charity is anonymous.
Einstein, you would not know if it were anonymous.
> it's hardly altruistic (or anything remotely resembling it) when you give a
> small fraction of your wealth in exchage for having your name or
> company's name all over stuff. that's called "advertising" or "ego".
Funny, people have been doing this for ages - and yet when Bill Gates or Paul Allen does it, it's somehow wrong.
Heard of the Nobel Prize? Pulitzer Prize? Fields Medal? Guess who these are named after.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen are running a business in one industry and are using the profit they make from that to help make this world a better place. I somehow think fighting AIDS and famine is infinitely more important than writing software, but that's just me.
And I care two hoots on whether doing so boosts their ego or if they use their name -- they're helping science and society, and that is what matters.