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SETI Running Out of Money
New submitter opusman writes "According to an Australian space analyst, SETI is running out of money. Despite needing only $2 million a year, a relatively small amount in space industry terms, they are facing a financial crisis. From the article: 'Getting on board a spacecraft is tricky. There are few places for professional astronauts. Even when Richard Branson and a group of other visionaries makes space tourism more affordable, it will still cost huge sums to fly. But getting a foothold in the greatest quest of all can be done for just a few tens of donated dollars. Which is why it beggars belief that the SETI quest is on its knees.'"
Sounds like they need a Kickstart project.
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Like Fox Mulder I became cynical. He and I no longer believe in alien visitors. So no more donations.
Deceive
Inveigle
Obfuscate
BELIEVE THE LIE
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
My thought is that the only reason they're not finding anything is because the aliens are using gigahertz and terahertz frequencies to communicate on. And it's only now that we have some inkling that it's even possible. Or maybe they're not using radio at all. I mean, it's kind of an inefficient slow form of communication over long distances, if you think about it.
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It's quite sad that this happens now, when with the recent discoveries in exoplanets SETI could have actual targets for the first time instead of trying to find a needle in a haystack.
He started it, he could donate 40 years' worth of new budget and never even feel it.
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
Most people believe SETI to be pointless at this stage. We have a better grasp of the probabilities involved, and the odds are very high that SETI will never find anything, even if there are 100 other equivalent civilizations to ours within 100 light years.
I'm a supporter of SETI in principle, though I can't say I've ever supported it materially (other than a brief run at SETI@home when I was in university). Unfortunately I think it's simply a matter of priorities during economic downturn.
Up here in Canada, we have a program that also costs $2 million a year - the Experimental Lakes Area research station - and it's getting its funding cut by the federal government. It's upsetting to me, as I see valid science being disregarded in the name of fiscal responsibility.
That aside, the SETI program is likely to run, in one form or another, for the entirety of human existence. It may get shut down periodically, but this is not a question that's going to go away. Ever. Perhaps when our collective economies rejig themselves to be less focused on growth and more on sustainability, we can find room for a relatively cheap, pure science initiative. Until then, either donate directly to those initiatives you find appealing, or take whatever action you can at the ballot box. Or both, if you're feeling less apathetic than most of us!
. . . the intelligent life will probably NOT want anything to do with us anyway.
They'll just avoid us, like tourists not stopping in a bad neighborhood.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The money spent on space programs produce measurable, visible results. It also has milestones to show whether a project is on track, off track, or slipping.
For someone to support SETI, on the other hand, has to have faith that maybe tomorrow will lead to results and all those years spent waiting for something to happen wasn't lost opportunity cost.
Donating to SETI is perhaps more closely modeled on charity for religion rather than vis a vis to other space programs.
When I think SETI, I think of searching for radio signals. If that's changed, they need to put some effort into telling people what new methods they're using. Because their website still talks about signal processing and detecting alien technology. We now know that untargetted radio signals are not going to bridge the gaps between stars. The distance is just too great. We'll never pick up the Alpha Centauri version of I Love Lucy. So why is SETI still focused on trying to pick up alien radio signals?
The seti project was always a bit silly.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Why should I, or anyone else, donate money to the SETI institute? What tangible returns can I expect for my money?
It's nice that you feel they're involved in "the greatest quest of all," but I expect that most people would not agree. Besides not having much of a chance in succeeding any time soon, even if they did find evidence of extra terrestrial intelligence it would make almost no difference to people's daily lives. And the way things are going even if we did find ETI we'll be extinct as a species long before we could ever even communicate with them, let alone actually contact/meet them.
Besides, SETI Institute =/= SETI
What else could we be spending our money on? Projects like the James Webb Space Telescope or sending to humans to Mars would have certain benefits to humanity while spending money on SETI is likely to be a waste of money. If there were plenty of money to go around then I would have no problem spending the relatively meager 2 million USD on it. However, with things like they are, let's shelve SETI and direct our resources elsewhere.
Is there life on other planets in the galaxy? Probably.
Is there intelligent life on other planets in the galaxy? Maybe. There will be a lot more planets with only bacteria than there are planets with sentient beings.
Will we be able to detect planets with intelligent life? Even less likely.
If we find intelligent life then what? Presumably we're going to try to engage in a dialog. Is that really a good idea at this point in human development?
I can put my hard-earned money towards:
a) Fusion research, which might work in 30 years, or
b) SETI, which will NEVER find ET.
Guess where I'm putting my money.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
> gigahertz and terahertz frequencies
Or something else entirely. Look at our own communications, which are rapidly switching to all-digital. Unless you know how the digital is encoded/modulated/carried, all you're going to hear is random noise. And who says aliens use anything like we do?
I postulate that a technical civilization would only stick with radio for approximately 100-200 years before moving to something better -- and something that we probably don't even know how to listen to. When measured against just the age of our local group, that's very narrow odds.
Be better to spend the money actually GOING to the stars than just listening to them, in my opinion. :)
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
we humans may wipe ourselves out,
which from one point of view is just fine because we can't wipe out all terrestrial life.
however, it is quite conceivable that an extinction event could make us the last space-faring species this planet will ever see.
and if you accept the principle that 'life is a good thing',
then this implies that we have a moral imperative to get life itself off-planet and into the galaxy asap.
we should be building little bio-bombs full of spores, pollen, algae and other primary producers which are capable of handling
a few hundred years or millenia in interstellar space, and launching swarms of them to the top 200 closest planet-bearing stars.
somebody point me to kickstarter.
> gigahertz and terahertz frequencies
Or something else entirely. Look at our own communications, which are rapidly switching to all-digital. Unless you know how the digital is encoded/modulated/carried, all you're going to hear is random noise. And who says aliens use anything like we do?
I postulate that a technical civilization would only stick with radio for approximately 100-200 years before moving to something better -- and something that we probably don't even know how to listen to. When measured against just the age of our local group, that's very narrow odds.
Be better to spend the money actually GOING to the stars than just listening to them, in my opinion. :)
As I understand it one of the big markers that they look for is repetition, so ideally you want a signal of some kind that sends out the same stream of date repeatedly. I can't think of an earthly analogue right off the top of my head, perhaps like an alien commercial or something.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
Sorry, misunderstood the article on the first read. Still seems a rather silly comparison, as far fewer people are willing to fork over the cash for space tourism than donate to SETI.
SETI just doesn't seem that useful thanks to the inverse square law. Even with an antenna the size of Earth we couldn't pick up on background radio transmissions from neighboring star systems. For SETI to detect anything, all the following would have to happen:
* A reasonably advanced alien civilization would have to concurrently exist in our neighborhood.
* They would have to consider radio to be the most practical form of interstellar communication.
* They would have to construct a dish or array equivalent to Arecibo capable of sending a collimated multi-terawatt-equivalent radio beam into space.
* They would have to assemble a signal complex enough for us to distinguish it from natural sources, but not so complex we can't recognize it.
* They would have to transmit directly at Earth at the exact time (adjusting for travel delays) we are listening for signals from that precise direction on that specific frequency band.
I'll leave the odds on all that as an exercise to the reader.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
The question is not will all alien species use radio, neither is it a question about the relative benefits of going to the stars vs listening to them, the cost of going to the stars is currently around infinity, which means if we could afford to go to the stars we could afford to finance the seti project and still have enough money go to the stars.
The question is this: is it worthwhile spending 2 million per year listening for radio signals from other stars. I think it is, as 2 million is such an insignificant amount of money in terms of humanity's resources. We probably spend that each day on cocktail umbrellas.
Perhaps they can get extra funding by searching for this Higgs Boson thingy I keep hearing about.
There's got to be one out there some where...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Nah, I trust a couple geniuses among us are pretty good at pointing at something and saying "That's Not Right". (The rest of the decoding is a different problem.)
I think it's just the crappy distance problem. As a Civilization transmitting waves, we basically have only some 125 years. For the LightSpeed Distance problem, that's a pretty narrow window. Just because *now* we're ready, is the problem. "We want it all, and we want it now." It's our bad luck (for example) a civilization held together for 1000 years but at the time we were doing the Ancient Greece - Egyptian deal.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
How can you make such a definitive statement like "b"? Do you have some secret knowledge the rest of the scientific community doesn't?
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Unless you know how the digital is encoded/modulated/carried, all you're going to hear is random noise. And who says aliens use anything like we do?
you miss the point entirely.
it's not that we expect to overhear their personal or broadcast communications so much, but rather it's about listening for "hello, here we are" broadcasts or even directed transmissions. we can now locate habitable planets. such messages obviously wouldn't be encrypted, and would necessarily be something very simple that would have a high chance of being understood by completely alien species with different thought patterns, senses, and levels of technology.
for inspiration, check out the pioneer plaque,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque
that attempts to describe our location in the galaxy. or, the voyager golden record,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
showing mathematical and physical quantities, the solar system and its planets, DNA, and human anatomy and reproduction.
I believe Eric Idle said it best:
"Our universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
in all of the directions it can whiz;
As fast as it can go, that's the speed of light, you know,
twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
how amazingly unlikely is your birth;
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space,
'cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!"
-- Monty Python, Meaning of Life
--
So, can we have your liver, then?
Be better to spend the money actually GOING to the stars than just listening to them, in my opinion. :)
The Mars rovers including all mission extensions have cost almost a billion dollars and lasted less than ten years, so say $100 million/year. Shutting down SETI would then give you 2% of a Mars rover, want to make a guess at how infinitesimally small it'd be of an interstellar space ship? Not that we have the foggiest idea on how to build one... Space is absurdly big, Voyager 1 is 35 years out but less than 1/1000th of the way to the nearest star. Unless somebody is about to invent the warp drive, the only realistic chance of discovering alien life in the next 100 years - possibly next 1000 years - is to build huge, huge optical and radio telescopes, find earth-like exoplanets and ping them.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You're assuming a relatively trivial form of analog encoding. That's probably not the way that an advanced civilization would communicate unless they wanted to be found out. It's likely that they would channel hop according to an extremely long randomly generated pattern (i.e. a secret key known to both the sender and the receiver) that would make their transmission indistinguishable from the background noise.
Now, I know that the SETI institute assumes that ET wants to be found so don't read this as a straw man argument against them. I think they have a valid hypothesis. (I also think that hypothesis is wrong, but that's just my way of thinking about it.)
Only if you look at it from the perspective of digital 1's and 0's. If you look at it from the perspective of analog signals, you'll see square waves or sine waves on a frequency.
Actually, if you're using something like direct-sequence spread spectrum modulation over a wide bandwidth, it's really going to just look like noise that's *quieter* than the noise floor at the receiver. Unless you know what you're looking for, you're not going to be able to distinguish the signal from the background noise.
Of course, if aliens are at least as concerned about battery life as we are, they aren't going to be transmitting signals with so much excess power and with so much redundancy that the signals will reach us AND that we'll be able to decode them.
I was actually just wondering the other day if this would happen soon. They didn't really seem like a very solvent operation. However I do hope that they can get funds together. Private funds that is, the Government can't even afford to operate right now. I think a Kickstarter would be ideal, I'd like to see them give it a try. However, the rewards might be a bit tough.
"$1000 level - Dibs on a meet and greet with the first Aliens we find."
~theCzar
> As I understand it one of the big markers that they look for is repetition
But it would (at best) be a "complex" repetition. If you're handy with files, use a hex editor to look at a .WAV of some audio, then look at the equivalent in an .MP3. The latter looks like pure random gibberish (even though it's not). In a sense, the repetitions have been *removed* to achieve compression.
Our own HD Radio carriers are similar. They're highly compressed and sound like hissy white noise on an analog radio -- regardless of what we're broadcasting. I'm not saying that it can't be decoded (if it couldn't, there would be any point!). But you have to *know* how to decode that bitstream. What in the world makes anyone, SETI or otherwise, think that they can determine the format of any alien signal? They're just assuming that an alien people would use something that we would recognize and understand.
I have to be honest ... as much as I'm a booster of space exploration in general, I've never been a big fan of SETI. I think it's a marvelous waste of time. Just my opinion, and you know what those are worth, but rather than throwing money at them, I'd rather see everyone donate to an effort to, say, build a permanent colony on the moon or in an asteroid.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
I've said this for years, but it makes diehard seti fanatics angry.
SETI is looking for the wrong things.
Your argument against radio communications is dead on. interstellar flight capable aliens would almost certainly not be using radio waves as their primary way of making calls.
Instead, look to hard science and physics to get an idea of something that an FTL capable species would have to be creating, if they travel regularly:
Gravity waves.
More specifically, we need realtime analysis of the CBR. An alien ship zipping across the galaxy at FTL speed is going to leave a gravity shockwave behind it, like the wake on an ocean liner. Realtime measurements of the CBR, cross-referenced over time will highlight the major "shipping lanes", if any exist.
It would also be a major boon to cosmologists, in and of itself.
So... Seti should stop fighting the cosmologists. They should stop trying to compete for money. They should agree that they both need better tools, and collaborate to make those tools real, than share the data feeds.
This "but ..but..... radios!" Nonsene has to end.
Like the colonization of the Americas, the subjugation of India and China .....
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Absolutely! Then again, SETI isn't that big of a waste. And who knows, maybe the horse will learn to sing. But in the meantime, you're right, I'd love to see a lunar colony in my lifetime. In 1969, as I watched the first human touch booted foot on the moon, I was imagining in my mind that in 20 years it would be possible for me to buy a ticket to visit that place! But that jerk Nixon, even as he was congratulating Neil Armstrong for his historic achievement, was already plotting to gut the space program. I want to mine Jupiter for hydrogen to fuel our industries! I want to end smelting of iron ore here on earth in favor of doing it in the asteroid belt! But the short-sighting IDIOTS in politics can only see as far as the next election (if that). It makes me sick to think about it.
"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance."
Stories like this contribute to my growing generalized cynicism and pessimism. I have no connection to SETI, but it seems to me like an honest, modest effort at discovery which could change humanity's perspective forever - one way or the other. And it's starving for funds that represent less than the annual property tax bills of Larry Ellison, Steve Ballmer, and Bill Gates on their homes. To me, this is a bright red flashing light on the societal annunciator panel that something's wrong with our priorities. If I had a $10 million net worth, I'd include $10K to SETI in my annual donation program. As it is, it will be much less. I hope that those of you who can do more, will. Thanks.
Persistance of effort is certainly a key in the search for intellegent life. While the likelihood of finding an interesting signal is small for this year it greatly improves over time. Compare SETI to the annual revnue and tangeble results of the movie or video game industry. Why not kick in at least the price of a movie ticket or game app? We can't win if you don't pay. Economically we are talking about a small fraction of the budget of a single hollywood production. Arguments that we can't afford this effort as a society are seriously laughable. An interuption in the SETI instutue effort would not be at all logical despite "limited resources." I am cyical about nearly everything. I still believe strongly that a continued and refining effort is likely to find an interesting signal at some point and from this invalueable lessons will be learned. We can't really determine the probability since we don't know how many signals there are in our space-time neigborhood but we will never know the answer to that if we don't look.
> the fact it happened 10 times is an indicator of something.
Not necessarily, not unless you assume that aliens think as we do. Youngster, I'm old enough to remember when pulsars were first discovered (back in the 60's) and there was all sorts of speculation that they might be a signal from a distant intelligent race. After all, the pulses, while containing no discernible information, were as regular as clockwork! And the frequencies were PRECISE and invariable! :)
So, let's contrive an example. Somewhere out in space is a weird binary stellar system, one in which a big, gaseous giant with strange elements in its outer layers is spilling this stew onto a dwarf. (In other words, similar to the rig-up for a nova, but with key differences.) The dwarf regularly fuses this stewed garbage, cranking out a hash of very complex signals. Between that system and earth, though, is another binary system (maybe even dark matter; who knows?), rapidly rotating, that periodically occludes it. Thus, we meet your criteria: for all we "know," it's a signal containing information, and it's being repeated!
OK, so that's not terribly likely, but it illustrates the point: even if SETI should detect a signal that sounds for all the world like it's an extraterrestrial intelligence, how will we know for sure? Even if it IS a signal from aliens, why do you assume that they think as we do? Maybe their idea of "communication" is something completely and entirely different.
Nah, let's put the money in actually going OUT there.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
Your example says absolutely nothing about violation of causality due to a change in the maximum speed at which information can propagate. You are either describing a situation in which there is improper time coordination, or you are assuming time travelling signals to start with.
While there are no known methods by which information can propagate faster than light...
If something were to be discovered which could do this it would not necessarily violate causality, it would merely prove that relativity is either incorrect or incomplete (even if it were to allow instantaneous travel to any point in the universe, and the new maximum speed is therefore infinite.)
In order to violate causality you would need to be able to receive a message you sent before you sent it.
Instant propagation of information would likely allow a universal clock across all space, and you could coordinate time by that. You would need to adjust for the faster travel time if you are synchronizing your clock based on the speed of light, but it would be trivial to do that anyway.
Under relativity it is undefined what would happen if you could travel faster than light, as the theory does not allow this. It is basically not usable in this case, and trying to do so would be foolish (it simply does not cover what you want to do, and you obviously have information that Einstein did not when he came up with it if you are communicating FTL.)
If I could send this post beyond the edge of the known universe and back with zero travel time I still cannot read it before it is written, and causality remains very much intact.
The only thing that would change is that if you are three light hours away, I could get a message to you three hours before an electromagnetic signal would be capable of. We would be able to converse in real time instead of with the delay, nothing else.
If you could produce the post I just wrote before I wrote it, you would have a causality violation. No rate of travel allows this, no matter how large it is.
I am not sure why this is so hard for many people to understand.
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
It is most likely that heaven and hell are not even part of this time–space limited dimension.
So true. Ditto Narnia.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
human anatomy and reproduction.
So our first message to the rest of the universe is porn. Gotcha.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
I'm not going to check, but I think I've already replied to you elsewhere.
No, I'm afraid gravity propagates at C, which is the same as the maximum speed of light. If the Sun randomly vanished, no effect from that would reach us for 8 minutes- Earth would continue to orbit around the spot where the Sun had been for 8 minutes before the change in the gravitational field reached us. In Relativity, there are no cheats to get around C- it is the maximum speed for any form of matter, energy or information to travel, full stop.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_gravity
Thank you for your reply. Every other reply stemming from my post has been idiotic and deeply ignorant.
Suppose the aliens evolved on the dark side of a tidally locked planet and are busy braodcasting light signals at us?
More seriously though it's about timing. The longest a human civilisation has survived is a few thousand years. Assume the aliens broadcast "hello universe" for a few thousand years, what are the chances of SETI listening at the same time their broadcast reaches us? If the earth hadn't been hit by a random event 65 million years ago, SETI would be not be here now. SETI may have happened thousands or millions of years ago or may be millions of years on the future.
Art is the mathematics of emotion
Yeah, really suspicious, what with the position being posted on Wikipedia as the Wow! signal (named by a SETI researcher themselves) and linked to from even the SETI homepage.
There's no "cover up", they couldn't do a damn thing that would reproduce the signal, nor could thousands of independent scientists who looked at the same places. If it was a cover up, you wouldn't have pictures of the printed output with "Wow!" written on it, the exact coordinates, or hear about it anywhere.
There's nothing special about the Arecibo telescope - it's old, decrepit, outclassed and there's thousands of the damn things out there. And people with those telescopes have looked into that signal and region many times since trying to reproduce it. And found NOTHING. At worst, it was a spy sat wandering across the sky that they're not allowed to say they can see up there or just completely random blip.
It's like thinking you heard a tiny click in the night. You don't rush up, run around the house, start knocking down walls looking for an intruder. You listen harder, and if you hear anything else THEN you act. And if you don't hear anything - back to sleep.
The Wow! signal was sent "back to sleep" decades ago. Seriously, 1977, one barely-increasing signal on one radio telescope and NOTHING since then, even looking into that EXACT position. Hell, the scientists in Italy thought they'd messed up the speed of light and it turned out to be a faulty connector on a fibre optic cable. These things happen, times one billion.
SETI shouldn't be scrapped because they "missed" anything. They should be scrapped because the chances of them finding ANYTHING (even in a highly populated universe full of ultra-intelligent beings) is so ludicrously close to zero, and there's BUGGER ALL we can do if they do find anything (and it's been suggested, by Hawking no less, that the best strategy for human survival is to keep our mouths shut and not respond!), that even penny spent would be better placed on just travelling to the Moon, let alone communicating with a possibly distant "civilisation" whose speed-of-light communications time is probably on the order of millions, if not billions of years.