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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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
>> 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.
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.
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?
Those super-sensitive radar or radio receivers make excellent satellite spotters
With all due respect, horse hockey. Artificial satellites are quite easy to find with much cheaper equipment.
The money invested in SETI is then invested in other companies.
The returns from this then pays for SETI and the people who owns the bonds (this would have to be a tiny return for the bond owners).
Once the SETI program finishes the investments in other companies is closed and the amount left over is given back to the bond owners.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
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.
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).
Unfortunately "Active SETI" as it is known is untenable on SETI's budget. The best they can do is a bit of timeshare on radio telescopes. Nobody else is interested.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
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
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.
While much of that data is probably useful in a scientific sense, a catalog of emission numbers and coordinates is not exactly the sexy sell to the public that Hubble pictures were.
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).
Only if that information is catalogued, notated, and distributed in a useful manner, which they may not be devoting manpower or other resources to do.
We did it at least once.
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.
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.
'nuff said.
It's a useless organization.