Slashdot Mirror
Arecibo Observatory Facing Massive Budget Cuts
SirLurksAlot writes "Many supporters of the SETI@home project have recently received a message informing them of impending budget cuts for the Arecibo Observatory and asking them to show their support for the project by writing to Congress. The letter also informs supporters that there are currently two bills (Senate bill 2862 sponsored by Senator Hillary Clinton, and a similar House bill, H.R. 3737), which are intended to secure funding for the project. According to The Planetary Society, the current plan for the Arecibo Observatory involves cutting funding by more than 60% from $10.4 million to just $4 million by 2011."
This is insane. We're throwing untold billions of dollars away on useless, inconsequential or outright stupid things every year, and we can't afford a few million for something like Aricebo? Are we nuts?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Get your checkbook out, Mr. Hadden!
this is turning out as planned. remember the movie Contact? What will be will be.
What if all SETI@Home crunchers donate 1 dollar/Euro? Problem temporarily solved, isn't it?
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
To put this into perspective, $6m is about the cost of the seat in a single F-22.
Seeing the phrases "SETI@home" and "receiving messages..." made me jump to some obvious conclusions...
This is a signature. Bow to me.
maybe those aliens just don't want to be found... perhaps a more prudent use of resources would be folding@home. You know, curing cancer instead of holding our head to the ground to listen for non-existent buffalo...
Haha, I suppose I could've phrased that better. I should've said SETI@home sends message of impending doom.......
.
.
.
.
for Arecibo Observatory budget.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
I think it's best if it's turned into a giant skateboarding bowl, the labs could host nightly LAN parties.
HAD
Buy fewer bombs.
Morons.
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php That's a list of other things you can do with BOINC and distributed computing.
This is a signature. Bow to me.
quick, claim you almost discovered the Higgs Boson!
Table-ized A.I.
Have they found any aliens yet? If not, why keep paying? Oh yeah, searching for "Killer Asteroids".
have you guys seen http://www.sciscoop.com/? are they just a complete knock-off of slashdot or are they affiliated somehow? there's gotta be some kind of copyright infringement or something about the format...
Scientists look out into space for any sort of information. If they found it they would call it a sign of intelligence.
Scientists find DNA information which constructs and governs all of the cells in our bodies. They call it an accident.
Much of basic research does not always produce immediately tangible results. SETI + Aricebo have produced massive distributed computing which is widely used now by many EXTREMELY worthwhile projects (protein folding, cancer research, etc). This is a basic tool now, and I'd say that's pretty valuable and productive.
Just because it isn't directly dumping 200 MPG cars into your lap, or producing a magic fat dissolving drug, doesn't mean that it isn't helping you somehow.
..........FULL STOP.
The F-22 does stuff TO people, Aricebo does stuff FOR people.
..........FULL STOP.
Where the hell is Jody Foster at a time like this?
yeah like helping the PharmaCo's create the next wonder-drug that nobody without insurance will be able to afford.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
"Many supporters of the SETI@home project have recently received a message..."
And my heart leapt into my throat!
The rest of the article was REALLY a big let-down after that, let me tell you.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Good. Maybe soon, all the BOINC users wasting time searching for non-existent aliens will move on to something useful!
World Community Grid is a boinc project , no Seti@home no boinc, no boinc no World Community Grid.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Anything which doesn't make a profit will be purged. Its inevitable. We will end up being a society that churns out nothing but burgers and shit movies because those are the most profitable things.
And you, all of your, helped make it happen. Give yourselves a pat on the back.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
...that because we spend alot of money poorly, we should spend more money poorly?
I disagree - instead of writing Congress, those who want Aricibo funded should donate money directly, instead of trying to use the power of government to force everyone else to pay through taxes.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
We know for a fact there are weapons of mass destruction in space. Doesn't cutting funding to space research mean that the asteroids have won?
We've already had one near-miss, when Hillary Clinton tried to force some budget language funding Arecibo in the weeks before the Puerto Rico primary. She didn't earmark new funding, she just added a mandate that existing funding go there. Oddly enough, the legislation didn't mention which other ground-based program would be cut to free up the funds...
Microsoft delenda est!
In times of recession the lawmakers get allergic to basic research, which they think is a kind of scientific hedonism. The thought pattern here seems to be that science is a shabby garden run by elitist weirdos. You water this garden with money and then you can pick the new drugs, weapons and consumer electronics growing on its trees. The lawmakers attempt to tidy up this garden in order to improve the yield of goodies by cutting down the trees that don't bear fruit. This can only be harmful in the end, because they don't have a faintest idea about gardening...
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
Meanwhile, the Iraq War has cost the average taxpayer about $12,000 each over the last five years.
If we assume a baseline 100M taxpayers, and an Iraq war cost of 100B a year, then, we're really talking only about $1000 a year on average. Notice, though, that 90% of the taxes in the USA are paid by people making over $250,000 a year, so really, we average stiffs are probably not even paying for the war at all.
Now, let's say that the Iraqis come through and increase their oil production to first 3m bbls/day, and then to 5m / bbls a day, and the benefits of this production increase result in additional 50 billion a year in profits to American companies, PLUS, a reduction in gasoline costs. We can calculate the ultimate profitability of the war based upon a reduction in the price of gasoline per person, knowing that in the USA the per capita consumption of gasoline is about 10 barrels per person per year. Source , and thus, about 30 barrels per taxpayer per year. So we say at 30 x 45 gets us about 1200 gallons of gas per year per taxpayer. We can thus calculate that if the war in Iraq is victorious, AND, nets a global price reduction of about a $1 / gallon, then, each taxpayer would come out ahead about $200 per year, even if the cost of continuing the war is born indefinitely. If, on the other hand, the USA wins the war and a stable semi-US-friendly government emerges and thus we can withdraw the troops, and Iraq still pumps enough to lower the price of gasoline by a $1 a gallon, then the war would basically pay for itself in about 5 years, and then after that, it would be pure profit for the USA. Hey, imperialism can be profitable, which is why countries do it!
This is my sig.
'Overrated' does not mean 'I don't agree with you' or 'I don't like your opinion'.
"no S@h no boinc" - how? BOINC doesn't depend on S@h, S@h depends on BOINC.
Desperately trying hard to find the slightest evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence while astronauts, pilots and radar operators witness UFO events that can hardly be explained by anything but what we're looking for so hard in the sky.
But I guess that the term UFO inspires such a lack of credibility that we have to look hard to the sky where we won't see anything while ignoring what takes place in our atmosphere.
You just got troll'd!
I think it is outrageous that we can spend trillions on Bushs war of lies and deciet in iraq but we cannot come up with $11 million for aricebo. It shows how corrupt the government has become, when Bushs wars of aggression of killing and death are more important than expanding human knowledge.
Seti@home was started for several reasons
the SETI project was interesting and computationally amenable to distributed processing
Originally the SETI@home was intended more as a proof of concept rather than the finally goal and it popular success surprised even the SETI team.
boinc was a restructuring of the 1st gen SETI@home software and is designed to be much more modular and versatile framework than its predecessor. Because the framework is more versitile the other projects can spend their time writing their specialized software and not re-inventing the wheel.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
SETI@home is at the present time entirely funded by donations. Any time SETI@home uses at Arecibo is piggybacked on searching for pulsars or mapping the Galaxy in the 21cm line.
Or are you suggesting that because Arecibo spends any effort on a project you dislike it should be shut down?
Support SETI@home
Create an account on the SETI forum and get to know those guys that run the place. They do squat there for what they're paid. I wish I could take a vacation like those guys. They're biggest decision is "What country do you want to go spend a month at?" Shit I'd be playing WOW all day too! Get to know them before you wish them (mine and your) millions.
Yes, all three of the people who work for SETI@home are billionaires from their SETI salaries. Did you ever try to run a scientific project and a web site visited daily by a few hundred thousand people with a staff of three part time employees? Are you on call for your job every hour of every day?
To be serious, pay at SETI@home is, like typical university pay, about 70% of industry wages for the same work. And given that they aren't getting enough in donations to fund the three employees they have, they are lucky the project hasn't folded.
And the staff members I know personally would rather drown in raw sewage than play WoW. One used to work on an open source flight simulator for a while, however. That was about 15 years ago. I doubt he has much time for gaming now.
Support SETI@home
... for 17 years.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
/me thinking about how hard it would be to gather a list of registered voters and fire up Quick Test Pro to automatically generate thousands of letters...
:)
Can't be too hard, right? I could probably have it done in less than a day. Geek power!
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
$4 million for a long paid off installation is still a decent maintenance and automated operations budget for the most meritorious existing operations. Open source the data and do minor repairs until worn out. I vote for the new experiments. Let's see which lasts longer, Bill (Gordon) or Aricebo. Still a nice movie prop, maybe new movies will add a paint job or two in the future.
LOL. Assuming of course that oil prices are all due to them nasty "speculators" and not to the fact that the rate of growth of demand is far outpacing any conceivable rate of growth of supply (including all Iraq, ANWAR, deep-sea, Arctic and what not) and that no feasible increase in supply is going to make a long-term dent.
What you ignore, when you make that assessment, is a pricing equilibrium brought about my normal market forces. Yes, demand is increasing at a rate that will outstrip supply. But, as prices increase, then, demand can and will fall and level off. It might be at $200/bbl, but, the price increases will level off as a greater percentage of the population decides to not have it. That's just the way humanity works. Any increase in supply, thus, is always going to be beneficial, as it will act to either delay or suppress the price increase. Now, you could have an argument with ANWR, but, to say that 200 billion barrels of Iraqi supply cannot make a dent in world prices is absurd.
Ask the Roman, Mongol, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, British, Japanese, Nazi and Soviet empires. Amongst others.
I want to hold out this silly tripe tjstork had put out for all to see as what passes as "reason" amongst all of these war-hawks
You can call it tripe, as much as you want, but I was only stating facts, and not making any moral judgement. However, you should note that that Roman Empire lasted, in one fashion or another, for nearly 2000 years (dating from the founding of Rome to the fall of Constantinople). The Chinese Empire lasted for 2000 years. The Egyptian Empire lasted for probably 4000 years. The British Empire lasted for 400 years.
The only reason the Japanese, German and Soviet Empires collapsed was because another budding superpower opposed all of them with an economic system that was better than their own. Do read about the Japanese economy running into World War II, and take careful note of comparisons of GDP. Similarly, as much as people rail on about supposed NAZI efficiency, even the "lowly" British produced more aircraft, engaged in quite successful technological research (RADAR, Computer, code breaking), and managed to build quite a successful surface Navy while the Germans could only build a fleet in being. And similarly, the Soviets, masters of an entire continent and a giant population, screwed it all up with central planning. Quite honestly, if the Soviet Empire allowed trade with the rest of the world and free markets in its borders, its quite likely Germany would still be partitioned and the economy might be so good that the Eastern Bloc might not even want to be liberated.
The reason that I say this, is, yes, wheras we can argue pro or con about empires - I'm actually in favor of a total US military withdrawal from everywhere on the planet with a renewed focus on trade. But, you can't just say "empires are stupid and doomed to fail", because, right now, to the best of our knowledge, empires produced the longest lasting and most stable forms of human government -ever-. The USA is the world's oldest Democracy, and its only 250 years. As ages of civilizations go, its not even close to be a contender on the overall test of time among civilizations that are truly, long lasting.
This is my sig.
Well, two quick things:
1) I really don't care to much about the observatory, but hey, if other people do, and there's enough of them to fund it, go them;
2) killing the budget of this observatory + other projects saves about 10 million dollars in a country that is going almost 100 trillion dollars in debt for entitlement spending ($90 trillion over the next 40-50 years; the American comptroller general [national accountant] is now touring the country like a prophet begging everyone who will listen to make the government stop spending so much);
Let me spell this out:
debt ~ 100,000,000,000,000
savings ~ 10,000,000
Seriously, whether I care about it or not, if the project is doing ANY good, its current funding levels are so completely insignificant, just, let it be.
Many analysts believe (and I agree with them) that the Western technological culture is hopelessly addicted to oil and that the growth demand is pretty much inflexible unless truly drastic changes are made to the Western (and by extension all other countries which adopted or are adopting this system such as Japan and China) life-style and technology. Consider this: every electronic device uses plastic as its chief (by volume) component. Nearly all food processing involves plastic in packaging.
Well, that's the supposed theory of "inelastic" demand, and in a free market society, it's just not right. Pretty much, people will switch to the cheapest thing, and can do it pretty quickly. Have a look at July car sales. Five years ago, you couldn't sell a small car in the USA, and now, the SUV is dead. These kinds of decisions are being made in every material. If plastic gets to be too expensive, people will switch to glass or steel or wood, all of which can be made with coal as an energy source and last I checked, there's plenty of coal. So what, as you say, if individual transportation becomes too expensive. Or, perhaps people will use coal steam cars. Or, coal to liquids might work, or, maybe just electric cars or maybe there will be no cars at all. In that case, in case you haven't looked a map, you'll be pleasantly surprised to find that nearly every American city is built on or near a rail stop. Sure, suburban people might move back to cities, maybe we will have to give up cars, maybe we won't, but either way, people will survive. I mean, you are talking about a country that survived a switch from an agrarian to an industrial economy, survived the onset of global economic competition. Americans are good at coping with change.
Going cold turkey on oil means death as far as Western technological civilization as we know it is
Not at all. A few hundred years ago, western technological civilization ran out of wood. Life became much less comfortable for a while but ultimately necessity proved to be the mother of invention, and the west invented the industrial revolution.
See above. All the Iraqi oil would do (assuming that it can be brought to market quickly enough...delay the inevitable...
Delay the inevitable is -good-. It gives us time to invest in other technologies. That's why I say, drill in ANWR, offshore, everywhere. Bring the prices down a bit and take that money and pump it into new technologies.
The imperial longevity is in reverse proportion to the amount of people involved, availability and speed of communication and transportation technologies and the cost of running the empire. That is why you will note that as we progress in history the average reign of an "empire" has shortened dramatically. The US empire is already showing all the signs of collapse, after mere few decades of openly imperial policies
Well, that's all pretty good propaganda if you want to make yourself feel good but consider this - the Roman achilles heel, economically, was grain to feed the city. They literally had to get grain from other places. They fought Carthage over Sicily, and won, and were later to take over a number of places with a hunger for food that makes our own oil addiction seem quaint. During the wars, Rome had its homeland invaded, its standing army utterly crushed, its cities looted, but eventually, after hanging in there for a long time , finally triumphed over there big rival and ran with free control of the med. sea for quite some time.
The imperial longevity is in reverse proportion to the amount of people involved, availability and speed of communication and transportation technologies and the cost of running the empire. That is why you will note that as we progress in history the average reign of an "empire" has shortened dramatically
Actually, no. There's no reason that empires must be automatically short, even today. You might say, too, that the longevity of empires has more to do with vast disparities in e
This is my sig.
If this project is so important, and there area so many people for it, surly the few million could be raised through private means. It is not a lot of money we are talking about here. The reason it is not being raised now, is there are not that many interested. Don't blame the politicians, you guys are to blame... put your money where your mouth is and raise the money or speak up..... I for one have no problem letting some of these projects die and would not want my tax dollars going to them as much as I do not want them going to products of war..
I can think of dozens of better things to spend my tax money on than a project that searches for "little green men."
Our infrastructure is crumbling and we want to spend a ton of money on this? Absolutely insane, if you ask me...
I want to live in a society that values not only money, but other things too. Science, art, education, healthcare. They all give something in return.
Is to pretend like you're a satellite TV repair man and offer everyone in the San Fernando valley free upgrades so you can secretly turn their dishes into a distributed radio telescope to collect data to foil the plans of the space aliens in human suits that are running pollution factories in Mexico to raise the temperature of the Earth and wipe us all out.
In the beginning there was NO Universe and no time. There was nothing and then it exploded. THAT is modern science?
Science is honestly following where the evidence leads, and it is especially true of science that if (whatever is the) current understanding is is bizare, we take it on the evidence, even if it is unsatisfying. It is superstitious thinking to claim that something must not be so because you (just one imperfect being, as you nominally recognize) do not find it intuitive. You're talking about the "Big Bang" theory, which is a cosmology and not a cosmogony; it makes no statement or claim about what caused the universe; it only describes the universe after it began to exist.
Don't call that science, but faith, belief, just as any other.
It is science and definitely not faith because the understanding was arrived at by following the evidence faithfully and admitting that our understanding is incomplete and the universe retains some mystery, rather than by waving the hands and saying "God dit it!"
No matter how far you go back, you cannot get around cause and effect. We are part of the effect, but there is no way we can KNOW the cause.
That is *precisely* why your use of the "cosmological argument for the existence of god" fails; it just begs the question. It is a very old argument, and its flaw has been easy to demonstrate since antiquity. If everything must have a cause, then the creator god must have a cause, and that cause must have a cause, and so on all the way down. Perhaps you realize that, and think "well, I suppose something has to be uncaused, and I'll call call it 'God'." But it is easier to say simply that the universe itself is uncaused, and that the universe itself just exists; it is no more and no less amazing.
The Bible, ALONE, of all world views, places the origin of the universe into a cause that is eternal, a transcendent God with no beginning or end. ...
I think you, or anyone else, ought to carefully read it in its entirety. Only after that would you be qualified to express you opinion about it.
Clearly, YOU have not read "of all world views" yourself, and are not qualified to make this statement, so you are being hypocritical. Furthermore, if you were familiar with other "world views", you would see immediately that you are unequivocally wrong on this point, and that to claim your own petty world view is the "one true way" is both pompous and trite. You obviously lack the familiarity you claim to have with other religions, even very closely related ones, and with religion in general. Islam and Judaism make this same claim, and even about roughly the same God! Hinduism and Daoism have very different spins on this idea. Zoroastrianism has exactly the same theological concept (Ahura Mazda, the uncreated creator ) that you just claimed was true only of Christianity. Only one of the few, major counterexamples I just gave is younger than Christianity, and most are *much* older. It is either naive or arrogant of you to think that your religion (in this case, Christianity) is the lone bastion in all human history of people being in some way "reasonable" about their religion, above and beyond how poor that reason actually is.
By orders of magnitude, the Bible is still the most widely distributed and translated piece of writing on earth.
That is an appeal to popularity, and even though you probably don't realize it, it undermines your position anyway. Most of the people on Earth once thought it was flat, but that didn't make them right. As for the "most widely distributed" work of literature on Earth, it is still a minority view among humans! Most people aren't Christian; less than one in three are, and even that figure is a bit optimistic. Christianity is more popular than any individual religion,