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SETI Finds Funds For the Allen Telescope Array (For Now)
Ransak writes "It looks as if SETI has met its short term funding goal to restart the Allen Telescope Array. Is crowdsourcing the long term future of pure research projects?"
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At least there's still a significant number of people interested in space.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
>Is crowdsourcing the long term future of pure research projects?"
It is in the US if the current budget news is any indication....
It certainly indicates that there is a very healthy support on the ground for scientific research endeavours such as this. Could the same thing be said for research projects that are a little dryer? Who can say...
Despite that I am very happy for SETI to have received this funding and I am looking forward to seeing more fresh data coming from this project. Even more so that they did not need to shut down the cryogenic components.
Is crowdsourcing the long term future of pure research projects?"
Why not? God knows funding from the government isn't safe anymore.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Not sure it was a waste but I think the assumptions need to be revisited before throwing more money at it. If ET were broadcasting in the EM spectrum SETI should have detected a signal by now. Either we are looking at the wrong frequencies, or the signals are beneath the SN ratio, or ET isn't broadcasting in the EM spectrum.
Finding the funding for an alien telescope array is the first step in actually finding the alien telescope array itself...
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Fund a telescope array, feed the needy, keep non-profit hospitals open, invest in the local electric car startups, go part time at work and volunteer at the local EFF. I'm willing to bet you can spend your money better than the government can. Crowdsourcing could be the way of the future of the government would just get off your backs.
No more bridges to nowhere and tax refunds for G.E.
No more occupations, murder and wars.
Liberty.
SETI, like all other religious endeavours, should be funded on donations by its adherents alone. The government has no business subsidising it.
And yes, SETI is about as scientific as Intelligent Design. The whole fundament of SETI is a belief that something must be out there, with no better theoretical basis than the Drake Equation.
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Actually, and I can't remember who said this, maybe some here can, but I remember reading how the odds that SETI would find squat would be so low as to be non-existent simply because there is only a teeny tiny window if you use our world as a model because one progresses from "blasting EM everywhere" to highly localized signals that don't go anywhere so quickly.
Look at how quickly we went from nothing to analog "blast EM everywhere" to tight digital sat signals. What 100 years? In space time that would be less time than a girl's little squeaky fart. So even if there were tens of thousands of races out there, and they all used the same EM bands we did the amount of time their signal was sent out into the cosmos was so damned tiny you would have to watch the entire sky simultaneously to have any hope at all and even then it would be teeny tiny odds. it is like a blind man trying to find a needle in Nebraska and the needle is moved randomly.
So while I thought the golden records were fine, hell it didn't really cost much to throw those on a ship we were launching anyway, I have to wonder if our limited resources wouldn't be better spent in studying our own solar system instead of hunting for ET. Hell even if we found ET it isn't like we could do a damned thing about it, the distances are simply too great. But if folks are willing to put up the cash because they are looking for ET? More power to ya, free country and all that.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Read the original SETI report (NASA SP-419) - from its inception, SETI didn't expect to overhear information-bearing signals. Instead, it was looking for deliberately generated 'beacons' - high-powered, spectrally dense transmissions. These should be detectable over distances of the order of several thousand light-years.
Nobody expected to find a new continent by going around the planet to India.
It's not a question of what we're looking for - it's a question of what we might find, and that, IMO, is what makes SETI worth keeping.
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
Shouldn't the "invisible hand of the market" have fixed this?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The way I see it is this: One of the way science and engineering advance, is when a difficult arbitrary goal is set with enough conviction. We try to reach to it, putting a lot of resources into it. Along the way, we are forced to solve difficult engineering problems and gain scientific insights. War is one way to achieve this (and certainly gets its share of resources) but trying to find life elsewhere or putting man on Mars, for example, is a much more pleasant way to do it.