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?"

Comments

Money

[identity0]

>Is crowdsourcing the long term future of pure research projects?"

It is in the US if the current budget news is any indication....

Welcome to the libertarian viewpoint.

[7-Vodka]

Welcome to the libertarian viewpoint. We do away with income tax and you get to spend your money on things you care about. Put it to use where it's most efficient.

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.

Re:Welcome to the libertarian viewpoint.

[Arlet]

I'm willing to bet you can spend your money better than the government can

Yes, for some things. The free market is excellent at solving some problems. Government is good at solving other problems, and usually government programs are created after people notice that the free market isn't taking care of it.

Re:Welcome to the libertarian viewpoint.

[macraig]

Riiiight... and if we took your profound advice, every stretch of road would be owned by some corporation, there would be no "highway neutrality", and we'd wind up paying multiple tolls to drive anywhere... because the government wouldn't be allowed to tax anyone to collectively buy off the builders of the roads for the ownership (and CONTROL) of them. Who do you suppose paid for all the roads you traverse every single day for free? The government... WITH TAXES. Exactly how would you propose crowdsourcing our streets and national highway system?

Why do you think we're having these endless debates about "network neutrality" now? It's precisely because the government - WE - didn't insist on retaining ownership of all the telegraph, telephone, and telecommunications wires that companies like AT&T have been laying for more than a century. It's shared infrastructure, just like highways, and it should have been our government - us - paying to retain ownership (and control) of those wires... with taxes If we had done that, we wouldn't be worrying about network neutrality now because the wires would be TRULY neutral.

This is the way it's supposed to be

[mvdwege]

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

Re:This is the way it's supposed to be

[Arlet]

SETI is testing the hypothesis that something is out there.

No, they are testing that something is out there (but not too far), with a powerful transmitter, and using a big dish aimed at us at exactly the same time we are aiming our dish at them.

Everything else is too weak to detect.

Re:This is the way it's supposed to be

[TheRaven64]

SETI is perfectly scientific. You have a hypothesis ("There is intelligent life in the universe trying to communicate with us."), and conduct an experiment to test it.

So, if SETI is scientific, what outcome of the experiment would falsify their hypothesis? It is equally scientific to hypothesise that God exists and is watching us and test it by the experiment of staring at the sky and trying to spot him.

A real scientific theory makes predictions that can either be supported or contradicted by experiment. SETI makes no falsifiable predictions, and is therefore faith, not science.

Re:This is the way it's supposed to be

[Anonymous Coward]

A real scientific theory makes predictions that can either be supported or contradicted by experiment. SETI makes no falsifiable predictions, and is therefore faith, not science.

I think you have an overly black and white view of the way science works. It's rarely as simple as "we run experiment X and if we see (do not see) Y then we accept (reject) theory Z.". Often you can only make statements like "given assumptions A, B, C we can excluded this region of parameter space of theory Z at the 95% confidence level." That doesn't mean theory Z is unscientific or that the experiment is worthless.

Re:This is the way it's supposed to be

[grumbel]

And yes, SETI is about as scientific as Intelligent Design.

That's bullshit. SETI does not proclaim that alien live exist, it doesn't proclaim anything. SETI is simply looking for it and they aren't exactly hiding the fact that they haven't found anything. In so far its not much different from a biologist or archaeologist running through a jungle or desert looking for interesting things, he might find something or not.

Intelligent Design is vastly different, as they proclaim to already have the answer and then try to support it with fraudulent evidence, ignoring a far better theory that already explains everything they try to explain.

The whole fundament of SETI is a belief that something must be out there, with no better theoretical basis than the Drake Equation.

It's not a believe, its an assumption that there might be something out there and you can't know how false or true it is until you start looking. Also the Drake Equation isn't the theoretical basis for SETI, its not even a theory in the first place, its just a fancy why of saying "I wonder how likely intelligent live would be?". It was meant to foster discussion on a conference some decades ago, not hard science.

Re:James Webb

[hairyfeet]

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.

Why was there a need for this?

[denzacar]

Shouldn't the "invisible hand of the market" have fixed this?