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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?"
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!
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.
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!
Too true.
I think SETI is really a waste for a completely different reason. And it's basically this: 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. You just have to look at our own history of contact between various cultures to figure that out. And in this case, it would be far worse, because the difference in technology, culture would be far greater than that between say, Europeans and indigenous people in North America/Australia.
So, is it sensible to spend money looking for creatures which if we find them, we should ignore? Better to spend the money figuring out how to hide!
Deconstruct the State
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
So, is it sensible to spend money looking for creatures which if we find them, we should ignore? Better to spend the money figuring out how to hide!
Yes, but first you need to prove we need to hide.
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
"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."
I have a similar opinion. I'm a big fan of diversity when it comes to programs like this. Challenges bring innovation, right? They didn't have a lot of money, SETI@Home is born. It becomes popular, we start seeing more distributed computing apps like Folding@Home. Would that have come about anyway? That's possible. Heck, I may not even be correct about Folding@Home's origins. But I do wonder how many people picked up Folding@Home after playing around with SETI@Home. If I'm right that one influenced the other, then it stands to reason that investment in SETI also indirectly supported cancer and disease research. You never know when an advancement in one field will cause an advancement in another.
So I say yes, it is worthwhile. Money can always be 'better spent', but hindsight is 20/20. Never know until you try.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
OTOH, cancer and AIDS research appears to me to be amply funded even given the scope of those problems.
You'll feel that way until your mom/sister/gf/wife gets breast cancer, loses her hair to chemo and then loses part or all of her breast(s) to surgery. After that happens, you'll wonder why we don't have better chemo treatments (ones that don't make you go bald) or why we need to hack off big lumps of flesh to make sure the cancer doesn't come back. I guarantee that you'll think that cancer research needs more funding and that searching for aliens suddenly doesn't seem so important.
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. If we ever find an advanced extra terrestrial civilisation, it will quite possibly be so alien as to boggle the mind, so making declarations about how they couldn't behave in some particular way is pretty dubious. The could literally be so alien that it may be impossible to ever really communicate with them. Aside from eating us, they may turn out to have a fondness for geometry, and decide to reshape our planet into a perfect sphere using quantum high energy death beams for purely aesthetic reasons.
The good news is that odds are quite good that we won't be both tasty and nutritious for aliens. The biochemistry would likely turn out to be really quite different. It's even possible that exposure to our atmosphere would be instantly toxic to them, making human hunting a bothersome affair which can only be done in a bulky and cumbersome space suit. Of course, being tasty would give them some reason to keep at least some of us around for breeding stock, so as it happens, being tasty might be a best-case scenario for humanity's long term survival!
But, in my own arbitrary guestimation, I'd expect that a really advanced civilisation would have relatively little interaction with us. There are probably nearer sources of minerals and water and whatnot than flying all the way to the sol system. They'll be so far ahead of us that we won't have any scientific information that intrigues them enough to come and steal it. If they have the sort of inclinations which would result in them wiping us out on contact, they probably would have done it to themselves before becoming so advanced. We'll probably only ever see them in person if they are interested in linguistics and anthropology and literature, etc.
As for the question of funding SETI, I don't think we'll find anything, but the potential payoff is worth the cost. Continuing with my arbitrary guesses, if there are advanced civilizations out there, they are talking to each other using either very directional signals which won't ever get to us. OR, they have invented some sort of sub space radio which is completely unknown to our understanding of the universe. In either case, we won't hear anything. What's worse, if you plug what I think are plausible guesses into the drake equation, any civilizations that are out there are probably very few, and very far away. But, there is still that chance of the biggest disovery in human history. I think that's worth something.
How would you detect an amoeba 1000 light years away?
The same way you detect an intelligent civilization that does NOT use radio. You literally look for them. What if you took... I don't know, say 50% of the resources that SETI uses and invest that into planet finding telescopes. Eventually, provided more discoveries lead to more funding, we will be able to actually SEE planets from other solar systems. We can see the signs of life on earth from space. Given the technology, why couldn't we see if life exists elsewhere. I think we have a much better chance at finding a planet with oceans of green algae than one that watches TV.
Or, like I said, we travel in our own solar system and check here. There is much more life in the universe than intelligent life.
How long ago did Humans discover fire? When do you expect us to stop using it because we are "too advanced" ??
Not all at once, no. Currently, we use fire to heat water that turns turbines and produces electricity. It is inefficient and dirty. It is slowly being replaced by wind, solar and nuclear. So, eventually, we won't use fire to generate electricity.
We currently use fire to drive the internal combustion engine. Eventually, we'll all have electric cars (or something) that doesn't use fire to make it go.
Many years ago, we used fire to heat our homes. Many homes today use electric heat. GWBush's house uses geothermal heat to heat and cool his house.
So yeah, eventually fire will be replaced, one use at a time, and be seen and a naturally occurring menace.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I think that the actual aim of SETI is lost on a lot of people. They're not looking for signals on with the intent that we'll ever meet anyone they find (not primarily anyway), they're just trying to find some sort of evidence that intelligent life exists somewhere aside from Earth. Odds are, any signal they discover will probably be a few thousand years old. By comparison of our own civilizations, the group that broadcasted that signal probably won't be around to pick up our answer when our response reaches them in a few thousand years. In the mean time, we're still in a mixed free-market economy, so when money is spent on all of those radio dishes, it puts more money in to the R&D of them. Then there's also the concept of grid computing that SETI greatly helped popularized. Even if they don't find anything, we still benefit; so yeah, it's worth it.
Hey, look! It's Bono's brother.
This is true, but it's only because it's a binary solution set. Until or unless SETI finds a transmission, it will have made no progress in finding one, only in not finding one.
However, once it finds one, numerous benefits accrue; some certain, some with varying degrees of probability.
First of all, we learn that we're not alone, that we're not unique. Numerous modes of thinking posit that we are alone, or not, and those modes will receive solid underpinnings instead of speculation. This has general value for future inferences, even for current inferences where confirmation agrees. Like most of science, where this may lead may not be immediately obvious, but again like most of science, the odds are high that it will lead somewhere productive. And this consequence is certain. For instance, it would mean a great deal to me to have something I consider to be extremely likely but impossible for me to personally confirm, confirmed by objective facts.
Second, it will have identified one of two things for us: Either we have revealed a civilization that is just going through radio and is feeling pretty confident about itself and others, or it will have revealed a civilization that is much further along, and is interested in contact. The former would be a pretty huge co-incidence, because broadcast radio is inefficient (witness our going to cable to preserve bandwidth, optical to increase it, satellite to ground to bolster reliability and coverage, various beam methods like lasers and tight focus radio to save energy and achieve reliability), so the odds strongly favor the latter - the 100 year or so window we used broadcast radio is closing as we consider this today. So most likely, we'll have found life that is much further along than we are technologically, and looking for other life. It isn't a huge stretch to assume that such a find would come hand in hand with new technology for us. After all, if they want us to hear them, either they want to talk, or they want to get rid of us. It seems like a lot of work to try to get rid of things you don't even know are there, doesn't it? Inefficient. And it doesn't fit the mold... if they're worried about us, then letting us know they are there in such a way that they can't tell if we know or not is imprudent. So again, the odds fall on the side of life that can and is willing to benefit us.
Third (and we're getting lower on the probability scale here, but still) the transmission itself may contain immediately useful information for us. It could be anything. Make widgets like this. Don't go to the 3rd planet of Beta Centauri. Cut it out with the nukes, assholes. Efficient space drive drive works like so. Your Aishwara Rai, can we buy her? 42.
Lastly, and least likely, we could be handed a paradigm shift. Antigravity. FTL travel of any flavor. Additional physics. How to clean up our atmosphere. Things we cannot even vaguely imagine.
All of these things only require reception. If we add transmission back to a known source of an intelligent signal, now we're talking interaction. That could be wild as well.
There may be gold mines for linguistics; for biology; for physics and all the sciences that are really corners of physics (chem, electronics, nuclear, etc.)
And in the meantime, SETI does something else for us. It serves as a focal point for a certain type of hope, a bright optimism, that I would really rather not see go away.
So if you really want to cut funds, I suggest that the place to do it is in funding, oh, I don't know, how about a certain war in the middle east? Maybe quit funding the "drug war" against our own citizens? Either of those would benefit most people (not arms manufacturers or those in the jobs that have sprung up for our most recent go at prohibition, of course, but I guess I don't really give a darn about those particular people for some reason.)
Sure would be nice that if we did find other life, that we weren't quite so involved in trying to kill and/or re
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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
This isn't really an accurate characterization. A more correct way of stating it would be to say that all biological activity on this planet is characterized by reproductive rates exceeding what the available resources can sustain--leading to conflict over said resources. That realisation, courtesy of Thomas Malthus, is really the foundation of Darwin's theory of evolution (well, that and the notion of trait variation and heritability of traits, but whatever).
If they succeeded in becoming the dominant species on their respective planet, they're probably just as ruthless as we are.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
I will grant you that both political and religious entities may act out in extremely negative ways if such a discovery were made. However, I don't think that's sufficient reason to turn away from asking the question. If we're to grow, we have to face reality at some point, and I am of the opinion that sooner is better than later. Religion's is definitely losing its grip; I'm a completely "out" atheist, and they suffer me to live. :-)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Um-hmmm. And Fusion reactor research can never come to a conclusion until or unless we get a fusion reactor. Unless they try for a really, really long time, can't do it, and simply give up. And cancer research can never come to a conclusion until or unless we get a cure for cancer. Unless they try for a really, really long time, can't do it, and simply give up. And AI research can never come to a conclusion until or unless we get an artificially intelligent computer or other construct. Unless they try for a really, really long time, can't do it, and simply give up. This is definitely science. What you postulate is simply cowardice.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Ah, the old "religions will crumble if we find intelligent life elsewhere" bit.
How interesting it would be if we finally make contact with an alien race and the first thing they ask us is whether or not The Creator has sent a "Messiah" to us yet.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Christian values are responsible for "humanity"?
So the civilizations that existed in Greece, China, Japan, India before Christianity existed were devoid of any humanity, I presume.
When I read comments like this, I understand why Bush and his neocons keep getting elected in the US.
Magnus.
"Um-hmmm. And Fusion reactor research can never come to a conclusion until or unless we get a fusion reactor."
Sure they can, as long as they follow the scientific process and break it down into smaller testable parts (as opposed to the SETI process which would involve simply putting a bunch of things together in a box, looking for a fusion reaction, and if it doesn't occur move on to another combination).
"And cancer research can never come to a conclusion until or unless we get a cure for cancer. Unless they try for a really, really long time, can't do it, and simply give up. And AI research can never come to a conclusion until or unless we get an artificially intelligent computer or other construct."
And this just proves you don't know what you are talking about. We get better treatments for cancer and more advanced AI applications each year. You want to know why? Researchers in those fields are using the scientific method (well, cancer researchers are, AI is more of a mathematical discipline so its approach is rather different, but still not the pseudo-science SETI method).
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
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.
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