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?"

Comments

First

[professional_troll]

First bitches

N.I.G.G.E.R.

[Anonymous Coward]

y.o.u. a.r.e.

Re:WTF? srsly

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, talk about global warming being a religion. Name one species that has become extinct on this planet due to it being too warm. FYI, the warmest climates are the most fertile. If the planet were cooling, I'd be worried, but quite frankly, I'd like some warmer weather. Sucks for people in New Orleans though. But maybe they should have thought about that before building below sea level...

Find a cure for cancer first

[ylikone]

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.

Re:S.E.T.I

[Lemmy Caution]

We are "nicer" - that is, we have what we would call "humanistic" values - because of a very specific history that involves Christianity and the rise of the middle-classes. What we commonly assume are "universal" human values are, at closer inspection, products of the Enlightenment and the secularization of Christian values of compassion and equality. These values themselves came to the fore because they are more "democratic" - that is, they assure people at the lower strata of society that in the after life, the strata disappear. (In crude terms, it is a "slave" religion, though I evoke Nietzsche only with some hesitation.)

The belief that these specific humanistic, egalitarian (sort-of) values, including the transformation of an instinct for compassion into a universal law which assumes that God must, too, be compassionate, are universal values, is a dangerous conceit. It is what motivated the neo-conservatives to create, by sheer force of will, a modern democratic state in Iraq, with the assumption that "deep down inside" the people of that region want nothing but to be what we are.

Now, you have the hubris to extend that presumption to non-terrestrial cultures that we don't even know exist.