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Is SETI Worth It?
njdube sent in this Space.com story about the money behind SETI that opens, "It's a risky long shot that burns up money and might never, ever pay off. So is searching for intelligent creatures on unseen worlds worth the candle? After all, aren't there better ways to use our monies and technical talents than trying to find something that's only posited to exist: sentient beings in the dark depths of space?"
SETI - The result of having failed to find intelligent life on Earth.
Isn't _______ (space program, particle physics, string theory, insert science program that isn't directly applicable to everyday life here) totally useless and a huge waste of money? This money could be better used elsewhere!
In fact I'd attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan to prove that it's worth it.
Three million dollars a year is a small price to pay for the chance at discovering another sentient race in the galaxy, even if it is a longshot. It is one cent per year per individual.
Yup, definitely worth it.
If you're willing to look at it as an investment of sorts, and that the potential "payout" is absolutely enormous, I'd say it's a fair deal. Not something at the top of the list to keep in a depression or anything, though.
News at 11. Who cares if some money is spent searching for intelligent life. We learned at least one major breakthrough by doing this that was already previously theorized that P2P Internet can be used like a supercomputer.
God spoke to me.
Couriosity is a good thing. Most investigations never lead to anytging, but those that do often pay off incredibly well. So this SETI stuff may or may not have results, but as long as it is basically free (or very low cost), it is certainly worth doing.
On the economic side, an answer is impossible. It is completely unclear what actually finding alien Signals could be worth. If it is just generic greetings, probably not much. But if it is, sort of, Open Source knowledge of things we do not know yet, it could be incredibly valuable.
I am for continuing it.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Is finding an extra-terrestrial intelligence worth it? That would only be the most significant event in the history of humanity. No SHIT it's worth it.
It's like those oil-funded economists who kvetch (pun intended!) about whether it's "economically worth it" to stop humanity's extinction from global warming.
Can I get a job asking dumb ass questions for $$$?
The press spends more money covering SETI than the scientists spend actually doing it.
Just because something involves "space" doesn't mean that it has a NASA-like budget.
Didn't you see First Contact? As soon as we find aliens, world peace occurs. Can't you please think of the children?
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Because while there is almost no chance of ever detecting E.T.'s version of I Love Lucy, there is that possibility. It may be a gigantic waste of money, but I'd rather have it go towards something like this than say building yet more nuclear weapons. Also they may find interesting non-sentient life related signals from stars that other scientists may miss. Many scientific discoveries come from happy accidents, so a SETI researcher discovering SOMETHING of value isn't exactly far-fetched...
Insert witty sig here.
If we get rid of SETI, how else will lazy movie writers introduce aliens?
Of course it's worth it. Just think of all that alien anime we're missing out on!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
We are sentient beings in the dark depths of space.
...that one seems a little more plausible, doesn't it?
The repaired question is: Does sentient life exist far from earth?
"Does SETI provide value?"
The money spent on it pays for scientists and new systems. The real question revolves around value for the money spent. If not SETI, then what else? I would expect that there lots of things of more immediate value and potential that could be studied.
That said, what's the value of finding that there really is someone else out there? I think that a very few of my tax dollars working to find out is something I'm happy with.
Yeah it's not practical, yeah it's expensive, but damn, if it pays off, it pays off big time. Besides, it's not like we're asking you to pay for it, SETI runs off private money.
Personally I think they'll have more of a chance in the fledgling field of optical seti, where they're looking for aliens pointing laser beams at us... yes really.
Yet another blogger begging for an audience.
How about we dedicate spare CPU cycles to cancer research (or some other worldwide disease like AIDS). Instead of finding life on distant planets, how about we fix life on ours.
Meh.
Is SETI worth it?
That single part question requires a multipart answer.
First, SETI is extremely worth it, without a doubt. It seeks to answer the biggest question in history, "Are we alone?" While SETI will never prove that ET life does NOT exist, it might prove that it does. That will be the largest discovery in the history of man... BY FAR!
However, that said, we could be talking about civilizations that are millions of years ahead of us. Think about that, one million years. How far have we come in a million years? Do you think that if primate-pre-man were looking for us a million years ago, he'd know to look for radio waves? Of course not! Hell, we didn't know about radio a mere 200 years ago. So, do you really think that a civilization that advanced uses radio? I'm going to guess that they don't. I'm sure they would have perfected something else by now. Something like quantum entanglement or something (has anyone clocked the speed on that?) that we would never think to look for. Well, not for another several hundred thousand years anyway.
So, I think SETI is wasting their time looking for radio waves. Not only is a long shot to find ET life, but multiply that by finding ET life that happened to be using radio at a time that matches how far they are away (if they are 1000 light years away, they would have had to be using radio 1000 years ago). If such a civilization is 950 years ahead of us, we still would not be able to detect them. (That's still a long time in technical evolutionary terms. Think of where we were around 1050!)
First I think that SETI should broaden the search. They should be the Search for Extra Terrestrial Life... or SETL (pronounced Settle... fitting isn't it?) I feel that SETI's money could be better spent looking for any life at all, not just intelligent life. Once that is found, branch out and look for the smart stuff. They could start by looking for planets that could support life, starting right here in our own solar system. I want to see a mission to Europa and Titan that look for signs of microbial life. Europa's ice is supposed to be churning. Could we just look for some that has been churned up to the surface? Why wait for a grand ice burrowing submarine mission that cuts through miles of ice and hopes to find water. Why not put the money toward some kind of mission to land there and look around. Move from there to try to bring back a sample. (Sorry to get OT, but that's just an example.) Yes, I know that SETI is not NASA, but some of that radio renting money could be spent on lobbying and public service campaigns that could do much more that trying to see if a star in Orion is listening to BobFM (more music, less talk!)
Well, that's my $0.02, since you asked and all.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Let's say we not only find intelligent life but that we can communicate with them and they have the answers to all our problems...
Would it be worth it then for the relatively small amount of resources we're putting into this now...
But don't answer just yet!
What if they they give us the ability to travel in space, thus increasing our resources greatly so we can solve even MORE problems we didn't know we had!?!
How much would you pay for that? Would that be worth all the effort and dreaming we do now?
Or will you take what's in the magic box?
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence? Worth it. Funding isn't binary (it isn't a choice between SETI and curing cancer, we can fund several things in differing amounts), obviously we will spread funding with some thought to how much funding each thing is worth. And finding extraterrestrial intelligence deserves a bit of money.
Now, pointing a radio telescope at the sky and listening is pretty much pointless. I can't imagine any advanced civilization continuing to broadcast radio waves in a strength we are capable of reading from the nearest star. Due to the inverse square law any really long distance communication will be directed to a pretty narrow angle. Any short distance communication wouldn't waste the power to transmit strongly enough for us to pick it up from across the galaxy. The chance of short-distance extraterrestrial communication happening within a lightyear or two of earth *or* a long-distance communication passing through earth's telescopes while we're listening... is frankly tiny.
So how to look, then? Well that's not my job. Look for stellar scale engineering or something, or wait for *them* to find *us.* And hope that any civilization advanced enough for starflight doesn't care for wars of aggression?
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
When did "monies" become a word? It is "money" people! Money is the plural and singular...
It depends upon your theory of HOW intelligent life develops. I, personally, believe in the Singularity and the law of accelerating returns. Any idiot can look at the overall rate of technological progress over the last 100 years (which is not nearly as fast as the progress in computers, but it still FAST), look at the century before that, and figure out that the rate of change is accelerating exponentially. It'll presumably continue until progress can't be made due to hard laws of physics...
A society that advanced won't need to use "radios" to communicate with other life forms...they'll be able to send ships out at 90% of the speed of light (VERY technically possible and even practical with technology in probably a few hundred years, or post Singularity) to visit other intelligences "in person".
Or better still, send wormhole mouths out at 99.99999% of the speed of light (maybe possible within the laws of physics : it all depends on whether "dark energy" can be generated) and establish instantaneous links with the rest of the universe.
If Christopher Columbus followed the same reasoning (don't look for something that might not exist), where would you live today? The most rewarding of all discoveries are found by exploring the unknown, with no guarantee of reward.
It depends upon your theory of HOW intelligent life develops. I, personally, believe in the Singularity and the law of accelerating returns. Any idiot can look at the overall rate of technological progress over the last 100 years (which is not nearly as fast as the progress in computers, but it still FAST), look at the century before that, and figure out that the rate of change is accelerating exponentially. It'll presumably continue until progress can't be made due to hard laws of physics...
A society that advanced won't need to use "radios" to communicate with other life forms...they'll be able to send ships out at 90% of the speed of light (VERY technically possible and even practical with technology in probably a few hundred years, or post Singularity) to visit other intelligences "in person".
Or better still, send wormhole mouths out at 99.99999% of the speed of light (maybe possible within the laws of physics : it all depends on whether "dark energy" can be generated) and establish instantaneous links with the rest of the universe.
But, getting to my main point : I believe that a reasonable person would conclude the odds vanishingly small (like 1 in 10^200 small) that there are intelligent life forms that we will be able to detect with SETI. Either they are farther away than the speed of light would allow access to or they are already here and hiding among us. (no, not x files style, presumably with nanotech they could be completely and totally undetectable, with atomic sized observation bots.)
Point is, I think SETI is a waste of money. I don't see how we would find anything.
The truth of the matter is that we have no serious SETI effort.
All current SETI activity is built on the assumption that someone is trying to talk to us. Our detection capability is pretty much limited to an alien civilization already knowing we exist and directing extremely powerful, focused broadcasts directly at Earth.
Basically, given our current SETI programs, we couldn't detect Earth's civilization even if we were in the next star system over. We leak a lot of signals, but over vast interstellar distances these signals are weak, can be lost in background noise, and would require a huge antenna or array of antennas to receive. In other words, the we depend on aliens having their own SETI that is vastly more advanced than our own.
A real SETI project would cost many orders of magnitude more, and would require radio telescopes many orders of magnitude more sensitive than we have now. We're talking something on the level of making a crater miles across and making it into a radio dish. Arecibo is puny in comparison to what we need.
Blanketing an area the size of Rhode Island with a dish array might also work (though it would have to be very, very precisely controlled).
Any serious SETI effort that hopes to find someone that doesn't know we're here already and wants to talk to us will cost many many billions of dollars.
A direct search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a crap-shoot. We don't know how probably the formation of life is, we don't know where to look for it, and we don't know how to look for it. Very basic answers have yet to be answered. How many planets are out there, and what are their properties? We have only been discovering extra-solar planets over the past decade (or so), the planets that we have been discovering have been very exotic (because of our detection methods), and we can only find them around relatively nearby stars (the stars tend to be smaller, thus dimmer, thus only easily detected if they are nearby). Once we have a decent sampling of planets and their bulk properties, we can start considering chemistry. Yeah, that's tedious and expensive research. But it is necessary. Imagine how hard it would have been to develop the theory of special relativity if we didn't develop the Newtonian model first (giving us the rough outline that Einstein would perfect). Maybe some brilliant mathematician would have eventually stumbled upon the mathematical models of general relativity, but it is highly unlikely or would have taken much longer.
The fact that SETI is voluntarily financed is a rather important. It means that there is no point to the article, because whoever wants to give to it will, and whoever doesn't won't, and no one else has the right to pronounce judgment on either choice. That won't prevent the busybodies of the world from spouting off with regard to how others spend their own money, of course. The rest of us should be mindful that the busybodies occasionally gain political clout, and become Nazis. There is a lot of that in this thread. To them I say: it isn't your money, and it therefore isn't any of your business.
That's what they said to Columbus.
There are soooo.... MANY other things we could could spend three million a year on.
And in fact WE DO!
HUNDREDS of Millions a year on Video Games, Movies, Sporting events
HUNDREDS of Millions a year on "Gourmet" Coffee.
Not to mention how much is spent on Drugs, Sex and Rock and Roll.
Instead of that we could be spending that on medical research, feeding the poor, funding education, etc...
BUT we don't. So, as long as we're "letting" truly HUGE amounts of money be spent by society on "mindless pursuits", why not let a small section of society spend a RELATIVELY SMALL amount of money on a totally useless, wasteful, studid, wonderful, amazing search for life on other planets.
So, unless and until the majority of society is willing to de-fund ALL the sports, entertainment, gourmet coffee, (keep inserting names of more "non-essentials" here) hands off SETI!
After all, aren't there better ways to use our monies and technical talents than trying to find something that's only posited to exist: sentient beings in the dark depths of space?"
Yes, we should instead use our monies and technical talents to engage in devotional activities that venerate something else that is only posited to exist: our magical sky grandpa. Then, we should use our monies and technical talents to build weapons to kill the people whose understanding of the magical sky grandpa differs in various insignificant ways from our own.
This reminds me of a running argument I have with my retired father. He complains about NASA being a waste of his tax dollars while he sits in front of a satelite TV. Refuses to see the irony.
The article is a nice attempt at arguing that 'investing in SETI' can prove to be useful 'down the road' by using some examples of how the curious and inquisitive minds of the past yielded immense discoveries and scientific progress that benefit us all, but it's akin to comparing apples to oranges.
The pragmatist in me says that SETI is a curious way for a few people to spend their time looking for signs of life 'somewhere out there' in the Universe, but it has no practical use.
I mean, honestly, let's assume that tomorrow, we capture a signal from an alien civilization. Finally, the answer to 'Are we alone in the Universe?' is answered, great. Then what? Chances are that the transmission is (by the time we received it) hundreds or thousands of years old. During that time, the civilization that sent it could have vanished for a number of reasons, of which we'd have no clue about.
If anything, such a discovery would only lead to more problems, since in one single swoop, a number of major religious beliefs would be shattered, therefore leaving a bunch of pissed-off fundamentalists in a tizzy. The best and brightest would be infinitely pleased with such a discovery, but unfortunately, they're a nearly insignificant minority compared to the idiot masses.
The bottom line is that if the SETI folks want to spend their time listening to space static or looking up at the stars, let them. It's their project, and if they can find the people to fund them, more power to them. If someday they find messages from 'little green/alien men', great. I'd be willing to wager that none of us will be around to congratulate them.
"We'll need 2000 crickets, 4 cans of Easy Cheese, and the fluid from 18 glowsticks for this plan to work...." - ph0n1c
It hasn't found ET but surely there are there other interesting astronomical things that are spotted as it scans the skies?
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
One serious problem with SETI is that it looks only for obsolete forms of modulation. Almost all the SETI efforts are looking for "carriers", signals that are mostly wasted energy. AM and FM broadcast radio, and analog TV, have strong carriers. Almost nothing else does any more. There are more efficient ways to synch up the receiver. The strong-carrier systems are being phased out. In a few decades, nobody on Earth will be sending out strong carriers.
SETI is thus looking for civilizations in their first century of radio. The odds of finding an intelligent signal with current approaches is low.
The problem with looking for complex signals, like digital TV, is that they look like noise. Imagine some alien civilization receiving a DTV signal. It's quite possible that some of a a DTV signal might make it to a nearby star; terrestrial DTV is broadcast with megawatt power. But it will probably get there below the noise threshold. You can find a dumb carrier well below the noise threshold, because it's so repetitive. You may not be able to read the modulated information, but you can tell there's a carrier. But an encoded digital signal below the noise threshold just looks like noise.
There are digital signals designed for reception below the noise threshold; GPS is encoded for that. But the data rate is low and the redundancy is high. That's not true of DTV.
One can imagine an alien civilization finally figuring out they're getting something from Earth, building a big receiving antenna in their outer system to get a clean signal, and then trying to figure out how to decompress the thing. At least they don't have to crack DRM encryption first.
Look at all the money wasted on religion. The pursuit of non-existent super beings makes SETI pale into insignificance. Why has no-one brought a class action lawsuit against churches for defrauding their members?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
'Dumbass'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Dunham#Walter
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
See? When you own a website -- you can flamebait and troll as much as you want!
I suggest you read Slashdot
One thing not mentioned at all in the article is that not much money is spent on SETI. The budget is in millions of dollars, for some reason people have a skewed view, thinking that SETI is costing billions of dollars. SETI does a lot with very little. Also, the new Allen Telescope Array is multi-purpose. It will be used for science as well as searching for ET.
I think one reader asked the question why things which don't directly impact society at all are funded. Science in its purest form is the search for truth. The quest for knowledge has been a constant in our culture for thousands of years. While the effect on everyday life is sometimes imperceptible, in the long term science has changed our entire world view several times over.
I'm in favor for continuing SETI. However, I don't see much chance for success.
Why? Because if there are intelligent beings out there, it's hard to understand why they would, on the one hand, communicate by radio, and on the other hand not have colonized the entire galaxy by now.
Logical arguements have almost no effect on how money is distributed: federal money, internal funds in a company, or personal wealth spread broadly across society.
It's the same "dollar and a dream" theory that people apply to the lotto. Is the money worth the statistically insignificant chance of a massive jackpot? you decide!
I'm depressed that nobody is challenging the paradigm that "we" should decide whether SETI or anything else for that matter is "worthwhile". The mere effort presumes the existence of one true value system that trumps all others. Jihad, anybody?
How about Bob and Carol spend their money on SETI, Ted spends his on protein folding, and Alice spends hers on beer? Because it's their money and their choice.
"Should" expresses a moral judgement. When collectivists use it they are advocating, in the end, unlimited social violence against those who will not comply. Pol Pot wan't bugfuck crazy, he was just consistent.
--phunctor
Everyone hypes the vast number of cycles that the SETI at home project has realized, but what is the wattage that those cycles used to do all that computation. Sure maybe they would have been on anyway, but as most people with laptops can attest to power consumption varies with activity so all that SETI at home work has a had a real energy cost.
I point this out not because I'm any sort of super green. but because many of the advocates of SETI are and I like pointing out things like this to people like that.
In a word, yes.
Man has always dreamt of hawt alien sex, and how else will we ever find spacegoats if not through SETI?
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
if you don't look for it.
qz
Seti is important because it showed what can be done with distributed computing. However, like has been stated before in this thread, it is looking for very old means of communicating. I think folding@home is a better use of your computer cpu cycles.
"Victory can be anticipated, but not assured" - Sun Tzu
Isn't _______ (designer clothes, ring tones, dry cleaning, nail salons, drm music, starbucks coffee, professional sports, or anything else I personally have no interest in) totally useless and a huge waste of money?
I am sure everyone can fill out their own list of "useless".
But we are a thousand times better off letting people freely waste their resources than to have someone who thinks they know better tell us what to spend our money on.
Personally, I like the fact that we have an economy that can employ a guy at a car wash, and a scientist working on SETI.
Generally the people who bitch about wasted money are the same ones who would love to take your money and redistribute it for you.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I think you could basically ask the same question to any kind of research for which you do not know the results or when/if you are going to get the desired results (pretty much any research no?). The question is plainly stupid. It is not worth now because there have not been any [desired] results, but if there is ever a [desired] result, it will be worth any amount of money and time spent.
People need to understand that science (research) is not engineering where you want to develop certain thing and allocate a specific amount of money and time to do it. With research you might run out of resources and not find the answer or find it using less resources than you planned. Or better yet, finding other unexpected results (like penicillin).
As Isaac Asimov put it: The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
they will lose the "intelligent" part of their name if they let us find them.
Hope is the currency of fools
Lets think about this for a moment. Sure...any rational person is likely to agree that, given the size of the universe, our own existence is proof enough that sentient life probably exists elsewhere. But really...until we learn to transfer communications at speeds faster than light (let's not worry about travel yet), what's the point? Yay...we find out there are aliens somewhere. What meaningful interaction can we possible have with another species that resides on a rock located some hundreds or thousands of light years away? This also assumes they'd notice us too, and would return communication. If not, then we're going to have to get some really wicked telescopes to learn more about them - or hopefully learn warp speed to pay them a visit. So...back to reality, and the small chance we find ET somewhere. My question is: Would simple confirmation of the existence of ET (and the likelihood of gaining nothing more than that tidbit of knowledge) really be worth the money/resources expended?
I see you don't understand how government funding works. It isn't just private entities that send money to SETI, the US Government has a stake in it as well. That means Bob, Carol, Ted, Alice, AND Suzy all help to pay for SETI just to see if we can find an intergalactic version of Howard Stern.
I love my sig.
they should instead spend it on finding evidence of intelligent design in DNA (*ducks*)
Table-ized A.I.
I'd feel very sad if we all just chose which things to do based on cost vs. likelyhood of success.
Doesn't just the magic of what SETI s doing interest you enough?
I don't mind the improbability of finding aliens this way even half as much as the disappointing loss of faith in the human spirit if the SETI project just got rationalised away by some beancounter.
Isn't trying to find things we think might be out there what science is all about? Is looking for intelligent life in space a bigger waste of money than finding new suns, planets, black holes, galaxies etc? Yes, if we should happen to find little green men, we most likely won't be able to communicate but if we find a new planet, we're also most likely not able to get there, so where's the point?
If one questions SETI as such, one must question science in general too. Without science, we wouldn't be posting here. We wouldn't have to worry about SETI cos there would bei neither SETI nor Computers nor radio telescopes. We'd still live in caves and freeze our bums off eating plants and berries, grunting along.
What would make more sense to me was if SETI was doing concrete earth based research first. Namely how about
analysing common earth based signals e.g. cell phone signals. How would you go about writing an algorithm to
search within a data stream for intelligent signals (language) then how would you extract those signals into
meaning (translation).
Essentially I think we should be using the many languages/signals that exist on earth to perform research, this
would be of great use in the here and now; while learning a lot that would apply upon detecting
a signal. Research in this area could impact information theory, cryptography, compression etc.
Also as other posters have pointed out how about studying exotic communication ideas (faster than light
communication) equally fanciful but potentially very useful in the here and now. When we better understand
both how to send fast signals and what constitutes an intelligent signal... then we'll be in a much better
place to actually look for them and we'll have done some useful research in the meantime.
You can apply exactly the same logic to religion. There is zero evidence to support the hypothesis that there is an invisible man living in the sky who created everything, yet religion marches onward as if "God" or "Allah" or "Jahweh" or whatever existed. No amount of lack of evidence will ever convince them to stop believing there is such a magical person, and the only reason they don't apply technology to look for him is that they've cleverly made it unnecessary by definition.
The construction of silly, unfalsifiable hypotheses like this is really limited only by the imagination. For example, maybe humans are the genetic product of UFO aliens who interbred long ago with chimpanzees while they were here on a visit and got horny. Nobody's ever found any crashed UFOs to support the notion, but, hey, imagine what a splash it would make if one were found! We should be spending millions of dollars running around digging in the dirt looking for crashed UFO relics!
Same difference, get it?
I used to be a supporter of SETI until I realised how much power it consumes.....nothing to do with money, it's all about the environment. It's ironic that we're burning huge amounts of power to look for something which doesn't really have a lot of meaning. Some people believe that finding aliens will totally change religion....maybe it won't, religion has a way of adapting quite well to change. But one thing is for sure....we're adding thousands or millions of tons of emissions to the atmosphere, choking ourselves to do this. An idle PC (P4) consumes around 150Watts (mine does)....running SETI pushes this to 225Watts - so an extra light bulb really. It also encourages us to keep our PC's on for longer so that Johnny's score can be higher than Paul's. But assuming that the PC is on for 12 hours a day, that extra light bulb is a kwh.....in the US that is about 0.6 to 0.7kg of emissions, and in Australia it's much higher at 1kg. OK, a Core2 PC might be idle at 90Watts, but at full bore on SETI it still goes up to around 160Watt, and this is without running the graphical screensaver part too, which will push the power up even more to draw some lines on the screen by the GPU. It's pointless I think. If you want to do this, how about swinging over to one of the more more useful projects so at least it wont be useless.
If SETI is such a long shot that no one thinks will yield any results, what is the risk? Wasting money? So? Who cares if some grad students, eccentrics, and maybe some foundations waste their money? That wouldn't be the first time, that's for sure. Calling it risky at the same time you claim it won't produce any results is sort of a circular argument, isn't it? kisses, jimbo
Let me put it like this: SETI costs us, at most, $5,000,000 a year to fund. The war against Boogiemen, in Iraq alone, is costing us ~$116,750,000,000 a year to fund. SETI's lifetime cost thus far has been 115,000,000 (assuming 5million/year. 5mil is the most it costs per year, 4 million the least) Mathtime! 115,000,000 / 116,750,000,000 = 0.000985010707 Yes, the lifetime cost of SETI has been but 0.000985010707% of the cost of ONE YEAR in Iraq. .001% of the cost of one year of a bullshit war to fund a search for proof that we're not alone in the universe?
Hell yes.
Hell
Yes
Hell
Fucking
Yes
Sources:
http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_faq.html
http://www.nationalpriorities.org/Cost-of-War/Cost-of-War-3.html
Let me put it like this:
.001% of the cost of one year of a bullshit war to fund a search for proof that we're not alone in the universe?
SETI costs us, at most, $5,000,000 a year to fund.
The war against Boogiemen, in Iraq alone, is costing us ~$116,750,000,000 a year to fund.
SETI's lifetime cost thus far has been 115,000,000 (assuming 5million/year. 5mil is the most it costs per year, 4 million the least)
Mathtime! 115,000,000 / 116,750,000,000 = 0.000985010707
Yes, the lifetime cost of SETI has been but 0.000985010707% of the cost of ONE YEAR in Iraq.
Hell yes.
Hell
Yes
Hell
Fucking
Yes
Sources:
http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_faq.html
http://www.nationalpriorities.org/Cost-of-War/Cost-of-War-3.html
Weather satellites. You know, the ones that can give you many days' advance warning of hurricanes, so that the death count is in the tens instead of the thousands.
Are you adequate?
I apologize if I'm repeating already mentioned ideas. Alcohol makes for poor but abundant insight, redundancy and high mod points on Slashdot, so I'll try.
(ehem) You know, we're still figuring out the allocation of resources to practical matters on Earth these days. I'm no mathematician, but what serious probable difference does it make if we continue the SETI program now or in a hundred years when humanity will either have figured itself out or be extinct?
Property is theft.
That cracked me up
They should have beta-tested it first on Myspace.
And because Bob, Carol, et al are part of this society too, they don't get to directly choose where their tax money goes. That would be direct democracy -- but by dollars. So, since we elect representatives, and tell them to go vote for what they like, we can't really do much when a majority of them decide that SETI is important, or at least not hurtful enough to warrant it being denied funding. Because who is to say what parts of science are useless? At least you can point to the idea of SETI finding a way for people to donate a portion of the computing power of their computers to a single program, a model subsequently taken up by Folding@Home and others. Its just like how particle accelerators don't produce much direct science, and yet encourage research in superconductors. Think of it this way: the more we push the limits of humans outwards, to knowledge or science or outer space, the less we push on each other (ie war, genocide, crime).
Not that SETI doesn't seem like a waste of time. You'd figure we'd have found something by now. Maybe we are first. Maybe everyone is evolving at just about the same time. Hell, if background radiation is so uniform, perhaps the creation of life is too.
Let the aliens do the searching. They're probably better at it...
Although, I do recommend listening to Alpha Centauri for any plans to build an intergalactic bypass through our system.
There is a drastic difference between the idle and fully-loaded power consumption of computers these days, on the order of 2X. I think this is the biggest problem with SETI. Rather than looking for life in space, let's try to slow down the decay of our own planet.
SETI isn't worth it because the government hiding from the public the fact that they already know aliens exist. The world will never know that we are in contact with aliens because it would cause so many problems in society. SETI is an expensive cover up!
As it has in the past while, will you blame that on SUV's again?
How about when it goes red giant, will you blame the CO2 levels again?
Sheesh, and you people claim that Muslim and Christian Fundamentalists are bad, but Global Warming Fanatics are no better. All a bunch of easily panicked herd animals.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
Wow, I feel qualified to answer this one without even reading TFA summary (TFAS):
No. No it is not.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
Sentience Quotient, Wikipedia link.
If we have trouble "talking" to animals (which are close to use in Sentience Quotient values) or plants (a bit further out) and making them comprehend us, think of how much trouble aliens would have "talking" to us.
SETI - The result of having failed to find intelligent life on Earth.
In the words of Monty Python:
There is no such thing as good luck. There is only misfortune and its occasional absence.
Making a moral judgment about how someone spends money is perfectly fine. We make moral judgments about government spending all the time.
Nobody here or anywhere else has advocated the use of force, or anything else, to STOP someone from doing so. If something is a horrible waste, publicly shaming them usually works just fine, and if not, oh well, move on to the next one.
This "Jihad" you speak of is entirely in your own head.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
First, the lead-in posted to the article hear is very misleading.
Second, some people seem to be under some misperceptions, and haven't taken the time to read the article itself. SETI doesn't get money from the government. Reading the article actually explains that very early on.
Old convention is, advanced species would be visiting for a reason, not simply to visit. The two major lines of reasoning is: 1 - scientific exploration/knowledge; or, 2 - colonization/expansion. So, should we be concerned? Sure, and at the same time realize that if first contact is fucked up, it's probably going to be because of our fears and prejudices.
As has been said.. We don't have to be so concerned about finding little green men; we need to be concerned with finding the large green motherfuckers.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
So they're not really looking for that. The current phase could well be described as learning how to look and it's certainly interesting for more reasons that just cosmology.
It's not completely hopeless, however. They do have equipment sensitive enough to detect a highly directional, very high power signal directed at us by some other civilization. A power level and directionality that would still be difficult for us, at our currently level of power consumption, to produce. But if an ET civilization were actively sending a beacon to candidate stars as part of their SETI program, we could detect that.
Obviously, if the number of ET civilizations is small, the number of them with sufficiently high energy-use and inclination to send invitations is even smaller. But if it's non-zero, it'd be of monumental importance.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
On the other hand, there are people like me who believe that SETI isn't really looking for alien life, but is really an early-warning system for a surprise attack from other countries. They tell us they're looking for aliens so we won't know what they're really looking for.
Oh, spending money to kill those that disagree with us is SO much more worthwhile than looking for new intelligent species. Let's take the money that could, even if the chance is slim, prove to be the largest discovery of the age, and make a few more white phosphorous grenades, or spend it on more torture equipment. Maybe if we're lucky, we'll find a new species that sees Republicans as 'the other white meat'. Don't bother arguing the point, everyone's heard the asinine rhetoric over and over, and to quote Bill Hicks, 'every word that comes out of your mouth. . . is like a turd falling into my drink.'
Methinks that SETI will not find anything using the communications channel they're using. They need to take a step back and rigorously investigate the possibility that gravity waves are not very, very fast -- as if it is so, *that's* where all the chatter will be.
Flame away, but it would be the intelligent and responsible thing to do. When something does not work, it is irrational to keep on doing it the same way without changing anything. None of the statistics about how likely it is for us to communicate with somebody changes that. People need to consider the possibility that the current paradigms possibly could be wrong in some respects. Rigor has not exactly been applied to many of the consenuses that exist in astrophysics today. There is ample evidence to point to multiple cosmologies and astrophysical theories by now. If you do not realize this, then it is because you have been refusing to read about it.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
God: An invisible friend for grown-ups.
If you RTFA the Government donation "was" prior to 1993 was approx 3 cents for every person in the US. After 1993 Government spending on SETI is "zero", so all monies donated to SETI is by private individuals. There are many ways of contributing, one would be to donate money, the other donate a portion of your PC clock cycles and therefore electricity which someone will have to pay for eventually. In some way this is like "Folding at Home" except there are more perceived tangible results to be had but you still have to make a decision to provide the service, however like SETI no one forces you. Basically it is your choice your money and the Government is not involved.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
The resources of our solar system are up for grabs. Our fledgling civilization which has not yet reached the moon can already detect water on planets around other stars. It seems likely that any civilization capable of interstellar travel is much more skilled at detecting resources across these distances. They will need this information to figure out where to go and what to expect when they get there. If they want our resources, they are coming here regardless of whether we send out a signal.
Lots of times the "waste" of money in research/discovery/exploring new things payed off big time. Maybe in that time it looked something crazy to do or to try, but a lot of them opened a whole new world.
Now, what could that bring back? Confirmation that there is another (?) inteligent life out there? Will be nice, will be a revolution, but is more a confirmation that statistics work than anything else. Trade/Chat/Invasion? Time and space conspires a bit against that, at least if universe rules are as we think they are. If the next advanced enough civilization is at, lets say, 50 light years from here, that kind of issues would take too much time to be practical. But if what we get from the transmission is some sort of "textbook" (galactic encyclopedia, or the diagram of a ftl ship, something that teaches us something new or corrected) then no matter how much we invested. we probably got far more.
And if someone thinks that the odds of that are too low, a good example of wasting money with extremely low odds of getting something back is called Lotto, and a lot of people think that is good to play it and wastes on it yearly more than what did the SETI project in its entire life probably, so why not bet on something that will change all humanity instead?
Tell the government your searching for proof of global warming on another planet caused by another species burning of carbon fuels then sit back and watch the money flow in.
Could some of the algorithms used to analyze frequencies/doppler shift etc. be applied in other applications? SETI was also the first distributed computing effort of its kind. It also provided the groundwork for many other distributed computing projects that followed, and if nothing else was a cool idea for a screen saver.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
We know 100%, dead certain that there are "sentient beings in the dark depths of space". We are living proof.
The job of Seti is to perhaps start answering the question "How many other civilizations are out there?".
I recall it was James Burke in his television series "Connections" that stated, roughly, that over the same timeframe American women spent as much money on cosmetics as NASA spent on the Apollo program.
I don't, not even for a moment, question the spending of money on Seti and similar projects when the entire annual budget for the a project is only about $14 million. The US needs to stop spending so much money on the military/police establishments and start spending more on science, education and arts.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
The SETI program probably costs less than the harm done to the world economy by people reading slashdot every morning.
No sig today...
that's the more fundamental question.
SETI is not taxpayer funded, it's funded by donations. If you don't want to donate don't. If you want to donate, please do. (See link below)
Bitching about SETI seems to be the new Slashdot hobby. If you just want to bitch, then bitch about something that costs real money and returns nothing. Like, for example, the Iraq war. One week in Iraq costs more than all of the money ever spent on SETI. Feel like you're getting your money's worth?
For that matter the final two seasons of Frasier cost more than the Allen Telescope Array has. Do you think that was a bargain? Maybe that money should have got to medical research...
Support SETI@home
If there is no return then Business will say yes. But the journey to find the answers gives us the ability to add to the fabric of humanity as well as getting to the answer so I guess my answer is, research without end is worth it if it causes others to join the search and contribute to the community, regardless if the goal is reachable or not!
http://www.gibby.net.au
http://data.tumblr.com/zjkgd28711jx576l3otqxduY_500.gif
I've always prefered a command line interface. GUIs are such a cursory way to interact with a computer.
The SETI at BOINC project is IMHO waste of time. The data received from Arecibo are in a very wide bandwidth and with very fine frequency resolution, but the sampling period is too small, about 1s. When you take a Bach's 9th simphony with the crystal clear sound and resample it at 1s rate, what you get is pure noise. Nothing else. And that's what Arecibo is receiving, a noise.
It's worth it. That's all there is to it -- it's just one of those basic value: love is good, hate is bad, finding aliens is good, not looking is bad. End of story.
Aliens rule!!
what should we do if we actually did find life out there? And the sensible answer is: hide. Seriously, the chance that contact with space aliens will bring us benifits is tiny. If they have the ability to visit us, then the far more likely scenario is that they will exploit/conquer us
If the idea of increasing fuel efficiency and reducing environmental impact brings about wild speculation of socialist, new-world-order plots, what chance do we have of convincing anybody to reduce EM emissions to avoid space aliens?
At least, unless we find some.
Tweet, tweet.
SETI is looking for a signal from an advanced civilization that is deliberately using archaic methods to transmit. What I mean is that they're looking for a beacon signal that's designed to be easy to interpret, and that's transmitted at an extremely high power level.
On a practical level, that's the best they can do. Using the best receivers that we currently have, it'd just barely be possible to detect a megawatt-level signal from a few light years away, if it was aimed right at us. Detecting the equivalent of leakage from a TV transmission is a complete fantasy. Unless there's someone out there that's really desperate to be heard, we'll never find them.
And of course, we're not about to start a program of sending similar signals to all the nearest stars - that'd take real money. If we detect a signal, then we might respond back.
Unfortunately, the same argument holds in the other direction, too. Any alien civilizations out there would be foolish to waste the resources to send a signal we could detect, before they were sure we were there to hear it. When I think about SETI, I sometimes imagine thousands of intelligent species out there, all monitoring their antenna arrays, waiting for a signal that none of them have the funding to send...
SETI did not proof it is worthwhile, but
no religion in the world proofed that it is worth it
(with the exception of non-religious scientologists
as their Thetans experience the profits here)
I think that, Giant Telescopes by Patrick McCray presents a pretty cynical but insightful view of the program. One of the best things about SETI, it allows researchers to work with a bare minimum of overhead. University researchers sometimes ask SETI to maintain their grants so that the school will not skim funds off of the top.
Don't you worry about _______, let me worry about _______.
If the project gets unplugged the government will reinvest the money in...
... so even if SETI is no success at the moment I think were all better off keeping the money where it is or do you honestly believe option c) is realistic?
a) The war in Iraq
b) Tax cut's for the filthy rich
c) Something useful, like public health care or education
I would hope that a civilization that is able to travel faster than light, that is possibly thousands to millions of years ahead of us, has grown beyond the need to eat other living things.
More optimistically, I am hoping they have grown feeble of mind through centuries of dependence on super-sophisticated technologies. As it happens, some of them begin searching for their creator(s) and come across Earth. We play a gambit where we tell them we are even more sophisticated and evolved than they are and take credit for creating THEM in the first place. At which point, we demand oral from their entire population. Oh, and they have like three, soft, mouths.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
This topic was covered on Logically Critical http://www.logicallycritical.net/ like, ages ago.
NEXT!
"After all, aren't there better ways to use our monies and technical talents than trying to find something that's only posited to exist: sentient beings in the dark depths of space?"
After all, aren't there better ways to use our monies and technical talents than trying to find something that's only posited to exist: America, nuclear power, antibiotics, a cure for cancer, higher-yield crops, more efficient water distillation, more efficient solar power, military intelligence... the list goes on and on.
In case you're still in doubt, the answer is: NO.
Actually, when you come to think of it, it's usually fairly dumb to waste much money trying to find something that is already well known.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
of the aliens. I'm more worried about what'll happen here when the announcement we've made contact goes out.
We'll have people preparing for armageddon and hiding in holes in the gorund, religions declaring crusades, others declaring loyalty to our masters beyond the stars etc.
FFS just look at the reasons we're able to kick off with each other over at the moment. Can't we just wait a little while to sort ourselves out before we go searching for 'interesting times'?
"burn money"???
That would imply the money disappears. It doesn't.
You've obviously have never had gator tail or wild boar, if you have it was prepared badly.
FalconShould there be a Law?
What fool would be so churlish as to suggest that we should only search for things that we know we can find.
Since powered flight was known to be impossible, then George and Orville should have clearly not have wasted their time.
Since man could not breath and would suffocate if he travelled faster than a horse could run, clearly Stephenson should have stuck to pumping water out of mines, and not wasted time on the Rocket.
Think of the number of "impossible" things that have beome part of our every day lives. - Anyone remember when they said 100 Mhz was the physical limit for CPUs ? (Think i486) Clearly any further research was inane and foolish.
One of the most defining aspects of Man is his Curiosity. Combine that with a refusal to believe that things are impossible, and you end up with thousands of crackpots, and a handful of Geniuses.
If we stop trying simply because someone else tells us "it can't be done" we may as well sleep out the remainder of our lives.
http://davesboat.blogspot.com/
I think SETI is successful for having mapped all the geostationary satellites.
This includes of course all secret spying satellites, which may prove useful for the NSA.
Besides that, it has shown the ability to deploy very large distributed projects.
As a distributed project leader, SETI has allowed to setup a nice platform called BOINC, which is helping a lot of smaller projects, which would not been able to have computing power without this infrastructure...
It's a risky long shot that burns up money and might never, ever pay off
Risky? What risk? There can be just about two outcomes: we find proof of intelligent life or we don't. Which one is the risky one?
Apart from that, isn't that characteristic of all pioneering efforts - that it costs you something and may never pay off? And, correct me if I am wrong, but isn't pioneering what Americans pride themselves of? Or are you guys only bean-counters nowadays?
We always hear this argument 'money that could be better spent on solving so-and-so problem' - well, even if we didn't spend the money on SETI or other basic research, it wouldn't go to getting rid of poverty, disease or hunger; or protecting the environment or any of the other huge problems we are facing in the world today (and even more tomorrow). Because, in order to solve these problems, the world needs leaders with the will to do it and to stay the course even when it turns out to be less than popular. If we had the will to do so, we could solve all the problems in the world more or less today - we really could, but we don't, and what a bloody shame that is. In the meantime, why not SETI or any of the other basic research projects?
Plants can also be beneficial for each other. For instance aphids are insects that love to feast on roses along with some food crops, however strawberries and a few other plants repel aphids away. Here are some more examples of plant combinations.
FalconShould there be a Law?
But more to the point, what makes you think aliens wouldn't want what we have. we have asian pron all over the interweb, what intelligent species can resist that?
So, Asians will be the only ones not eaten?
FalconShould there be a Law?
"NO SHIT, SHERLOCK!"
depends on whether you want to find them before they find us.
expandfairuse.org
It isn't just private entities that send money to SETI, the US Government has a stake in it as well.
TFA said congress pulled the plug on funding SETI in 1993. Maybe you missed it though, I sometimes do this.
FalconShould there be a Law?
There is no need to be hasty, SETI will find life by the time Duke Nukem Forever comes out !
The way SETI works is it scans random noise for non-random data.
But surely a race advanced enough to create transmissions that can reach us from across the galaxy would have discovered compression by now.
Compressed data is pretty indistinguishable from random noise.
So it was probably a waste of time.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
What makes this different than anything else the government/private sector does that's not worth the time or money? For example, we loose a couple billion dollars a year to illegal immigrants by either Americans loosing work or them sending their moneys earned here over seas to their home countries. We could rid ourselves of the illegal immigrants over the course of 5 or 6 years for a cost of only 500-600 million a year and in turn save billions a year. And that of all things isn't even up for discussion. Illegal immigrants have given us no beneficially gain to society and only cause us as a nation more problems and costs us way to much money for absolutely nothing in return other than to those people who hire them. In my opinion , at least SETI has the possibility for eventual discovery, and also for greatness. People should stop trying to impair ideas and technology that could eventually be beneficial to the human race, and maybe should start focusing on the problems that have no monetary/technological/cultural gains for society, such as getting rid of the illegal immigrants that cost us money every year and fill up our jail cells. The chances of finding life are indeed wishful thinking at best but it is out there. The universe is to big to be able to find something over night, with hundreds of possible galaxy's, thousands of suns, and millions of planets, if theres not someone else out there, I feel it would be a complete waste of space. But on the other hand we will never know if we don't try to find them. On a more positive note, maybe they would be willing to trade cheap labor for advanced technology.:)
For about 4 million dollars per year, you've got top people doing amazing work with tangible benefits. Tangible you say? How about developing the distributed computing technology underlying seti@home? How about paying for use of assets that might otherwise go unused? How about trying to solve one of the most fundamental questions of the universe? The feds spend $4 million every day on stuff that's WAY less useful. If you're looking for waste, the audit would probably cost more than their annual budget.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
GREETINGS HONOURED LIFE FORM FRIEND
MY NAME IS GENERAL XWIGGHURRGRRGHHHUL OJHWIXHUURGGH OF THE STAR SYSTEM KLUVUUU 419. I BEG YOU FORGIVE MY UNINTRODUCED CONTACT BUT I AM SEARCHING A TRUSTWORTHY ASSOCIATE SPECIES FOR THE TRANSFER OF 42,000,000,000 GALACTIC DOLLARS...
Run SETI - Keep the dream alive :) //T
what's the point of ANYTHING. I mean, on average, we've only got a million years alive as a species, humans will have done nothing significant in the history of the earth. The average length of a human ancestry is (IIRC) 5 generations or about 150 years, so investing in your children's future is futile. And when the universe dies the heat death or big crunch, all we may have done will mean nothing.
So what's the point of ANYTHING?
You say it's a long shot, but what if you're wrong? Or maybe it is a long shot, but it's still a possibility. If we're not listening, we won't ever hear anything. If there's anyone else out there, I want to hear them, even at the risk that there isn't anyone else and SETI is just a big waste of money.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
If there are space aliens, they will be so unlike us that we won't be able to communicate.
They will have an alien physiology, that means two things, our microbes won't save us, ala H.G. Wells, and we'll probably be poisonous to them, ala "To Serve Man." If they are biologically similar to us, (very unlikely) they'll see us as food, because we see all biologically similar species as food, some people even go as close as monkeys. If they are similar enough to us to be able to eat us, they will.
If they come here, they'll just come to conquer us. As part mohawk, I think i can say that with confidence.
Unless far out ideas like warp drive or stable worm holes are more than just science fiction fodder, there is no way they can get here, we could get there, or that any practical communication could take place.
So, without visitation or communication, or any real probability of deciphering alien communications we may find, we will never be able to prove that it is "alien" communications instead of some other form of natural radio source.
So, SETI? Sure, if you have time to waste, it means nothing. Like going to church or reading the horoscope. It passes the time and keeps you believing in some higher power. Good luck with that.
Bush would think something along the lines of " if we don't go looking for weapon of mass destruction in Iraq, we can never prove they never had any to begin with!".
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
The most profound question you can ask in science, philosophy and religion is the same: "Are we alone?"
To hell with the Luddites and to hell with the bean counters. They suck up all the benefits of science and technology without having the slightest clue about it. And they have the audacity to claim a voice in where and how research should be conducted. Screw 'em!
If we can't spare a few bucks looking for an answer that would truly change everything about how we look at the stars, we should go back to living in caves and dying of old age at 35.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Knowing that there's intelligent life in the Universe would be a seriously big deal.
Being able to LEARN something from that intelligence would be an even bigger deal.
Giving up before we've found such life, especially considering the minuscule investment required, is chickenshit.
Finally, giving up is stupid. Suppose they find us first?
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
The ideology behind SETI is great, but they're listening on a frequency that is restricted for us (an intelligent species) to broadcast on. What makes us think that some other intelligent species isn't doing the same thing. Listening on a frequency that should be "so obvious" to broadcast on, yet they themselves aren't broadcasting on it! Furthermore, the odds of any intelligent lifeforms using RF communications and we manage to detect it within the ~30 year window that we have been listening is simply outrageous. A project like this needs to go on for hundreds if not thousands of years just to have a decent sample size. Don't expect SETI to find anyone out there ever in our lifetimes. It's a nice thought, but probably futile.
Sorry to rain some reality on your hopeful dreams, but an alien civilization that altruistic wouldn't even make it out of the stone age.
We already have (or had) a group like that on Earth. They did everything together, had peaceful resolution mechanisms for conflict, helped each other and learned early how to control their population growth without institutionalized murder (a.k.a., war.) It's the Bushmen. Yeah, they never made it out of stone age on their own.
If you look at the history of humanity, all progress was made (A) in the name of greed, and (B) by those which, partially because of A, could afford the cost and manpower to invest in new stuff.
You know the golden age of Athens in ancient times? Athens had managed to gradually move its function from merely the head of a defensive coalition of equal states against Persia, to being the master of those states and fleecing them in wholesale. Those states were moved from bearing an equal share of the military burden (at their choice whether in troops or money), to just having to pay heavy taxes to Athens. And instead of paying for defense against the Persians, it eventually moved to being just a protection racket: pay up or _we_ will attack you. They did it quite a few times too.
All those fabulous temples and monuments and the thousands of people with nothing better to do than play armchair-philosopher, those were paid with the money they levied in taxes from their "allies."
Or look at the middle ages. We already had a shiny-happy community kind of village, where everyone gets enough land to survive if there is any land left, they (often) owned the oxen together, they had common-owned pastures and woods, etc. (Now the relationship with the nobility was very inequal, but the villages themselves were a different story.) It was a poverty trap. If any surplus land is given to anyone who might need it, then noone has the surplus to invest in anything whatsoever.
The moment things started moving forwards was when (A) some people could get more land because of the the black death, but more importantly, (B) when they switched to fenced plots. Basically from "this is the common land of the village and we're using it together" to "this is my land, and you can fuck off and starve for all I care, you're getting none of it." Even as the population rebounded after the initial devastation, the guys who had taken control of more land, no longer went and divided it with everyone in the village.
Sure, there were other factors too, like switching to the more profitable raising sheep and exporting the wool instead of subsistence farming of grain, but it all boils down to the same thing: it's _my_ land, I do what _I_ want with it, and I'm not sharing any of that with you lot. If you went back to dividing the land so noone starves, you'd be right back to the poverty trap even with sheep.
What mattered and eventually resulted in the industrial revolution was that some people could (A) get a surprlus and trade it, even while at the same time someone else starved to death, and (B) invest the profit into getting even more profit, following their own self interest. It could mean buying more land from people who were less efficient, or buying some machinery, or whatever. Again, motivated by self-interest.
The Age Of Exploration... what do you think motivated it? Well some merchants' greed, that's what.
The birth of capitalism... well, read Adam Smith some day. Even though admittedly his ideas are almost socialist in regards to what the state should do, he did notice that, essentially, the most efficient way to optimize producing what people need isn't via charity and selflessness, but via the merchants' acting in their own interest. And indeed that's been the chief driving force ever since.
Etc.
Basically I find it funny to see all the utopian ideas about enlightened selfless aliens who'd just hand over all their technology to the first apes they find. Just because they're that kind and enlightened.
If su
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
We don't really fund it to any great degree on the scale of national budgetary items. It may not generate useful contact in its entire lifetime, but it has pushed the bounds of several scientific and engineering fronts. It has also brought us SETI@Home which pushed the concepts and boundaries of open group computing. Certainly other projects, more highly funded, have produced less in the way of tangible results.
It is definitely worth what we pay for it. Is it worth a huge budget increase? Probably not.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
They operate on the same reality, under the same laws of physics and logic, as we do. If they are succesfull enough to reach the stars, then their psychology must conform to those laws; and that makes it similar to ours.
Consider 5 people that want to travel from X yo Y. They all operate under the same laws of physics and logic. One walks there, one skips, one does the crab-walk, one takes a bike and the other tries just staring at the destination and therefore never reaches it.
The path that life on Earth took to civilization is obviously a successful one. Your supposition that it is the only path to reach civilization is unsubstantiated supposition.
I'm a big tall mofo.
SETI did successfully find something already!
computing and signal processing innovations alone.
I for one thank SETI for the advances (and interest therein) in distributed computing
If we find "them," run and hide is right! If someone from out there does show up maybe it will be a bitter payback for all the Euro-colonizing that was done in the New World. 1492 intergalactic smack down part II! Here, have some disease, let us have your lands, and oh welcome to the Catholic Church! Maybe those Scientologists know something we don't, heh.
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
You raise a great point about the biochemistry of ET's. I think it's these differences that really determine why SETI won't find anything unless those ET's are actively searching for us. We are listening for signals from advanced civilizations using 21st century signal processing and digital communication methods. Their auditory systems may not work the same way ours do and we could be shoveling sh*t against the tide.
The technology issue is also big here. We are currently using contemporary digital filtering and Fourier Spectrum analysis (http://www.dadisp.com/ab23sol.htm) to look for far more advanced signals than we can at this point imagine. Fourier analysis is no longer the leading edge of DSP research (James Kaiser once said "The most widely used signal processing tool is the FFT, the most widely misused signal processing tool is also the FFT)."). There are many new algorithms used for frequency and other domain processing that have yielded amazing breakthroughs (Wavelets and their role in image compression for example) and there are others yet to be discovered. ET's would probably have the one-up on us with this technology and would/should not expect to transmit such signals and expect someone less advanced to hear it. Maybe they would use a primitive communication scheme (FM?) but even then as I mentioned before, if their auditory systems are totally different from ours, they could try their best in an initial contact signal, but there is no guarantee that we could detect it. However, I would think any FM signal would stand out from all that cosmic back-ground noise in the bands we're listening to, so maybe it can work, but only if they initiate the contact and "lower their standards" to our level of technological sophistication.
I think ET's will find us before we find them. SETI is a great attempt and we're doing the best we know. However, we are still a very primitive civilization and have a long way to go before we can actively seek out other civilizations through our communications systems.
With respect to SETI, it is very much like a lottery with extraordinarily poor odds of winnning, and what amounts to an infinite payout.
- We only need to find signs of extra terrestrial intelligence once to prove many assumptions wrong.
- If we do discover something we can either choose to contact it on our terms, or try to prepare ourselves for contact.
- If we do find evidence of a spacefaring civilization, it will let us know that certain technologies are possible and worth pursuing
And lastly:
- Proof of extra terrestrial intelligence will at the very least force most organized religions to rewrite much of their material, if not cause them to fall apart entirely.
END COMMUNICATION
Christianity != Ethics.
I know a lot of christians like to believe that all ethics were derived from the bible, but Plato and Aristotle were laying the intellectual foundations for modern ethics in the 4th and 5th century, BC. Before that was the Babylonians, with Hammurabi in the 19th century BC.
Christianity hasn't had a great track record for ethics in the last millenium. It's been used to justify some of the worst excesses of humanity.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Google up "Bringers of the Dawn"
Give yourself about 3 hrs to listen to the whole spiel, or read the book. Slashdot folks are so pre-sumerian.
Thanks, appreciate the gardening link. I'm gonna investigate the hotwater weed killer thing I found off that site. I already have a propane flame weed burner, but a large part of the year it is too dangerous to use from fire hazard, so a continuous hot steam applicator would actually work better.
It's absolutely NOT worth it. We should buy more "Mother of all Bombs." I would rather scare the terrorists. All the same size and damage as a small nuke, but none of the fallout! "Take that unborn children shot full of depleted Uranium in foreign lands!!!"
Yeah, SETI is a retarded idea. Let's cut that one. Let's also cut the space program altogether, and go back to the pony express, while we're at it.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
I for one welcome our . . . Oh, we haven't found them yet? Nevermind.
So should we waste money by having psychics or spiritualists stand outside 24/7 waiting to possibly hear a message from God or the spirit world? This is the same way I think about SETI, especially when I see people starving, homeless, waring, and dieing of diseases like cancer and AIDS. We need to fix our own planet before we worry about communications with another.
... you can't send a cockroach into space, even if you would use all of it.
Honestly, check the numbers: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/233/1
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
So, are we just gonna sit here and wait for the aliens to find us?!
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
In light of Kolumbus, I just might understand that argumentation from someone from the old continent, but coming from an american it seems odd.
Then again, the native americans would've been faaar better off without us europeans sticking our rifle barrels up their arses.
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
A program like this looks like a money pit right up until the moment it yields results. It is akin to [cosmic] insurance...you are pissing money away unless and until it pays off. Personally, I don't mind tossing money down the well on the off chance that, in my lifetime, we find we are not "alone" in time/space.
is today, 11/09. So, that is what I find extremely interesting and weird about this whole conversation of making contact with another species out there. Even if it was posted late last night (based on Eastern US timezone). Oh, just on the off chance that we find a single signal that lets us know we are not alone, then I say SETI is worth every penny and then some. RIP Carl Sagan. Your vision and enthusiasm is missed.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
You're thinking with your stomach.
Seriously though, there are good reasons to predict that any communicative civilizations are benign (if not necessarily benevolent), and no sound reason they would be hostile. I think you're just being fearful without thinking.
There is selection pressure against the trait of hostility in social gene pools: destructive members of the pool tend to destroy the pool, especially over large sample times. Therefore, if a gene (eh, or whatever) pool is extant, it is probably not self destructive, and this correlation is stronger the older or more "advanced" the sample is. If civilization succeeds, it probably deserved to; if it fails, it probably had it coming (barring asteroids, etc). Kind of Calvinist, really.
"You just have to look at our own history..."
Human civilization is still young; barring cataclysm or stupidity, it has much more development ahead than behind it. You think because we are thugs in our infancy and adolescence, that everyone else is a thug into adulthood. That's two leaps of logic: (1) everyone was a thug in their infancy; (2) no thugs grow out of it. As I pointed out above, thugs take themselves out along with their victims, and anything advanced enough to take us out from afar could probably not have gotten to that stage if they were thugs.
"...the far more likely scenario is that they will exploit/conquer us."
Since we are so young, we would have little technology to offer, but much to offer in terms of biology, linguistics and sociology: we would be, after all, an alien civilization from a distant star. A unified field theory wouldn't tell them about the evolution of life on Earth, Earth's languages, or what we watch on Sunday afternoons.
I was a part of the SETI project for 3 years - 4 computers and no hits. They discovered a system in the Cancer constellation recently that has a planet that is in an earth-like position/orbit within the range of water not freezing or turning to a gas. Why not poitn everything we have in that direction??
Stop by and watch a Christmas movie, commercial or cartoon! -->http://www.XmasDVD.com
Don't forget the Fermi Paradox and Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation for why we appear to be alone is that we are alone.
Furthermore, don't forget that as our technology grows, our ability to destroy always outstrips our ability to create. (See physics, entropy, cybernetics, etc.) In the last 100 years, we have cured diseases that have saved millions of lives. But large teams of people have also invented weapons that can kill billions. In another 100 years, when that ratio improves some more, a small group of people will be able to kill trillions. Then it's just a matter of time.
So even if there is life out there someplace, I doubt it will live long enough to be visited. (I'm assuming--as other posters did--that any advanced civilization out there arrived there via aggressive Darwinian competition.)
Why is it so certain that you can find other civilizations by listening to radio frequencies ? As we now the development of life forms entirely depends on the factors they evolve in, it is also probable that their technology would also be much more different in line with their evolution.
it is highly probable, for example,say, a civilization to directly go in developing technology based on various uses of light, and base their communication, computerization, and even transportation on such an infrastructure. we are just starting to use light concept on computing, testing crystalline storages instead of magnetic disks, on transportation, testing out beaming power with laser to a vehicle from ground, so that heated air on the capsule can be used to propel the craft upwards (nasa's famous tests with that thing on a string), testing out ion engine concept, and testing out usage of laser links in datalinks.
what if, such a civilization using such technology just remains an odd and awkward twinkle of various red light emanations in hubble ?
in short, arent we too arrogant with the concept of everyone has to use mathematics and radio waves to broadcast a signal throughout the universe, OR somehow they will use them in their tech and some odd coincidence resulting from a use of a technology will create a wave strong enough to make it here ?
Read radical news here
Vulcans will come over as soon as you build the Warp Drive. This is where your focus should be. Live Long and Prosper
Sorry, spaceman, Aishwarya Rai isn't for sale, not even in return for FTL or access to the galactic data net. But if you're in the market for a slightly used Britney Spears mebbe we can talk...
SETI has already paid for itself.
Think of the maps of the world that were drawn in the 1400s, and then think of our current maps of Sol's neighborhood.
Notice, please, that there are no areas of our current star charts that say "Here Be Dragons".
That is the value of SETI. It assures that the imaginative fearmongers on Earth have less to work with in their efforts to scare people away from exploring space. It is like a vaccine against certain kinds of mass paranoia. The cost of SETI is minimal yet its benefits in preventing some stupid arguments against space exploration are phenomenal.
Yeah, it would change things tremendously if SETI ever found a signal. But knowing that signals are not bouncing around all over the place is also important, and worth the cost of the program.
After all, aren't there better ways to use our monies
"Our" monies?
I think that this decision falls to those whoever's money it is.
Of course, if it's government money, therein lies the rub... a pretty big argument against government funding of anything right there.
...in an attempt to impress Jodie Foster.
There's no guarantee the aliens, if SETI finds any, will be friendly. We could very well encounter a warlike, conquering species (think Klingon, Borg, or Goa'uld) and bring about the enslavement or complete eradication of our species. Look at the precedents - not all human social groups are friendly. History is littered with conquerors and madmen, as is the present day. Why should we presume space will be any different? At the very least, we should be wary.
This isn't the sig you're looking for... Move along.
The search for extraterrestrial life is great and all, but what are they really getting out of SETI? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to be a large survey(collection and analysis) of radio emitting objects in the sky. In the absence of discovering alien life, SETI still leads to useful scientific results.
"do you really think that a civilization that advanced uses radio?"
Actually, it's a very good bet they do. There are four forces in nature, and a speed limit. Electromagnetic radiation is very convenient because it is versatile: virtually every structure in the universe is transparent to some wavelengths and opaque to others. It propagates as fast as anything can travel, and needs no medium. Because of how the universe works (whether or not you understand it or find it convenient), moving through space faster than light is another name for moving backward through time. The only access we have to distant space and the distant past is the light (EM radiation in general) that reaches Earth from those times and places; the entire field of astronomy is no more and no less.
"[I hand-wavingly appeal to] Something like quantum entanglement or something (has anyone clocked the speed on that?)"
Quantum entanglement has the nasty problem of requiring some entanglement. You might send information [back in time|faster than light], but only between physical matter that's been entangled and then moved through space slower than light. You have to hike the entangled transceivers around just like running phone lines. Electromagnetic waves still work better because they are faster and are radiated by stars and bounced, transmitted, refracted, and diffracted off, around and through all the matter in the universe. It is the touchstone every civilization will know that everyone else knows to use. Even if there is faster communication, that's where every civilization will look.
No doubt if there are more advanced forms of communication, advanced civilizations will use them. But for communicating over interstellar distances, radio (or even optical) communication is optimal.
SETI is just for SHOW the US GOV knows the real truth about what is out there and they are covering it up and they also use the Stargate to get out and see it for them self also the NASA is a cover up for the S>FGAJKLAAGA>>>>>>.... link droped
He wrote some Science Fiction dealing with alien life on other planets and their relationship to God- 'Out of the Silent Planet' was the start of a trilogy along those lines. Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles also dealt an one point with a Catholic priest trying to convert the Martians- but the Martians he encountered were utter alien life forms, which appeared to exist as glowing balls of energy. In that form they were incapable of classic human sins- Lust, Greed, Murder, etc- because they couldn't harm each other.
Speculating about Alien religion is, of course, even more a stab in the dark than Alien Biology. Encountering Alien religion (or the lack thereof) would be pretty interesting- and just like alien biology, there's no telling what forms it might take. There's also no reason to believe that even among individuals of the same species they share the same religion- if an alien ship landed it might have a mix of atheists and theists, or even a mix of theists (especially if they have a polytheistic religion of some sort). Even theist/atheist could be the wrong term to describe them- for instance, they may be atheistic, but believe in reincarnation and/or some sort of afterlife, or just believe in personified forces.
I would love to get a 'second opinion', as it were, on religion from a source outside humanity. Of course, it's not like humans have been able to agree on what God is or isn't, so even aliens might not have that question figured out, or have an answer unsatisfactory to us. "Hmm? Oh, yes, God exists, but he stopped hanging around here after you guys kept killing off his friends. He's hanging out with us now, but sent us back to earth to pick up a few things he left behind".
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
To take the value judgement from the other direction, If I knew that there were aliens, and i had 100% indisputable truth, and I put that truth up for auction, how much do you think I could get for it (assuming someone didn't just come and beat it out of me of course)?
I suppose it depends on how much I know. If I _know_ that these aliens are willing to give me technology that I can use to make some serious money myself (new products, ideas etc) then I bet I could raise billions. How much would a mega-company give me if I could guarantee that every person in the world will need this product, and they can charge whatever they want, because no-one else will know how to get the technology from the aliens?
If all I knew was that these aliens were building a super express way and needed Earth out of the way, well I'm not sure I'd get anything for that knowledge, since there's nothing we can do about it.
Do I think it's worth $3million in private contributions per year to find out whether it's A, B or somewhere in the middle? I don't know, I didn't contribute to that $3million, but some people cared enough to donate it and try and find out, so good luck to them!
All science is an attempt to confirm (or deny) things that are "only posited" to be true. SETI expenditures at their peak have maybe been a few million USD per year, and since the early 1990s, that's almost all been private funding from people that are interested -- unless you are voluntarily involved in the project, it there isn't much of your money or your talent being used. Compared to the hundreds of billions of public funds spent on outright destructive uses, its hardly worth talking about.
I used to run SETI@Home v2 and still have the 5th highest score for my class. When they switched to .... BIONIC or something, I stopped. The choices to donate CPU time were AI, Human Genome and SETI. I decided that AI and Genome research would have commercial organizations performing the research anyway, so if I were donating CPU, then I wanted it to go towards SETI.
A little background
- Worked at NASA JSC on shuttle flight software and in the mission control center
- degree is Aerospace Engineering
- father saw UFOs as a B-52 pilot in the 1960s (he didn't see any little green men nor could he identify what he saw)
Intuitively - for me at least - there is lots and lots of life in the universe. How can there not be? In my opinion, anyone who needs to believe in A god or gods as the reason for humans existing simply is small minded as to how large the galaxy and universe really are. Just because they can't understand complex systems, they assume life had to be magically created and didn't start as simple chemical reactions that had no choice but to exist.
There are more galaxies in the universe than there are grains of sand on the Earth.
Read that again, it is about galaxies, not stars. Each galaxy has 100,000+ stars. That's a bunch of planets with sun light and light or heat lead to life almost everywhere we look on earth. Are you really so certain that life won't work the same way elsewhere?
Oh come on, this whole line of thinking that aliens might consider us food is so far beyond silly, it's depressing.
Civilizations only a little more advanced than us will understand this: food is mostly just energy. To feast to your heart's content you just keep care to recycle your nutrients and use energy to reconstitute the nutrients into forms that are tasty. And energy in the universe is essentially limitless... it comes from stars. And if you can travel to other stars, you are set for at least billions of years in that regard. No need to go wiping out sentient life for a snack.
Nothing. All the folks who say "a super advanced civilisation will have evolved beyond a need to eat us" are basing that view on absolutely nothing.Nothing but simple logic.
Sigh.
Now isn't there some nice Microsoft or Google thread nearby where you can go spewing your irrational FUD around? Go away.
Privacy Statement: We value your privacy! It is very valuable. That's why we try to sell it whenever we can.
Should" expresses a moral judgement. When collectivists use it they are advocating, in the end, unlimited social violence against those who will not comply.
Um what? In what way is "you should do X" equivalent to "I will kill you if you don't do X"? People are entirely capable of making moral judgments without being violent towards those they disagree with. It kind of scares me that you don't see the difference.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I thought they attacked us until they caught a virus?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
"Basically, given our current SETI programs, we couldn't detect Earth's civilization even if we were in the next star system over."
Several of your statements are factually incorrect. You're clearly unfamiliar with the technology in use or even the theory behind it. You separately underestimate the sensitivity of radio astronomy and the strength of our electromagnetic "leaks". The world would be a better place if fewer opinions and uneducated guesses were presented as fact.
Earth is roughly as bright in certain parts of the EM spectrum as is the sun itself. A distant observer would notice a typical G2 star in almost every way, but twice as bright in some parts of the spectrum as it should be. It's a dead giveaway that the sun harbors a technical civilization. That level of radio brightness has been propagating, sustained or increasing, at the speed of light for more than 50 years.
"Our detection capability is pretty much limited to an alien civilization already knowing we exist and directing extremely powerful, focused broadcasts directly at Earth."
Unless they have more power at their disposal than we presently do, and can "broadcast" (in the true, original sense) signals isotropically with enough power to be detectable over interstellar distances.
"Arecibo is puny in comparison to what we need."
The Arecibo dish could communicate with a similar dish at least 500 light years away in its present configuration, and about twice that if it had even a moderately powerful (~megawatt) terrestrial transmitter. The dish is not the problem; the receiver's noise temperature is, and that technology has been improving steadily since before it was built.
"Blanketing an area the size of Rhode Island with a dish array..."
Phased arrays improve angular resolution, but not signal collection and thus signal-to-noise. If you want to collect fainter signals, you simply need more dish area.
"...though it would have to be very, very precisely controlled"
True enough, but you seem to think that is more difficult than it is. The "control" you probably mean is aiming, and that's not hard at all; we've been aiming and tracking with radio telescopes for decades with great precision. The "control" that actually matters in a phased array is timing; thus the "phased" in "phased array". Since you're using multiple scopes, you have multiple data streams, and you need only synchronize those streams during analysis after the fact. Before The Internet, astronomers did Very Long Baseline Interferometry with ordinary VHS tapes.
You inadvertently touch on a very fundamental issue though: it is untenable for every civilization to listen only. Furthermore, since there is no designated transmitter or receiver status for any civilization (maybe it's locked in a basement at Alpha Centauri), each one must both transmit and listen. We can't just listen because nobody can just listen.
It does make a cheap lojack solution I hear. http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/22/seti-home-claims-its-first-major-discovery-a-stolen-laptop/
Even ignoring the fact that Earth hasn't any resources that can't be had in abundance elsewhere, indigenous people in North America/Australia are *far* better off today than they would have been without European contact.
If we don't decide what is worthwhile, how will those who are incapable of deciding for themselves know what to do with their money? If we say that SETI is good and cancer research is bad, and we say it often enough, children will learn this and when they grow up and are captains of industry and need to give money to something to improve their image because they've just been found out as the moral-less scumbags that they are, they will give money to SETI, and collectively we'll all go 'oooh, good'. Or we could reverse that, and suggest that cancer research is more important. Collective judgement is very important. It's the very reason that a lot of green issues are being addressed right now, and why the younger you are, the more likely you are to think this is a good thing.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
It's a cover-up for illegal military research. The SETI data we have all been processing does not come from outer space, but it is actually data from energy weapon experiments. We can only assume it's secret because the weapons do things like turn people inside-out or melt their skin off or perhaps it turns a person's inside into popcorn.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
> why we didn't _eat_ the conquered
http://baetzler.de/humor/meat_beings.html
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
"After all, aren't there better ways to use our monies and technical talents than trying to find something that's only posited to exist: sentient beings in the dark depths of space?"
Uh..Humans are sentient and our planet exists in the dark depths of space.
Good points.
The more efficient a signal is, the more it looks like noise. Compare a bitmap file to a JPG file for example. If they have much more advanced signal processing algorithms it would be practically indistinguishable from background noise.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
C'mon folks - we're pissing away hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq - makes quibbling over a few bucks for SETI seem kinda lame, don't it?
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
"Grack ack ack ack ack. Ack aack ack ack!"
Which in your tongue means as much as "We come in peace. We come in peace. Don't run, we are your friends!"
The fact that we are here to ask this question in the first place would suggest that probability of finding intelligent life in this universe is non-zero. It really takes incredible ignorance and stupidity to think that somehow EARTH is so special in this universe that we are alone. Unfortunately, the majority of people DO think that way.
Sentient beings in the dark depths of space? I know of a few billions of those, you might have heard of them.
You know why it's a waste of time and money? Because even if they do fnid absolute proof of intelligent life elsewhere in the universse, the lunatic fundamentalist fringe will just excuse it as either proof of god, or a message from satan or something like that and it won't change anything. Hell, if an alien stepped off a spacecraft in the middle of Times Square, they'd accuse the alien of being a liberal NY times reading commie volkswagen van driving espresso drinking tax raising anti-christ.
Salut,
Jacques
Yeah, it's a waste. If you don't find the upcoming Washington DC UFO
:-(
conference compelling, then I guess you don't mind throwing money at Seth Shostak.
http://www.freedomofinfo.org/media/PRESS_ADVISORY.pdf
It's only open to media and congressional staffers
or you can use the technology for commercial stuff like market timing and finding stock picks in the stochastic stock market.
1. If you can build a receiver to pick up a faint transmission from the depths of outer space, you can also build a receiver to pick up faint transmissions from Mars, or the Moon, or orbit, or on Earth. This leads to advancement in receiver technology, which means lowered energy costs for transmitting messages here, which leads to lower prices for consumers, and a win for everyone!
2. If you can build a transmitter powerful enough to reach the depths of space, you can do it here on earth as well. Leads to the capability for long distance communications at low costs, win for everyone here too!
3. Searching for signals in the noise of space requires some serious Digital Signal Processing capability to pick out a real signal from the crap. This can be utilized on Earth to increase the range of wireless transmissions outside normal bounds, reduce costs, etc etc etc. Win for everyone!
4. Radio dishes that powerful require some serious engineering to ensure they can survive stress from the electromagnetic forces and physical forces acting on them. This means better engineering techniques for building radios on earth, plus the structural elements too. Win for Everyone!
5. There is a massive amount of data being fed through SETI computers that needs to be analyzed, correlated, and extracted into a usable, readable, and verifiable format. The techniques for doing this are adaptable to large scale computer simulations. Not to mention it gave birth to the first distributed grid computing and networking, which was the direct inspiration for many of the distributed math, science, and statistics programs we see now (think FoldingAtHome or the search for Mersenne Primes).
6. The kind of antenna design needed to pick up a large range of communications can be harnessed on earth to build multipurpose antennae for transmission and receiving. Think cell towers, tv stations, GPS. Win for Everyone!
Now, I'm not going to say that SETI has been the sole driver in a lot of the previous pieces, but research into SETI related projects has provided catalyst into other areas. Computational methods, digital signal processing, radio transmission and receiving are only few that I could think of. Fact is, the scientists and engineers who participate in SETI do so because there is money available for use, they use this money to make advances in science that all of us enjoy today.
Maybe we should compile a list of researchers involved in SETI and see what else they have contributed to. I bet we would be surprised at some of the advances that have come out of it, much the same as the space program has provided leaps in aerospace technology.
~Sticky
/Oh, and finding aliens is important too...
//Hope they don't mind us beaming signals into space...
In the early hours of yesterday morning, I was sitting in a rowing boat with seven other guys (and a girl in the back), sweating and puffing. We passed a meadow where a group of cows were grazing. One of them was standing underneath a tree, with it's head raised, trying to grab a leaf from a branch with it's tongue. It looked _very_ much like it was enjoying itself.
For a moment there, I had to think about whether our cows are actually much happier than we are. True, they get slaughtered at some point, but they also get free food, lots of free time, free health care, frequent sex with handsome bulls, and many stables nowadays even have cow washing machines. That's probably as close as you can get to paradise, from a bovine point of view. In contrast, I constantly have to think about my career path, founding a family, staying in shape, and how I can impress my boss.
I'm not sure, but could it be that getting herded for meat by aliens might actually be an amazingly nice experience? As long as they use a painless killing mechanism that's quick and unexpected?
Yes... Because you're hungry again right afterwards.
Yes, SETI is probably a waste of time and resources. Because evidence demonstrates that ETs are already in the neighborhood.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disclosure_project
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6552475158249898710
You many now return your heads to the sand.
Signal analysis (FFT or whatever) should find patterns. Whether the signal is intended as audio, visual, data, or whatever is irrelevant. The signal scheme will have patterns in it if it is intended as an outreach. Moreover, those patterns will likely be unambiguously artificial.
Privacy Statement: We value your privacy! It is very valuable. That's why we try to sell it whenever we can.
You're doing the usual SF failure: you forget the time scales involved, and assume that two meeting civilizations will be roughly at the same (or comparable) point on a technology scale.
The Sun still has some 5 billion years left, but let's say things might start getting funny a bit earlier, so, hmm... 4 billion years for the maximum span of humanity? Just for comparison sake, humans have only existed for 200,000 years total, and civilization is extremely recent even at that scale.
Let's say two random civilizations are at different points along such intervals. It could mean literally being a billion years apart, technologically. Think: a million times bigger difference than between us and, say, the Normans at Hastings. _That_ freaking huge a difference.
Technological exchange in such a scenario is freaking useless for both. The side that's a billion of years ahead will get as much benefit out of it, as you would if you bought the technology to make caveman knives out of stone. And the other side would get as much benefit as a caveman being told "psst, use a modified electron-scanning microscope to make smaller transistors".
Let's say that technology is only of any use to each other, dunno, in a +/- 200 year interval. If it's more than 200 year old, you either already have it, or it's obsolete anyway. (Think how relevant galleon-building techniques from 1807 would be to today's shipbuilding, for example.) If it's more than 200 years in the future, you won't have the pre-requisites to even understand wth it's about.
So for each civilization it's a bet that the other is no more than 200 years ahead, and no more than 200 years behind. That gives you a total 400 years interval, centered on where you currently are. Inside a possible space of 4 billion years. The chance that the others will be in that useful range is exactly 400/4,000,000,000 or 1/10,000,000. It's a hundredth thousandth of a percent.
Do you honestly expect anything useful given those chances?
Not to mention that if they've got at least half a brain, they'll realize that we have to be the less advanced ones, so they have nothing to gain from such an exchange.
So, yeah, "greed within the limits set by society." Why would that mean they have to give us stuff for free? We're not even the same species, much less the same society that set those restrictions. Even to members of the same species, those limits imposed by society mean it's ok to not give another group anything if they can't pay for it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Yes.
Next question?
I want my Cowboyneal
Those religions that claim that Man is created in the image of God may need to differentiate between PHYSICAL image and SPIRITUAL image.
If the PHYSICAL image is important to the religion, they may have to do some rewriting, especially if the ETs are radically non-human.
If the SPIRITUAL image is the key, rewriting may not be necessary, especially if the core values are similar.
The SETI assumption has a flaw. There are two kinds of transmissions we could receive. Accidental ones, not aimed at us, and deliberate attempts to contact other races.
Even our own example shows that the more advanced your communications gets, the less wasteful it gets in transmitting where it isn't meant to go, and the more and more it looks like noise or is simply undetectable to the technology of just a few decades ago. And the more compressed and encrypted it is, the more it looks like noise even if you can intercept it. It's really unlikely we'll do an accidental wiretap on advanced beings.
But if they are trying to reach us, well, they're very advanced. Way more advanced than we are. If they wanted people at our level to see their signals, they could do it.
So looking harder and into the noise with current tech won't do it. Each time we invent a new technology of communication, we should look, but when we hit the right one, it will be blaring and clear, not subtle.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Hahaha... You just made my day.
"The amount of intelligence on this planet is a constant. The population is growing." -Cole's Axiom
I believe that if we did find aliens, well, you should worry more about them than us. Humanity is a war machine, a lot of our best progress has been made in times of war. We are built for it, we dream it. Just look at Star Trek; The Klingons are made to be this ferocious warrior race with honour, dissimilar from humans.. except, oh wait, it was written by a human, and it actually represents a part of humanity. You can look at a lot of things and gain similar results: Ender's game, Starcraft, Warcraft, etc etc.
Who's to say real aliens could ever dream of such a war hungry race?
If there is any life out there, we'd probably be the ones doing the conquering. I mean, if "we're" (I don't live in the USA, but those who do are certainly still human) willing to preemptively attack Iraq, then why not another planet? One which could pose an even greater risk than WMDs?
Governments contribute a large amount of the funding for SETI and scientific research in general. We have (at least in theory) the right to influence what our government spends money on. This is a discussion of public policy. So, I think it is okay to discuss the question "Do we as a society choose to fund x?" Or are you suggesting that research should not receive any public money?
Agree, but maybe we can show our point of view to Bob and Carol, and maybe they happen to agree and decide differently. Or maybe they post some replies here and convince us?
Freedom of choice is undoubtedly necessary, but it happens like with elections in democracy: If you don't know, you could be influenced by populist campaigns and vote for the worst candidate. Freedom of choice HAS TO come along with education.
This is a really interesting point that you bring up about quantum entanglement. If you keep one set of electrons on one side of a communication array and another set at the other end you can send binary in real time. This would have no broadcast leak and I think would be undetectable from our point of view. It's interesting that we've come to this point after only a hundred years of radio communication and already we can conceive of non radio transmition.
Didn't some college just come up with a way to push molecules around using a laser? Why not push an entangled electron to the moon and from that point on you would have a viable realtime data connection. Hell, why not set up a set of eight different electron sets and have a serial port ready to transmit. This could even be used in cellphones to make them non cellphones. Each SIMchip could have a pair of electrons entangled with a pair at the main switch. Say goodbye to interference from anything. It would be real time communication matter where you were, even the next planet.
If you are talking old, 1960's or 70's style SETI, involving radio searches for signals that they are sending to us then the answer is NO. Scientists of that era, which defined the basis for these searches failed to understand the capacities of a civilization advanced even a few decades beyond where we currently are. Freeman Dyson began to understand it in 1960 when he explored the requirement for the disassembly of Jupiter. But at that time, there were few serious concepts regarding nanotechnology, Feynman even in 1959 understood to some extent but not in detail. That had to await the publication of Drexler's Nanosystems PhD thesis in 1992. If one understands microbiology (and exponential growth) and one understands Nanosystems then the disassembly of planets becomes straightforward. The prediction of the probable evolution of intelligence is more problematic. But it seems clear that it happens fast and that they would have the same desire to speak with us that we have with speaking to insects. You can however detect advanced civilizations if they take their star dark. So the question is "What is the rate at which stars are disappearing?" [1]. If our current records show it to be very low, then intelligent civilizations are very very hard. 1. You may not understand this statement unless you understand concepts like Dyson Shells, Jupiter Brains and Matrioshka Brains. Until you have done the research to comprehend these concepts I would encourage not commenting on this comment. I have spent several years reading the literature, and it is probable that I will take you to the cleaners in the event of a misstatement.
I think investigating space is great. However, since when does clean-room style investigation take a priority to colonization. I want to see us drop a variety of bacteria on every planet in our solar system. I'd like to see deep space probes designed to try and safetly land biological building blocks on a planet outside our star system. THAT is a worthwhile goal. Life must continue beyond this little rock.
Actually, what always troubled me - what SETI is looking for?
...
Something that could not be explained by natural events?
Not sure what might it be
Star bursting in Morse code? In Chinese?
Considering it has been a while since we got to the moon, I think we should have already visited Mars and Venus.
Considering that we haven't visited neither Mars nor Venus yet I believe that *everything* related to space is worthwile. Yes, even space tourism.
Hmm, is pursuing what would be the single greatest discovery, event, achievement in mankind's history worth it? Maybe we should give the money to people who have failed at life? Perhaps we should give it to the government so they can afford to have more $1000 a plate fund raisers to fund more fund raisers. I think I'll got with SETI on this one.
People are too shortsighted. SETI has not been around that long. It's going to take a loooong time to find anything in the vastness of space. Looking for intelligent life in space is like looking for an off-white needle in a pile of white needles. And it happens to be a pile so large that no human can even hope to actually comprehend its dimensions. Of course it's gonna take a while. But if you find that needle, it's greater than the combined worth of everything you've ever created/discovered.
..."what is it worth?". You can only ask "what is it worth to X", for some X. I'd like to see money spent on SETI. I guess someone who makes just enough money to live on would feel differently.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
just an example. actually each civilization may think QUITE different, due to their cultural evolutionary past.
Read radical news here
We shouldn't FORCE how other people use their money, no.
HOWEVER, it's absolutely fair to make your own moral judgment, and, eg. tell them they are spending their money foolishly.
Or would you have exactly the same opinion of two billionaires, one that donates all his money to charity, and the other that spends it all on frivolous indulgances?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Alas, TA is not accurate. The government doesn't do direct funding but there are research projects and such that go to SETI via government grants.
I love my sig.
Why is it so certain that you can find other civilizations by listening to radio frequencies ? \
Well, radio is a range of frequencies of light. And if you're doing astronomy without paying attention to the radio range you're missing a heck of a lot. Like hydrogen.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Their Messiah might have gotten the True message.
First Commandment: Make cookies.
Second Commandment: Share cookies.
Third Commandment Eat cookies.
Fourth Commandment: See First Commandment.
Can you imagine what would happen to their belief system when they find out that we have milk?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
You have the fraction right:
115,000,000 / 116,750,000,000 = 0.000985010707
So the fraction is 0.000985010707. But the percentage, which is parts per hundred.
The fraction 0.000985010707 is the percentage 0.0985010707, not 0.000985010707.
You should do a sanity check, using easier numbers. You know that 115,000,000 / 116,750,000,000 = 115 / 116,750, so "about a hundred" per "about a hundred thousand" must be "about 1 per thousand" (and *not* 1 thousandth of one one-hundredth):
0.000985010707 = 0.0985010707%
So 0.1%, not 0.001% as you claimed.
The point is no less striking though: The ENTIRE HISTORY of the SETI program could be funded by a mere ONE THOUSANDTH the ANNUAL cost of the war in Iraq; about 8 HOURS of war (since 365/1000 ~= 8/24).
Captcha: shrinks (heh)
P.S.
Thanks for actually citing reasonable references; a welcome change for slashdot.
It's so much more practical than, say, providing food for the hungry or homes for the homeless.
No, SETI isn't worth it. I can think of hundreds of other things that are worth more in terms of CPU time and human research than SETI, amongst them, cures for cancer, Alzheimers, Parkinsons, AIDS....the list goes on. If we had 'nothing else that needed doing', then fine, do SETI.
"Everyone knows that vi vi vi is the number of the beast" -- Richard Stallman
you are thinking in OUR mindset, and heritage. with OUR light based technology we cant think and contrive of any means to use light to communicate in ranges further than optical range. and again with our mindset you are saying "they understand the EM spectrum and astronomy". they dont have to resort to the idea of contacting other sentient civilizations with radio waves in order to understand astronomy. again, just as per our own biases due to our own heritage, they may totally think differently as to what's the best way to reach other civilizations.
Read radical news here
Finding an extraterrestial being is like finding a ghost.
I wouldn't publically fund research to find ghost. Either should be relegated to fringe endeavors by those who believe they could exist.
Why don't we publically fund research to find the tree of eternal life? At least it helps immensely compared to finding aliens or ghosts if it is ever found. The probability of finding it is at least as good as those above.
I'm pro-Seti for the reasons mentioned above and obviously, 1) based on current scientific understanding it is overwhelmingly likely there is not just one intelligent civilization in the galaxy, and 2) the tech we could gain might be incredible so the financial risk is not only miniscule , it is a crime we don't invest more in it.
HOWEVER, I have to say that I once talked to my 75 yr. old Dad (a few years younger at the time) about it. We had a HUGE fight. A total schism! His understanding of aliens is that they don't exist, but if they do then they are the bugs from the Heinlein's Starship Troopers. Which we both did think is great (he saw the movie, I saw it but had reread the book many times). Basically he said he doesn't *want* to meet bug-eyed aliens! Vehemently! Okay, I don't either if they're psychotic murderers, fine. But I just want to emphasize that in addition to the stupidity of busybodies against SETI posting here, there are also probably a lot of people who due to either age and/or the media, just don't want to think about anything off the earth. Talking about SETI with my Dad drew such an amazing reaction from him. I think SETI and Spaceguard against comet/asteroid collisions are two useful things the government should fund, thank you. Allen's awesome. Oh yeah, and Contact the movie was cool but the book was better, darn it!
Thanks, appreciate the gardening link. I'm gonna investigate the hotwater weed killer thing I found off that site. I already have a propane flame weed burner, but a large part of the year it is too dangerous to use from fire hazard, so a continuous hot steam applicator would actually work better.
No Prob, though it's only a small space I garden. Being a small spot I just put weeds. Before moving though I had more space to garden. Then I had to deal with fire ants so I used hot water for them. Boil some water then pour it on the anthills. It would kill plants too, but in the grass the grass would grow within days.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Yep, done that with fire ants as well. I usually do a fast few shovelfuls out in the middle of the mound, dump in the pot of scalding water, then shovel the dirt back in and stomp it down flat, something to keep the heat in. I have had *marginal* success with that, not perfect, but at least it is a bit of revenge!
I usually do a fast few shovelfuls out in the middle of the mound, dump in the pot of scalding water, then shovel the dirt back in and stomp it down flat, something to keep the heat in. I have had *marginal* success with that, not perfect, but at least it is a bit of revenge!
I'd just pure the boiling water right on ant hills, without digging. The hill wouldn't be repopulated however another ant hill would pop up somewhere else. Then again we'd have a few hills at the same tyme. I'd leave the black ants alone as they aerate the soil and don't bite like the red or fire ants do. I recall once so many red ants bit my feet they swelled up and I had a reaction so someone took me somewhere to let them soak in a solution then apply some sort of cream on them. For some days I couldn't wear shoes laced up.
FalconShould there be a Law?