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Why Not Fund SETI With a Lottery Bond?
KentuckyFC writes "The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence or SETI is one of the highest profile projects in science. And yet its biggest challenge is in generating the funds required to scour the skies for signs of intelligent life. Government funding agencies generally ignore SETI so most funding comes from wealthy patrons such as Paul Allen who has donated $30 million for the construction of a radio interferometer designed to scour the skies for signs of ET. But the lack of other donors means this facility is still incomplete and only partially operational. But one astrobiologist has a solution. Why not create a lottery bond that allows investors to buy shares that yield a fixed rate of interest but also generates enough cash to fund ongoing SETI projects? To add an element of spice, this bond is also a lottery: when the search finally succeeds, a subset of the shareholders will receive a payout from the kitty. This is a fund that is likely to have global appeal but will need a financial institution willing and capable of taking it on. Any suggestions?"
SETI is a lottery already!
Why not sell stock instead and then I can short it all the way to the bottom?
Realistically we probably will not find anything unless they happen to be close *and* using tech we use. Our local sun and local planet gives off quite a large amount of spectral noise. In addition to our local galaxy giving off quite a large amount of noise too.
Right now not very practical.
But sure I like your financial ideas. I am sure someone will mange to screw you.
It won't fly - everyone wants to start a lottery. It's gambling - it's a money faucet.
Right now lotteries seem like such great moneymakers, so exceptionally high in value, because they are so controlled and there aren't so many of them.
Also - gambling fuels gambling addicts - and the people who can least afford it tend to be the ones who spend the most on this. It's bad.
EOM
Why not just a SETI lottery?
I'm absolutely serious - I've bought precisely ONE lottery ticket my whole life (knowing statistically that my likelihood of winning is the maximum at that point*). So I'm not really a "lottery player".
But I'd cheerfully buy SETI lottery tickets - one-third of the gross goes to a the pot-winner, 2/3 goes to SETI funding. Hell, it's better return-odds than many Kickstarters.
*I didn't win.
-Styopa
... is the phrase "WHEN the search finally succeeds" (emphasis added). There is not a single good explanation of why it has not succeeded already, which is a red flag that we are missing something fundamental about the nature of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Support microSD: in a post 9/11 world, it is unwise to carry your data on media that you cannot comfortably swallow.
In the off chance that I win, my first phone call will be to Gilbert Levin, the Principal Investigator on the Viking Labeled Release (LR) experiment that gave ambiguous results.
LR was developed by Levin as a way to assay sewage treatment plant effluent without having to wait days for streaked culture plates to show anything. By using a radioactive tracer, organisms can be detected at exceedingly low levels and very quickly by the radio-traced metabolism products.
Levin has been claiming that the Viking LR indeed detected life on Mars, and he has been pleading and scheming to get a "Chiral LR" life-sciences payload onto the surface of Mars to follow up. With NASA, it is nothing doing on this score since the Viking controversy -- they simply don't want to touch another life detection experiment for some reason. I thought the largely British Polar Lander was supposed to have a Levin experiment on it, but it crashed.
On the off chance that I win at Powerball, on the chance that this is enough money to fund a Mars mission, especially after the gummint gets its tax payments, and the chance the rocket works and the payload lands softly on Mars and everything else, and maybe on the remote chance that there is life on Mars and that Gil Levin's improved Labeled LR convinces people, Gilbert Levin will be awarded a Nobel Prize and become and immortal historical figure.
As for me, maybe I will go down in history as the chump who gave up his Powerball winnings?
What, would we stop after finding just one sign of intelligent life?
1. That planets with intelligent life are RF emitters.
2. That planets with intelligent life will remain planets with intelligent life,
3. That as tech advances, intelligent life will continue to emit sufficient RF to be detectable at interstellar distances.
We don't have real numbers for ANY of those values, making any calculation of odds unworkable. Me. . . I'll play the PowerBall: at least those odds are calculatable. . . (grin)
The odds of winning an Ultimate Frisbee Tournament > odds of winning lottery > odds of getting approval for lottery > odds of finding ETI
If you make a payout if SETI finds alien life, you suddenly give a financial motive to finding it. It could taint the results. Next Wow Signal we find and suddenly you'll have people who paid into it saying it's proof, and scientists saying it isn't. Lawyers will become involved.
Too messy if you ask me.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
If SETI doesn't make money, aside from donations, where does the cash to pay the bond interest come from? If it comes from other people buying bonds, then that's a pyramid/ponzi scheme.
1 - Point out to the military that, now that Kepler has discovered lots of new planets, any aliens living there almost certainly hate us because of out freedoms.
2 - Suggest that they budget for a top-secret signals intelligence gathering exercise designed to eavesdrop on these alien e-mails, TV stations and mobile phone chatter
3 - ?
4 - Profit!
And that's how things ought to stand for everything — except the handful of things the government is explicitly charged with under the Constitution: defense and law-enforcement.
If it is a good idea, you'll have no problems finding "wealthy patrons". On the other hand, a bad idea is likely to find sponsors among law-makers, or the government bureaucrats in those "funding agencies", to whom the said law-makers have delegated their funding decisions. Not spending their own money, they'll find an excuse. Heck, some of them are under pressure to fund something — or risk being suspected of loafing...
Taxes are collected at the gun-point (implicit in all tax-collection). Spending them on anything not explicitly provided for by the Constitution — be it SETI or school-lunches or corn-subsidies — is a travesty.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
And SETI is and will forever be a LOSER !! Never will there be anything heard !!
Only if the pesky aliens will text me the winning lottery number.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Your base premise that it's high profile science might be a bit off. It takes some astounding leaps of faith to believe we will catch aliens in that period of high power but simple RF emissions. Or that they would be sending some form of beacon.
Granted if I were able to direct all basic science R&D budget it would be toward dirt cheap safe industrial scale fusion power generation.
No sir I dont like it.
I believe we should fund STI (Search for Terrestrial Intelligence) first! Especially in our country, the USA!
This is a just a Ponzi scheme. Interest payments are paid out of new investments since no cash is being generated. At time of maturity, where are the payouts supposed to come from?
Finance professor at major research institution
I recommend you post a faux question to slashdot, and reveal your plan to collect contributions in what will appear to be a casual aside.
Yes, Allen?
Aside from the task at hand I'm sure there is a plethora of other information that SETI yields. It would be nice if all data was published in an easily consumable format. The resulting data could be a nice carrot to entice people to help crowdfund the effort.
>> So investors purchase shares that the yield a fixed rate of interest until SETI succeeds.
So basically, they want to buy something they can't afford by borrowing on the hopes of being able to afford it later. Dumb.
I like the lottery part of the idea better (if it's legal). Spend 90% of the lottery proceeds and invest 10% for the future winner or to pay of dinner at Milliways, whichever comes first.
+1 for challenging widely accepted beliefs.
-2 for not doing the math.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
So maybe it deserves to be funded by lottery! (Hint: Those super-sensitive radar or radio receivers make excellent satellite spotters)
Where will the money come from to make interest payments to the bondholders? Where will the money come from to return the principal to the bondholders at maturity?
If this is an example of the brilliance of the people at the Blue Marble Institute for Space Science in Seattle, they should not be funded for anything. Nothing. Nohow.
People have always been free to donate to SETI either financially or with compute time. The fact that the project can't self-fund means that people have voted with their dollars.
Why are we even talking about this?
[I'm not arguing the merits of the program, I used to donate compute time]
Why are we even talking about this?
Their parents *finally* kicked them out of the basement; they need to raise cash to find a new place to live.
We use radio telescopes to listen for stars and other celestial objects. One would assume these produce massive rf emissions. Has anyone done the math and determined if the transmitters currently used on this planet could be heard in other solar systems? Would our equipment detect them if installed there? Are our transmissions able to overcome the radio interference that would be common out there? Is there even a point to SETI?
Are we expecting alien races to use transmitters as powerful or more powerful than our own? And what subset of known space is actually a viable source at the power levels we use for communication?
Unfortunately, most states have a monopoly on lotteries. Otherwise, there would be many uses for lotteries. For example, savings can be encouraged with a lottery (prize-linked savings):
http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/lottery-savings-accounts
http://freakonomics.com/2012/04/26/lottery-loopholes-and-deadly-doctors-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/
Did they forget the part where they have to pay out those interest payments, and the principal, and the stupid lottery at the end too?
What revenue are they planning to pay those payments with? More bonds? Do they think they are the US government or Madoff?
It won't find anything, it's as simple as that. ;-)
I also wouldn't consider it one of the highest profile projects in science. Maybe I wouldn't even consider it science
Better invest the money into important earth-related projects.
How long ago was a concept such as radio ridiculous? Some 150 years?
I would suggest that such aliens have something better than radio to use. Yes, they might have used it for a few hundred years, but that is a thin slice of time to catch it
You nailed it. Not many people stop to consider this. It might be in the back of their minds, but they ignore it because the goal of SETI is just so exciting.
1. If the alien civilization is advanced enough to truly travel the galaxy (exceeding the speed of light), you can bet your house they already know about us -- and that they've decided to leave us alone, same as we've decided to create nature preserves and leave the gorillas alone. We are talking about technology we can't even imagine yet, and probably couldn't comprehend with our brains even if we had the blueprints. They can probably just "push a button" from clear across the galaxy and instantly know everything about us. They don't need or want to communicate with us, and won't for thousands of years (assuming we haven't gone extinct by then). They are probably waiting to see if we do in fact blow ourselves up.
2. If they can't yet exceed the speed of light, then (as you said) we are searching for a signal from that tiny sliver of technological evolution where they sent radio waves into space (as we do now). By the time the signal reaches us, they are either indistinguishable from gods (not wanting or needing to communicate with us), or extinct. Granted, receiving such a signal would still confirm that somebody was out there, at some time in the past.
I personally think this is something that has to be stumbled upon, rather than sought out. It will be something like one day noticing that an entire solar system has mysteriously relocated itself.
So he's ahead by 1! /joke
Aside from the actual task at hand, SETI may produce a plethora of other helpful information as a byproduct. Perhaps the folks at SETI should look into crowdfunding their efforts and in exchange they could provide scientific data an easily consumable formats. They could also take a look at crowdfunding under the Jobs Act (title III).
Are we intentionally sending out radio traffic in a tight beam that could be heard by others. Are we expecting them to do what we wont do?
When we discover solid evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, winning a lottery might not be the most important thing on our minds.
Much better to spend money to create better technology than to pour it into the current scheme to find extraterrestrial life.
If you want to play a lottery with the lowest odds by far, SETI is your "best bet"
If I buy a ticket and SETI discovers aliens, do I win?
Or lose?
You're looking at this from the wrong direction. Do we, today, look at the telegraph as ridiculous, or do we have ready knowledge of it and its operation? Granted, it's been around in the last 150 years, but the point still stands - once a technology is known, it is rarely forgotten to the level in question.
Let's use the Search for Terrestrial Intelligence to fund the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence! Only seems fair.
GStreamer - The only way to stream!
PONZI?
Answer: More or less no one.
Who will be listening to radio in 150 years?
Answer: More or less no one.
The time window to hear or detect someone, while looking in the right direction, makes winning the lotto look easy.
SETI is a nice idea, I'm all for the idea in principle, but the current plan? Waste of time.
Between radio SETI and optical SETI, new technology is inevitable, technology that can be patented or sold. Isolating data from a planet orbiting a star is going to require variable interferometry of a sort we don't yet have. New algorithms will be needed, as you can't sift through billions of channels for information content efficiently with what we have.
This means you can have a well-defined ROI even if nothing is ever found. And that means you can value SETI in terms of that ROI, which means you can float SETI on the market. Make it something with worth defined in terms others can understand.
Just as importantly, make it something the government regrets ignoring. They can talk all they like about the benefits of private enterprise, but they have legal restrictions on buying foreign technology or using the services of people without clearance. Signals analysis is signals analysis, meaning Russia and China will likely be involved in any open research, meaning the US will have all kinds of legal hoops to jump through. That or buy the shares in some way, thus funding the work and keeping sigint stuff out of the hands of imagined enemies.
In short, use the obsession with private funds to back Five Eyes against the wall. Give these nations no choice but to give SETI the money needed.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I've been running this screen saver on various machines for years. Last night, I took look at it running data from 2009, and I've been wondering? Are they recycling old data? And more to the point since there are other Bionic projects out there, is there a more fruitful use for my computer's spare cycles? Something that might actually have an expectation of positive return to humanity. At the very least, seti is going to have to start sharing time with other more relevant Bionic projects. I'm still thinking of terminating my participation altogether, as much as I still have enthusiasm for space itself.
Or, God forbid, paying off some national debt...
How about a SETI casino? House odds to generate funds on the ET gamble.
The time window to hear or detect someone, while looking in the right direction, makes winning the lotto look easy.
At least on this planet, transmissions are rarely just a single push to talk, or even just a few. The frequency is reused multiple times, or even constantly on a carrier. Spectral displays can show activity across very large bands, and automatic reporting and recording of the activity isn't that difficult.
All that said, I agree that I'd place my money on winning the lottery many, many times before anyone finds ET.
Just another day in Paradise
I'd rather fund something that actually fucking matters, like new techniques and technologies that help us live on the other planets in our solar system, or new propulsion technologies, or medical advances to help with the problems inherent in living in those environments.
I'm not disputing that finding intelligent life in the universe wouldn't be sorta cool, but it's intrinsicly worthless since message travel time is so long, and we have no viable means to make it to the signal origin. Search for life *after* you've dealt with the show-stopping problems of space travel.
test
You're completely missing the point morgauxo made. Is there some pie-in-the-sky subspace transceiver or fatline or something we haven't discovered yet? Maybe. Probably not. There are no indications of "loopholes" or "gee we don't know why" on the macro scale anymore. Radio looks as good as the universe will permit.
I was doing a few back-of-the-napkin figures the other day. The big problem that SETI has is that in order to be effective, it has to operate over timeframes measured in millenniums, and it could be many centuries before it finds anything. Humans are completely unproven when it comes to those timescales. The only way it'll probably work is if other civilizations have set up some kind of beacon. The only way we'd ever set up a beacon is if SETI found evidence that there was anyone to broadcast to in the first place. Maybe other intelligent civilizations aren't that much different in that regard. Chicken and egg.
It's likely they're out there. It's not likely they have something more advanced than radio, because it's not likely that the universe allows for much else. Who knows anything else. Maybe intelligent life is easy to evolve, maybe it's not that hard to survive discovering atomic power, but chances are zilch that you'll ever come into contact with another intelligent civilization no matter how advanced your technology is unless your culture and species are advanced enough to value funding things like SETI.
Maybe when I get rich after I write my novel I'll send cash their way. That is, after I get me an Aventador and a 5 acre mansion on a beach. Naah, make that two of each. Why buy one when you can have two for twice the price and you have more money than you could possibly spend in your lifetime?
Folding@Home
Since our IT Managers demanded all systems stay up during the night for maintenance, updates, etc. and they draw their transformers draw the same power regardless of load anyway, I installed this on all the workstations as screensavers before I left their employ. I'm told he was mad at first, but everyone loves it -- somehow raised morale slightly.
There are other distributed computing projects. I'm just too lazy to look them up in the Internet Yellow Pages for you. If only there were some way I could just convey thought directly into text via finger movements and use some sort of index to retrieve matching addresses... Hmm, perhaps we should invent a naming hierarchy first. Oop! 24:00 rolls over in a few minutes -- Got to get my Tradewars on, L8r.
...how else would education get funded? /s
Use the spare cycle to mine Litecoins then convert them to Bitcoins.
New Economic Perspectives
and they draw their transformers draw the same power regardless of load anyway
This hasn't been true for a long time. Way back in the day CPUs would consume the same power whether they were doing useful work or executing a HALT instruction, but modern CPUs enter low-power idle modes and so the power consumption is dependent upon how much work they are doing.
I have a Kill-a-Watt and I've used it to measure the power consumption of my desktop computer. It consumes 75 watts when idle and 170 watts when the CPU & GPU are running at full speed. It would likely consume even less if I enabled any power management features, but since the thing doesn't run on a battery I don't care to deal with them.
The same is true for devices with actual transformers. While current flows through the transformer regardless of whether anything is attached, the energy that is inductively stored in the transformer when that current flows during one half of the AC cycle is returned to the electrical grid during the other half of the AC cycle, and so no energy is consumed when the device attached to the transformer isn't consuming it. This is why transformers are marked like "120 V, 3 VA" rather than "120 V, 3 W" -- the actual power consumed (watts) depends upon what is attached to the transformer, but the current (amps) flows regardless of whether anything is drawing power from the transformer.
This post cuts to the heart of another issue: SETI is not going to have wide appeal. Let me try it like this: I have an aerospace degree from Virginia Tech. Now, I've never used it directly, but I work at a concrete plant, using my structural engineering skills, so that's fine. And I work something like 55-60 hrs a week.
But... As of about two years ago, I barely haven't qualify for poverty assistance. Which puts me among the poorest of the poor. By now, no car, no TV... No retirement... no college fund for my straight-A kid, and now for my wife, and kids, no healthcare insurance... I'd say no internet, but I have a company smartphone. I'm worried about what the constant insurance increases, electrical bill increases, trailer park rent increases, etc. will do. In actual fact, I couldn't care less about SETI. I would... if I had spare assets [time or money]. But I don't.
You want people who care about SETI with cash to fund it? Then try a little justice. Our economy is way broken. Our government is at continual war. Our civilian government thinks it can fund healthcare insurance by making the unemployed youths pay for it [surpise! Washington State has 57000 signups, 51000 of which are for medicaid/medicare]. The chances of getting by, much less getting ahead, through hard honest work and skill and smarts, are near zero: investors with an entitlement mentality have claimed everything.. Until that improves, anyone thinking that their special program is the one that's going to win out and have broad appeal is like thinking you'll win powerball. Yeah, it could happen. It's just EXTREMELY unlikely.
Go read Freiderich Hayak. Disillusion yourself.
boincstats.com
There are dozens of projects more worthy than SETI. Most of the biological projects have real, understandable goals and put out research papers on a regular basis. They focus on problems we have here and now. Most of the projects are orders of magnitude less popular than SETI.
There are also projects with a philosophy more similar to SETI, like searching for big prime numbers or collatz conjecture. Academically interesting to some, but personallly they won't get my electricity.
Sounds cool bro
'nuff said.
one of three things is true:
1) ET Aliens do not exist
2) They exist but prevent us from detecting them
3) The information about them is being supressed
Either way, its a waste of resources
It's a useless organization.
From http://http//en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Contact_(film) :
Executive: We must confess that your proposal seems less like science and more like science fiction.
Ellie Arroway: Science fiction. You're right, it's crazy. In fact, it's even worse than that, it's nuts. You wanna hear something really nutty? I heard of a couple guys who wanna build something called an airplane, you know you get people to go in, and fly around like birds, it's ridiculous, right? And what about breaking the sound barrier, or rockets to the moon? Atomic energy, or a mission to Mars? Science fiction, right? Look, all I'm asking is for you to just have the tiniest bit of vision. You know, to just sit back for one minute and look at the big picture. To take a chance on something that just might end up being the most profoundly impactful moment for humanity, for the history... of history.
GIven that there are already enough witnesses of alien visit here on the planet like http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/ufo/8221227/New-Zealand-releases-UFO-files.html . You know these are military documents not some lunatics in the yellow press I think SETI is a waste of time and money.