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SETI Pioneer Jill Tarter Retires
ananyo writes "After 35 years, astronomer Jill Tarter is retiring from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) — a field she helped pioneer and popularize, most recently at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Tarter, who inspired the late Carl Sagan to create the fictional character Ellie Arroway, heroine of the book and movie Contact, says she will instead focus her efforts on what she calls 'the search for intelligent funding.'"
The SETI Institute does solicit private funding. There also is nothing preventing private projects from popping up to monitor radio signals. Please inform yourself, rather than spewing inaccurate ideology.
Not limited to actually finding aliens but looking at everything coming out of SETI: What good has come out of SETI so far?
I don't think that's a valid argument.
Imagine a game that gives you a million times your bet once every thousand tries. It would be reasonable to play that game. Not winning any of the first hundred times wouldn't change the reasonability of playing that game.
Maybe you dont't value as high as I do the results of finding there's extraterrestrial intelligence. I do think it would change humanity in a fundamental way and it's such a big price that the current cost of trying is negligible.
Such a big price that if I were to define humanity's priorities, finding whether we're alone would probably fall in my top twenty.
No letting the free market fund this would be a first.
Already happened. The SETI Institute has been in the market for almost twenty years. The market may be far from "free" and I see that the Institute wouldn't spurn public funding, if it came their way. But the Institute has depended heavily on private funding and resources for almost 20 years. That's as free market as you're going to get in today's economic and political climate for research.
I am fairly certain that a lot of good work has been done by the SETI Institute in terms of science (e.g. consistent monitoring of parts of the RF spectrum and identifying new sources) and engineering (e.g. signal processing and distributed computing). Of course, I would also love to find an extraterrestrial funding.
But the Intelligent Funding has never been with SETI. When SETI started, we did not even know if extrasolar planets existed. Smart money would say that they did, since the abundance of stars in our galaxy alone puts the odds in favour of there being an awful lot of planets out there, but we only had a rough idea of how planetary systems formed based upon a sample of one. That left major gaps in our knowledge, such as the probability of finding a planet around any given star and what the composition of those planets would be. Even our present knowledge of extrasolar planets is skewed because of observational limitations.
There remain many limitations to the idea of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. Searching for weak signals is challenging even if you knew what to look for and where to look. Because of that, I believe that the Intelligent Funding should be directed towards astronomical research that would lay down a foundation for a real SETI in the future. This would be things like finding and characterizing extrasolar planets, creating better models of star formation (particularly with respect to the protoplanetary disc), and getting a better handle on the chemistry of the objects that we are observing.
Well, the thing is that this is not a game that gives a million every thousand tries. Instead it will give a complete surprise - maybe a million bucks, maybe a bullet to the head. Why do you assume that result of finding aliens will be positive development? There are at least three possible scenarios with unknown probability of happening: 1) Welcome, lesser developed culture! Let us give you all our cool alien tech, cure cancer and end world hunger. 2) So you are humans? Nice, we don't really care. Go away and stop bothering us. Or maybe "Solaris" kind of contact. 3) Oh hello you poor defenseless bastards. We were just in a need of new food source/hunting ground/slave labour.
SETI helps our reach to exceed our grasp. What else are the heavens for?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Unless we find intelligent life living on Saturn, they're going to be a very long ways away. Far enough to be extremely useful in the "stop being solar-centric, stop thinking some magical God invented man, everyone grow the fuck up" kind of way. But so far there's no plausible possibility of external risk at all. I'd be more worried about the religious zealots (of all denominations) and how they're going to react to having their minds forcefully opened to a bigger world.
The three scenarios you listed have essentially zero possibility of happening. Science rules the universe, not science fiction.
We now know how not to find aliens. Sounds like a joke, but in all seriousness, we didn't know that before we tried and it's a very useful thing to know. This doesn't answer the question of whether aliens exist (a question that can never be definitively answered "no"), but it does answer the question of whether they're so ubiquitous that you can't help but detect them by trying.
Ummmmm.... no. I am disappointed how many folks don't get "free markets". Market forces are powerful but they are motivated by profit. Nothing wrong with this, but as intelligent citizens, we need to understand how this works and their limitations.
One limitation is that if profit cannot be privatized, then there is little if any incentive for market dollars to pursue R&D or other activities. Where is the profit in finding ET? Even if you come up with an answer, then how do you limit the profit to those who make the discovery. You can't. So, market dollars will not pursue this project. This means you are looking for a benefactor or a government entity to fund this. There is nothing wrong with government funding of projects that the free market would not undertake... as long as there is a public good to the investment.
So, no, the free market is not a magic bullet to solve every problem.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I am really looking forward to the day when SETI announces evidence of an intelligent signal from deep space. Not only will it be exciting to learn about out interstellar neighbors, it will be great fun watching young earth creationists develop wild and elaborate denials of the existence of extraterrestrial life. Let's have very thorough background screenings of stargate workers this time, please.
Ask me about my sig!
In many ways she is SETI and she is definitely the soul of SETI. She isn't throwing in the towel but it still feels that way. It was sad Sagan didn't live to see first contact but to potentially stop looking during Miss Tarter's life makes me feel like it is truly hopeless. The science is there but the will as a society isn't. SETI could be funded for a 100 years for 1/10th of one percent of what we just spent banging our dicks on the table in Iraq and Afghanistan but it'll never happen. Having her retire so she can devote a 100% of her time to look for funding is a crime against science and a serious waste of creative talent. The movie Contact made an excellent point. Hollywood lately is spending more each year making aliens attack Earth films than SETI has spent in it's entire history. EACH YEAR! Most people think there has been a serious effort and they found nothing. What has been done to date is the equivalent of looking under one rock in a dry valley in Antarctica and declaring there is no life on Earth.
With all due respect, I would probably be able to plausibly argue as an astrophysicist (but not a SETI-affiliated one) that I do have "an appreciation of the scale of the universe, the limitations that Einsteinian physics places on communication and exploration of it, the incredible odds of finding coincidental intelligent life in close proximity to us on the kind of time scale and size scale of a 14 billion year old, 14 billion light year diameter universe". After 35 years in the field, Jill Tarter probably does, too.
Your position is not an unreasonable one to adopt, even if I think that characterizing SETI as "just a time sink for big children" is unfair, sounds fairly juvenile itself and makes your argument sound weaker than it actually is.
I personally feel, however, that while the SETI effort is like looking for a nearby needle in universe full of haystacks (and the SETI folk have never claimed otherwise), the cultural, philosophical and other implications of scoring an admittedly spectacularly unlikely "hit" are worth the relatively modest investment. A big chunk of SETI's money already comes from private donations these days, anyway, and a lot more public money has been wasted on totally pointless things totally lacking the world-changing implications of something like SETI.
And in the meantime, they've (at the very least) been able to do some interesting things in terms of radio telescope technology and other research, and inspired a bunch of kids and adults to think enthusiastically about science.