SETI doesn't just look for EM radiation; all sorts of natural things produce EM radiation. SETI must look for EM radiation encoding patterns thought unlikely to arise by chance. They must look only at those EM bands that would reach us, and for transmissions at sufficient power for us to detect. As we move away from large coherent transmitters (Radio and TV) toward lower power ones spread across the spectrum (teh wireless interweb) our own transmissions of signals potentially detectable by even a fairly nearby alien SETI program look likely to cover a time span of maybe a century. So stars do need to be rescanned, they might not have reached the radio age last time you looked. And that's assuming any significant fraction of intelligent civilizations ever go through a phase of producing strong coherent radio signals. That assumption strikes me as profoundly unimaginative.
Regarding the lottery: Some win with an entirely predictable rate. A lot of people still don't consider buying lottery tickets rational. And then we have the idea of picking up random pieces of paper on the street, walking into a random building and asking the guy there if you won; without knowing if there is a lottery going on, if the building is a store that sells tickets, or if the paper is a ticket. That's roughly the level of "long shot" I rate SETI at; not just irrational, but utterly bonkers.
A lot of people heard about distributed computing via the SETI client; SETI didn't invent distributed computing. My argument is, what if all the SETI fans realized it was a silly waste and were into protein folding instead? Distributed computing would be just as far along, and the worlds spare processor cycles would be better used. Beneficial side effects come out of any large project; they cannot be considered reasons to do that project instead of another. I shall judge the worthwhileness of SETI only by it's direct goal; and I deem it an complete waste.
"Islam commands its followers to wage perpetual warfare against infidels until they convert, submit or die."
Not actually. Religions are defined by the beliefs of their adherents. Muslims generally don't believe what you say they do, because if they did it would be over; we'd both be converted or dead. There's over a billion Muslimws you know. Just because a few wack-jobs interpret Islam as what it was in the middle ages doesn't mean the rest agree. Shall we start judging Christianity by the directives of twelth-century Popes? Yikes.
I'm not saying violent fundamentalists (regardless of stripe) aren't a problem in the world, or that they shouldn't be dealt with. But willfully misunderstanding their motivations isn't helpful. No matter what their religion says, when it comes to people half way around the world, not very many people manage to give a damn. If someone living in Medina decides he hates Americans, chances are he isn't pissed about freedoms being enjoyed in Kansas City.
No, the chances of there being an intelligent civilization within a certain volume of space are one thing. The chances that SETI would find it, assuming it is there, also cannot be estimated.
Whatever the chances turn out to be (which we won't figure out), we won't have a head start. If you play the lottery for a year and lose the whole time, you don't have a head start.
Does it really hurt to keep looking? No, in the same sense that if people want to set piles of their own cash on fire, that doesn't really hurt anything either. It's just a stupid waste of resources that could be better spent.
I fundamentally support peoples right to waste their resources on pointless things if they like; but I'll still call them stupid on slashdot.
"I'm sure that one of the tasks that states are responsible for is counting their own voter's votes."
How sure are you?
US Constitution, Article 1, section 4, Paragraph 1: "The times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing Senators."
The Constitution is not all that long nor hard to understand, and is reasonably well indexed in several places online. Consider referring to it before jailing anyone. States count their own votes, yes, but the Congress can tell them how when and where. (But not where for elections of Senators. Bonus points for figuring out the source that historical oddity.)
It doesn't matter if they were right. The point with respect to Federalism is not that their opinion on the Florida recount was wrong, it is that it was irrelevant. According to the Constitution, how to run elections is a State matter. The federal government should have had no jurisdiction. They acted wrongly not by the answer they gave, but by considering the question. Had things gone down in a constitutional manner, we should all be still arguing about how the Florida supreme court and/or legislature handled it. (I don't know how they would have, but I'm sure we'd still be arguing. At least it would have been constitutional.)
Cancer research has produced better understanding of cancer. Fusion research has produced better understanding of fusion. AI research has produced better understanding of AI. SETI has not produced better understanding of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Anything you do will produce unintended, indirect side benefits. These are not a reason to choose a particular thing to do over others. If side benefits are all that make something worthwhile, just do them instead.
I too have lost people to cancer. If your sweetheart has a 15% chance of dying over the next ten years, what was that chance a hundred years ago? Many forms of cancer are radically more survivable than they were in the past, and it's because of money spent directly on figuring out how to make that happen, not random side benefits from spending money on pointless things.
If a fusion researcher reaches a new efficiency record, but not enough to be energy positive, he has learned something about fusion; he is measurably closer to the goal. If a SETI researcher doesn't find a signal, he still has no idea what direction the goal is in.
"I'm not going to go into chances that SETI has to succeed. We just don't know yet."
And never will unless it does.
"But thinking that we are the only intelligent life in the whole universe? There is no reason at all to believe *that*."
I agree. It seems fantastically improbable we are alone in the universe; the idea is not worth considering.
"SETI might be a hit/miss type of thing. I don't know."
Saying SETI is a hit miss thing implies something like shooting arrows blindfolded, then having someone else tell you if you hit the target. SETI is like that except that you don't know where on all of Earth the target is, and the guy telling you if you hit speaks a language you don't understand and might be lying.
"Are all hit or miss type problems not worth trying to solve?"
No. It is solving them by means of entirely unknown effectiveness that is not worth trying.
I understand what you are saying and mostly agree, but I'm not actually confusing anything. I am making the unstated assumption that it will never be possible for us to search everywhere in the universe for all possible sorts of intelligent life. Given that assumption, "We are not alone" is not falsifiable. Whether a hypothesis is theoretically unfalsifiable in any universe, or merely unfalsifiable within this universe makes little difference to me.
"Saying that searching for extraterrestrial life is "not scientific" is the same as saying that the search for ET life is the same as the search for the flying spaghetti monster. I think that the absurdity of such a point is self-evident."
I do not think the absurdity of that statement is self-evident. The absurdity of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is not only self-evident, and even intentional, but that's the point. Searching for the FSM is an absurd way to prove whether supernatural beings exist; if you don't find him you learn nothing. SETIs search for one narrowly yet ambiguously defined sort of intelligent life is similar in that if you find nothing you learn nothing. But in any case, I reject your premise: Sifting through sand at the beach to see if I find a diamond is not scientific, but also not the same as sifting through sand at the beach looking for the FSM. You can argue which one SETI is more like, it isn't science either way.
"The fact that one particular hypothesis can not be reduced to a simple critical test for technical reassons does not make that particular hypothesis a-scientific, it only points out the limitations of the research possibilities open to that particular question."
Right, it means that scientific testing of that hypothesis is not possible. Therefore fiddling with that hypothesis cannot be said to be scientific research. It's quite possible to have a good hypothesis, and for it to be impossible to productively research it.
But actually, as far as "We are not alone"; it is a pretty lame hypothesis. We could (theoretically) find out it's true, but there's no possible evidence that would demonstrate it is false. And it has no predictive ability. If we knew it was true (but nothing more about why or how), that wouldn't imply anything further about the world.
Falsifiability and Predictive ability are really the same question, and that question is the test of scientific hypotheses. "We are not alone" fails. There are certainly good, predictive hypotheses about extraterrestrial intelligence out there. Most of these fall into the "interesting, but not researchable" pile. By the time you put enough sub-clauses on them to make them actually researchable, they get to be not very interesting.
"SETI systematically scans the entire sky in every direction, and even in failure to locate signals finds other astronomical events, and provides statistical upper bounds on the possible existence of broadcasting civilizations.""
It provides an upper bound for the number of civilizations that fit in those criteria and an unknown number of others, because we only have one example of such a civilization to extrapolate from. An idea of how unlikely it is that there are more than a certain number of things in a category whose definition is unclear isn't knowledge. Let's say we know there's a less than 1 in 20 chance that there are any civilizations within 1000 light years of us that are enough like us that SETI could detect them (noting that we have no idea what the range of possible civilizations is, so we know nothing about number civilizations total). Is it all that useful to get that down to a 1 in 50 chance? Because then we would know... still nothing.
"In addition, SETI is cheap, often piggybacking search onto the back of other funded projects," Wait, I thought other astronomical events were being detected by SETI? Real astronomy is a fine thing; I'm all for it. Let's just focus on analyzing signals for evidence of intelligence; that's the stupid part to spend money on. As you point out, it's not my money, which is why I just rail about it on slashdot, not lobby to cut off it's funding.
"Who knows. Maybe SETI will spot an inbound asteroid 30 years in advance of impact and give us time to nudge it." Asteroids don't broadcast radio signals, and certainly not ones encoding intelligently produced data.
"They're the only ones trying to look at the whole sky." What an idiotic claim. Before engaging in' defense of SETI, there's a topic you should have some familiarity with. It's called Astronomy. It is studied by people called Astronomers. You should look into it.
I hate the argument that we should do something because it will have side effect benefits. Anything you do has side effects; that's not an argument for doing that specific thing. If you spend millions of dollars to produce an enormous ball of twine, you'll probably get some new knowledge about techniques for moving spherical objects with forklifts. That doesn't make an enormous ball of twine "worth it".
Spending a lot of money Cancer research or SETI prospecting will probably do some sort of good outside the area of focus. The difference is that cancer research produces real, measurable advancement on cancer. Cancer patients live longer than they used to. Cancer patients survive entirely at vastly higher rates than they used to. To say that because cancer hasn't been eradicated, no progress has been made on cancer is insane.
SETI has made no progress on finding extra terrestrial intelligence. Nor is there much reason to expect it will.
What are you talking about? I can list as many intermediate results of fusion or AI research as you like. We've discovered several different ways to produce fusion. We've examined fusion extensively. Now that you mention it, we have produced fusion reactors. Saying we don't get anything out of fusion research unless we produce a functioning energy-positive reactor is obvious nonsense. Fusion research can and has produced all manner of useful knowledge.
Show me an intermediate result of SETI. Never mind, describe what an intermediate result would even be. Short of finding something, how can SETI measure progress? Are we closer to finding something yet?
Sifting sand on the beach, looking for a diamond is not science, it's prospecting. SETI is like that, only the beach is the size of Jupiter, you don't know if more than one diamond actually exists, and your sifter only finds diamonds of the exact size and shape of the Hope diamond, the only one you've ever seen.
If your objection is to the word "theft", I won't quibble. My argument is about whether your copying is wrong, not about exactly what word you use to describe how it is wrong. My original use of the term "dirty thief" was not meant to be read in any highly specific technical sense. Note that I also have no idea about your hygiene.
"You're right, I am sympathetic to that idea, and think he deserves credit for having written it. However, I am unclear as to what that means about my assertions."
The belief that creators deserve credit for their creations strikes me as the basis for IP rules. If it is proper to give him credit for his words, isn't that tantamount to saying he has some degree of ownership of them? The very phrase "his words" would seem to imply it.
"Because it unjustly prevents me from using my property..."
Unjust IP laws might unjustly prevent you from using your property. Just IP laws would justly prevent you from using your property in unjust ways. Which is what any just law is going to do. "What would constitute just IP laws?" seems to be the heart of our disagreement. You appear to be asserting that any restriction on your copying of information must be unjust. I disagree because I think copying my creation without ever giving me any credit or compensation seems obviously unjust. If I created something, I think I deserve some form of ownership over that thing. What sort of ownership for how long is debatable. It is your apparent assertion that I deserve no ownership at all that I specifically reject.
"... and requires coercive force to maintain these rights."
Coercive force is required to maintain any and all laws whatsoever. Law is coercive. That coercion is required to maintain IP laws strikes me as an uninteresting observation, not an argument against IP laws.
Statement 2 makes an obviously false assumption. It might make perfect sense to ban an entire group from an activity that a lot of them engage in when it wouldn't make sense to ban it if only one individual did it.
If one person smokes, that's not going to have enough effect on others to justify doing anything about it. If smoking (by all smokers) produces enough health problems to be a significant burden on society, it might make sense to take steps to try to reduce the rate of smoking.
Note that I am unaware of any jurisdiction that actually bans smoking by minors. They ban selling of cigarettes to minors. The (fairly well supported) theory is that if people are discouraged from smoking until adulthood, very few of them will start a that point.
Well, at least neither of us obsessively tries to get the last word in fundamentally pointless arguments with strangers on the internet. That would be retarded.
"The point about the car, which you continue to miss, is that using someone's IP without their permission isn't theft because they still have use of their ideas. In everything you've said, you still haven't had a real response to that, so I'll just have to assume you don't have one."
You have repeatedly made the point that use of someones ideas without their permission doesn't deprive them of the use of those ideas. I haven't responded to that exceptyo say that I agree, because thats all I have to say about it. I agree. Yes. That is correct. You are right on that point, which I have never disputed.
"What does it matter if property is just an idea that we all agree on?"
If property is just an idea we all agree on because it is useful, then we ought to be free to all agree on intelectual property if we think that is useful. Physical property and intelectual property are not different in any way that prevents us from making agreements with each other about them. They are certainly different in ways that mean the sort of agreements we ought to make are different.
"And you keep going on about the source of my arguments, where I got them from or whether I give them credit. None of that has any bearing on my arguments."
I don't care about the source of your arguments. My complaint was that they didn't seem to be saying anything you weren't, just asserting the same things you were asserting. I further tried to use the Kinsella article an example. You appear to think he wrote a good article, I thought you might be sympathetic to the idea that he deserved some credit for having written it.
"Paying royalties for fire is not a straw man, it is the crux of the issue. Having to pay everyone for every idea they come up with would pretty much result in going back to the stone age. I'm sure you will say "but I'm not saying we should pay everyone for every good idea". But that is exactly where it leads to."
Why? Why is it impossible for me to support, lets say, trademarks as they are, 10 year copyright terms, and abolition of patents? Or any other of the infinite possibilities in between total abolition of IP and royalties for fire? Can you really not imagine any middle ground?
Yes, but you are obviously aware of the correct word, and continue to add two extra letters to the front. You come across as less intelligent to me not because you use the word once, but because you go out of your way to use an incorrect word when you are clearly aware of the correct one.
It's not that "irregardless" is correct in informal settings. "Regardless" is the correct spelling regardless of the context. The link provided was pointing out that some people are under the incorrect impression that "irregardless" is a more formal version, rather than just a wrong one.
If Einstein had insisted on working in crayon, his bio would note that Relativity was all the more impressive an accomplishment, given his obvious mental deficiency in other areas.
"Physical property exists because we know I own the stuff in my house that I legally purchased."
We "know"? Just magically? Surely there is some physical property of the car that indicates it is yours, something inherent and independent of societal rules. No?
I don't claim the car isn't real; of course it is. I claim the fact that the car is yours is just an idea we all agree to; which seems painfully obvious. If we lived in some sort of radical communist society (which I do not advocate) perhaps it would be impossible for you as an individual to own a car or anything else.
If Kinsella said it better than you, why mention his name? Just paste in his phrasing, whoops, make that "the way he wrote it", since surely he has no claim over mere reproducible words. You wouldn't suggest he deserves any credit would you?
Paying royalties for fire is obviously a stupid straw man. I've not suggested anything about what sorts of protections I advocate for IP.
Good ideas are definitely scarce and valuable. If they were not, you would not care about societal rules that try to keep some of them from you. Information can be cheaply reproduced, but creating it is frequently quite expensive. Information is a different and interesting sort of property compared to physical goods, to be sure. It needs different rules, absolutely. You appear to suggest IP should be entirely abolished. I think that would be foolish on pragmatic grounds. You appear to suggest it is required on ethical grounds and I don't agree.
"There's not much more I can say if you choose to remain ignorant of that."
Sure there is. You could respond to the points I raise by considering them and posting your own thoughts, not just quoting others who aren't addressing my point. Both that quote, and Kinsella's article argue that intellectual property is different than physical property. I agree. They think intellectual property isn't real. I agree, because property isn't real anyway.
If you think physical property rights are some magic inherent property of the world, I'd like to hear why. If you think intellectual property in any form isn't a useful concept for a society, I'd like to hear why.
If you'd like to point me to a fascinating article about how copying information doesn't deprive others of its use, please don't. I know that. It's irrelevant to my belief that intellectual property is a useful concept. It may not deprive others of the use of the article when you send me a copy, but it deprives us both of our time for no useful purpose.
"Basically this guy is one of the large majority of environmentalists..."
And you're one of the large majority of poor reasoners who pick some lone nutcase and assume he speaks for most of whoever he claims to speak for.
Though I am definitely an environmentalist, I'll only claim to speak for myself when I say: If helps make the Earth any nicer for humans, Fuck the Moon. Strip mine it and pave what's left it in radioactive waste.
As a practical matter, getting to space takes so many resources that I don't see it ever being a win to acquire resources from off-planet. The earth is all we've got, and all I think we'll ever get, even in the magic sci-fi future; which is why I'm an environmentalist.
Property ownership (of any sort) in a society is a concept dreamed up because it is fantastically useful, makes a lot of sense, and is generally so nice for those societies. Like every societal convention, it depends on coercion vs. those who do not agree to it willingly.
There is nothing magic about physical property rules vs. intellectual property rules. They are both concepts dreampt up and enforced by society because they are useful. Intellectual property was certainly recognized thousands of years ago (in Rome at least), but only became much of a big deal about 500 years ago when the printing press meant a small number of people were actually capable of copying others works on any scale. At that point, most societies dreampt up some rules. Today, most anyone can copy any work trivially. Intellectual property rules will undoubtably have to change to adapt. To suggest they should simply be done away with seems a bit simplistic to me.
To suggest intellectual property isn't real misses the point. Of course it isn't real; "property" isn't real. It's a concept we made up because it is useful. Is intellectual property useful? I think so; some huge fraction of the things of value our society produces are informational.
Oh, and pulling quotes from the "Controversy" section of a neutrality-disputed wikipedia article doesn't really do much for your argument. I'm aware that there are other people who agree with you on the internet; I'm quite capable of thinking they're wrong too.
Slashdot Mirror
SETI doesn't just look for EM radiation; all sorts of natural things produce EM radiation. SETI must look for EM radiation encoding patterns thought unlikely to arise by chance. They must look only at those EM bands that would reach us, and for transmissions at sufficient power for us to detect.
As we move away from large coherent transmitters (Radio and TV) toward lower power ones spread across the spectrum (teh wireless interweb) our own transmissions of signals potentially detectable by even a fairly nearby alien SETI program look likely to cover a time span of maybe a century. So stars do need to be rescanned, they might not have reached the radio age last time you looked.
And that's assuming any significant fraction of intelligent civilizations ever go through a phase of producing strong coherent radio signals. That assumption strikes me as profoundly unimaginative.
Regarding the lottery: Some win with an entirely predictable rate. A lot of people still don't consider buying lottery tickets rational. And then we have the idea of picking up random pieces of paper on the street, walking into a random building and asking the guy there if you won; without knowing if there is a lottery going on, if the building is a store that sells tickets, or if the paper is a ticket. That's roughly the level of "long shot" I rate SETI at; not just irrational, but utterly bonkers.
A lot of people heard about distributed computing via the SETI client; SETI didn't invent distributed computing. My argument is, what if all the SETI fans realized it was a silly waste and were into protein folding instead? Distributed computing would be just as far along, and the worlds spare processor cycles would be better used. Beneficial side effects come out of any large project; they cannot be considered reasons to do that project instead of another. I shall judge the worthwhileness of SETI only by it's direct goal; and I deem it an complete waste.
"Islam commands its followers to wage perpetual warfare against infidels until they convert, submit or die."
Not actually. Religions are defined by the beliefs of their adherents. Muslims generally don't believe what you say they do, because if they did it would be over; we'd both be converted or dead. There's over a billion Muslimws you know. Just because a few wack-jobs interpret Islam as what it was in the middle ages doesn't mean the rest agree. Shall we start judging Christianity by the directives of twelth-century Popes? Yikes.
I'm not saying violent fundamentalists (regardless of stripe) aren't a problem in the world, or that they shouldn't be dealt with. But willfully misunderstanding their motivations isn't helpful. No matter what their religion says, when it comes to people half way around the world, not very many people manage to give a damn. If someone living in Medina decides he hates Americans, chances are he isn't pissed about freedoms being enjoyed in Kansas City.
No, the chances of there being an intelligent civilization within a certain volume of space are one thing. The chances that SETI would find it, assuming it is there, also cannot be estimated.
Whatever the chances turn out to be (which we won't figure out), we won't have a head start. If you play the lottery for a year and lose the whole time, you don't have a head start.
Does it really hurt to keep looking? No, in the same sense that if people want to set piles of their own cash on fire, that doesn't really hurt anything either. It's just a stupid waste of resources that could be better spent.
I fundamentally support peoples right to waste their resources on pointless things if they like; but I'll still call them stupid on slashdot.
OK, so you're saying Gore didn't get unfairly screwed. Sure, I'll buy that.
Too bad about the country though, eh?
"I'm sure that one of the tasks that states are responsible for is counting their own voter's votes."
How sure are you?
US Constitution, Article 1, section 4, Paragraph 1:
"The times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing Senators."
The Constitution is not all that long nor hard to understand, and is reasonably well indexed in several places online. Consider referring to it before jailing anyone. States count their own votes, yes, but the Congress can tell them how when and where. (But not where for elections of Senators. Bonus points for figuring out the source that historical oddity.)
It doesn't matter if they were right. The point with respect to Federalism is not that their opinion on the Florida recount was wrong, it is that it was irrelevant. According to the Constitution, how to run elections is a State matter. The federal government should have had no jurisdiction.
They acted wrongly not by the answer they gave, but by considering the question.
Had things gone down in a constitutional manner, we should all be still arguing about how the Florida supreme court and/or legislature handled it. (I don't know how they would have, but I'm sure we'd still be arguing. At least it would have been constitutional.)
Cancer research has produced better understanding of cancer.
Fusion research has produced better understanding of fusion.
AI research has produced better understanding of AI.
SETI has not produced better understanding of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Anything you do will produce unintended, indirect side benefits. These are not a reason to choose a particular thing to do over others. If side benefits are all that make something worthwhile, just do them instead.
I too have lost people to cancer. If your sweetheart has a 15% chance of dying over the next ten years, what was that chance a hundred years ago? Many forms of cancer are radically more survivable than they were in the past, and it's because of money spent directly on figuring out how to make that happen, not random side benefits from spending money on pointless things.
If a fusion researcher reaches a new efficiency record, but not enough to be energy positive, he has learned something about fusion; he is measurably closer to the goal. If a SETI researcher doesn't find a signal, he still has no idea what direction the goal is in.
"I'm not going to go into chances that SETI has to succeed. We just don't know yet."
And never will unless it does.
"But thinking that we are the only intelligent life in the whole universe? There is no reason at all to believe *that*."
I agree. It seems fantastically improbable we are alone in the universe; the idea is not worth considering.
"SETI might be a hit/miss type of thing. I don't know."
Saying SETI is a hit miss thing implies something like shooting arrows blindfolded, then having someone else tell you if you hit the target. SETI is like that except that you don't know where on all of Earth the target is, and the guy telling you if you hit speaks a language you don't understand and might be lying.
"Are all hit or miss type problems not worth trying to solve?"
No. It is solving them by means of entirely unknown effectiveness that is not worth trying.
I understand what you are saying and mostly agree, but I'm not actually confusing anything. I am making the unstated assumption that it will never be possible for us to search everywhere in the universe for all possible sorts of intelligent life. Given that assumption, "We are not alone" is not falsifiable. Whether a hypothesis is theoretically unfalsifiable in any universe, or merely unfalsifiable within this universe makes little difference to me.
"Saying that searching for extraterrestrial life is "not scientific" is the same as saying that the search for ET life is the same as the search for the flying spaghetti monster. I think that the absurdity of such a point is self-evident."
I do not think the absurdity of that statement is self-evident. The absurdity of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is not only self-evident, and even intentional, but that's the point. Searching for the FSM is an absurd way to prove whether supernatural beings exist; if you don't find him you learn nothing. SETIs search for one narrowly yet ambiguously defined sort of intelligent life is similar in that if you find nothing you learn nothing. But in any case, I reject your premise: Sifting through sand at the beach to see if I find a diamond is not scientific, but also not the same as sifting through sand at the beach looking for the FSM. You can argue which one SETI is more like, it isn't science either way.
"On a CRT more current flows to make the screen white."
Only marginally. The electron beam takes very little power compared to the magnets that aim it.
And LCDs can be and are made either way; the one you describe is less common.
"The fact that one particular hypothesis can not be reduced to a simple critical test for technical reassons does not make that particular hypothesis a-scientific, it only points out the limitations of the research possibilities open to that particular question."
Right, it means that scientific testing of that hypothesis is not possible. Therefore fiddling with that hypothesis cannot be said to be scientific research. It's quite possible to have a good hypothesis, and for it to be impossible to productively research it.
But actually, as far as "We are not alone"; it is a pretty lame hypothesis. We could (theoretically) find out it's true, but there's no possible evidence that would demonstrate it is false. And it has no predictive ability. If we knew it was true (but nothing more about why or how), that wouldn't imply anything further about the world.
Falsifiability and Predictive ability are really the same question, and that question is the test of scientific hypotheses. "We are not alone" fails. There are certainly good, predictive hypotheses about extraterrestrial intelligence out there. Most of these fall into the "interesting, but not researchable" pile. By the time you put enough sub-clauses on them to make them actually researchable, they get to be not very interesting.
"SETI systematically scans the entire sky in every direction, and even in failure to locate signals finds other astronomical events, and provides statistical upper bounds on the possible existence of broadcasting civilizations.""
It provides an upper bound for the number of civilizations that fit in those criteria and an unknown number of others, because we only have one example of such a civilization to extrapolate from. An idea of how unlikely it is that there are more than a certain number of things in a category whose definition is unclear isn't knowledge. Let's say we know there's a less than 1 in 20 chance that there are any civilizations within 1000 light years of us that are enough like us that SETI could detect them (noting that we have no idea what the range of possible civilizations is, so we know nothing about number civilizations total). Is it all that useful to get that down to a 1 in 50 chance? Because then we would know... still nothing.
"In addition, SETI is cheap, often piggybacking search onto the back of other funded projects,"
Wait, I thought other astronomical events were being detected by SETI? Real astronomy is a fine thing; I'm all for it.
Let's just focus on analyzing signals for evidence of intelligence; that's the stupid part to spend money on. As you point out, it's not my money, which is why I just rail about it on slashdot, not lobby to cut off it's funding.
"Who knows. Maybe SETI will spot an inbound asteroid 30 years in advance of impact and give us time to nudge it."
Asteroids don't broadcast radio signals, and certainly not ones encoding intelligently produced data.
"They're the only ones trying to look at the whole sky."
What an idiotic claim. Before engaging in' defense of SETI, there's a topic you should have some familiarity with. It's called Astronomy. It is studied by people called Astronomers. You should look into it.
I hate the argument that we should do something because it will have side effect benefits. Anything you do has side effects; that's not an argument for doing that specific thing. If you spend millions of dollars to produce an enormous ball of twine, you'll probably get some new knowledge about techniques for moving spherical objects with forklifts. That doesn't make an enormous ball of twine "worth it".
Spending a lot of money Cancer research or SETI prospecting will probably do some sort of good outside the area of focus. The difference is that cancer research produces real, measurable advancement on cancer. Cancer patients live longer than they used to. Cancer patients survive entirely at vastly higher rates than they used to. To say that because cancer hasn't been eradicated, no progress has been made on cancer is insane.
SETI has made no progress on finding extra terrestrial intelligence. Nor is there much reason to expect it will.
What are you talking about? I can list as many intermediate results of fusion or AI research as you like. We've discovered several different ways to produce fusion. We've examined fusion extensively. Now that you mention it, we have produced fusion reactors. Saying we don't get anything out of fusion research unless we produce a functioning energy-positive reactor is obvious nonsense. Fusion research can and has produced all manner of useful knowledge.
Show me an intermediate result of SETI. Never mind, describe what an intermediate result would even be. Short of finding something, how can SETI measure progress? Are we closer to finding something yet?
Sifting sand on the beach, looking for a diamond is not science, it's prospecting. SETI is like that, only the beach is the size of Jupiter, you don't know if more than one diamond actually exists, and your sifter only finds diamonds of the exact size and shape of the Hope diamond, the only one you've ever seen.
If your objection is to the word "theft", I won't quibble. My argument is about whether your copying is wrong, not about exactly what word you use to describe how it is wrong. My original use of the term "dirty thief" was not meant to be read in any highly specific technical sense. Note that I also have no idea about your hygiene.
"You're right, I am sympathetic to that idea, and think he deserves credit for having written it. However, I am unclear as to what that means about my assertions."
The belief that creators deserve credit for their creations strikes me as the basis for IP rules. If it is proper to give him credit for his words, isn't that tantamount to saying he has some degree of ownership of them? The very phrase "his words" would seem to imply it.
"Because it unjustly prevents me from using my property..."
Unjust IP laws might unjustly prevent you from using your property. Just IP laws would justly prevent you from using your property in unjust ways. Which is what any just law is going to do. "What would constitute just IP laws?" seems to be the heart of our disagreement. You appear to be asserting that any restriction on your copying of information must be unjust. I disagree because I think copying my creation without ever giving me any credit or compensation seems obviously unjust. If I created something, I think I deserve some form of ownership over that thing. What sort of ownership for how long is debatable. It is your apparent assertion that I deserve no ownership at all that I specifically reject.
"... and requires coercive force to maintain these rights."
Coercive force is required to maintain any and all laws whatsoever. Law is coercive. That coercion is required to maintain IP laws strikes me as an uninteresting observation, not an argument against IP laws.
Statement 2 makes an obviously false assumption. It might make perfect sense to ban an entire group from an activity that a lot of them engage in when it wouldn't make sense to ban it if only one individual did it.
If one person smokes, that's not going to have enough effect on others to justify doing anything about it. If smoking (by all smokers) produces enough health problems to be a significant burden on society, it might make sense to take steps to try to reduce the rate of smoking.
Note that I am unaware of any jurisdiction that actually bans smoking by minors. They ban selling of cigarettes to minors. The (fairly well supported) theory is that if people are discouraged from smoking until adulthood, very few of them will start a that point.
"... we ALL have our quirks."
Well, at least neither of us obsessively tries to get the last word in fundamentally pointless arguments with strangers on the internet. That would be retarded.
"The point about the car, which you continue to miss, is that using someone's IP without their permission isn't theft because they still have use of their ideas. In everything you've said, you still haven't had a real response to that, so I'll just have to assume you don't have one."
You have repeatedly made the point that use of someones ideas without their permission doesn't deprive them of the use of those ideas. I haven't responded to that exceptyo say that I agree, because thats all I have to say about it. I agree. Yes. That is correct. You are right on that point, which I have never disputed.
"What does it matter if property is just an idea that we all agree on?"
If property is just an idea we all agree on because it is useful, then we ought to be free to all agree on intelectual property if we think that is useful. Physical property and intelectual property are not different in any way that prevents us from making agreements with each other about them. They are certainly different in ways that mean the sort of agreements we ought to make are different.
"And you keep going on about the source of my arguments, where I got them from or whether I give them credit. None of that has any bearing on my arguments."
I don't care about the source of your arguments. My complaint was that they didn't seem to be saying anything you weren't, just asserting the same things you were asserting. I further tried to use the Kinsella article an example. You appear to think he wrote a good article, I thought you might be sympathetic to the idea that he deserved some credit for having written it.
"Paying royalties for fire is not a straw man, it is the crux of the issue. Having to pay everyone for every idea they come up with would pretty much result in going back to the stone age. I'm sure you will say "but I'm not saying we should pay everyone for every good idea". But that is exactly where it leads to."
Why? Why is it impossible for me to support, lets say, trademarks as they are, 10 year copyright terms, and abolition of patents? Or any other of the infinite possibilities in between total abolition of IP and royalties for fire? Can you really not imagine any middle ground?
If you're going to be (as another poster put it) "a pedantic asshat", it is traditional to be right.
You are unright.
http://investor.google.com/conduct.html
Yes, but you are obviously aware of the correct word, and continue to add two extra letters to the front. You come across as less intelligent to me not because you use the word once, but because you go out of your way to use an incorrect word when you are clearly aware of the correct one.
It's not that "irregardless" is correct in informal settings. "Regardless" is the correct spelling regardless of the context. The link provided was pointing out that some people are under the incorrect impression that "irregardless" is a more formal version, rather than just a wrong one.
If Einstein had insisted on working in crayon, his bio would note that Relativity was all the more impressive an accomplishment, given his obvious mental deficiency in other areas.
"Physical property exists because we know I own the stuff in my house that I legally purchased."
We "know"? Just magically? Surely there is some physical property of the car that indicates it is yours, something inherent and independent of societal rules. No?
I don't claim the car isn't real; of course it is. I claim the fact that the car is yours is just an idea we all agree to; which seems painfully obvious. If we lived in some sort of radical communist society (which I do not advocate) perhaps it would be impossible for you as an individual to own a car or anything else.
If Kinsella said it better than you, why mention his name? Just paste in his phrasing, whoops, make that "the way he wrote it", since surely he has no claim over mere reproducible words. You wouldn't suggest he deserves any credit would you?
Paying royalties for fire is obviously a stupid straw man. I've not suggested anything about what sorts of protections I advocate for IP.
Good ideas are definitely scarce and valuable. If they were not, you would not care about societal rules that try to keep some of them from you. Information can be cheaply reproduced, but creating it is frequently quite expensive. Information is a different and interesting sort of property compared to physical goods, to be sure. It needs different rules, absolutely. You appear to suggest IP should be entirely abolished. I think that would be foolish on pragmatic grounds. You appear to suggest it is required on ethical grounds and I don't agree.
"There's not much more I can say if you choose to remain ignorant of that."
Sure there is. You could respond to the points I raise by considering them and posting your own thoughts, not just quoting others who aren't addressing my point. Both that quote, and Kinsella's article argue that intellectual property is different than physical property. I agree. They think intellectual property isn't real. I agree, because property isn't real anyway.
If you think physical property rights are some magic inherent property of the world, I'd like to hear why. If you think intellectual property in any form isn't a useful concept for a society, I'd like to hear why.
If you'd like to point me to a fascinating article about how copying information doesn't deprive others of its use, please don't. I know that. It's irrelevant to my belief that intellectual property is a useful concept. It may not deprive others of the use of the article when you send me a copy, but it deprives us both of our time for no useful purpose.
"Basically this guy is one of the large majority of environmentalists..."
And you're one of the large majority of poor reasoners who pick some lone nutcase and assume he speaks for most of whoever he claims to speak for.
Though I am definitely an environmentalist, I'll only claim to speak for myself when I say: If helps make the Earth any nicer for humans, Fuck the Moon. Strip mine it and pave what's left it in radioactive waste.
As a practical matter, getting to space takes so many resources that I don't see it ever being a win to acquire resources from off-planet. The earth is all we've got, and all I think we'll ever get, even in the magic sci-fi future; which is why I'm an environmentalist.
"How long would it take before the change in mass of the moon would have an impact on life on our planet?"
Longer than the sun will last. Your scales are way off.
All the mining we have ever done on Earth doesn't add up to a hundred-millionth of a percent of the mass of the Moon.
Property ownership (of any sort) in a society is a concept dreamed up because it is fantastically useful, makes a lot of sense, and is generally so nice for those societies. Like every societal convention, it depends on coercion vs. those who do not agree to it willingly.
There is nothing magic about physical property rules vs. intellectual property rules. They are both concepts dreampt up and enforced by society because they are useful. Intellectual property was certainly recognized thousands of years ago (in Rome at least), but only became much of a big deal about 500 years ago when the printing press meant a small number of people were actually capable of copying others works on any scale. At that point, most societies dreampt up some rules. Today, most anyone can copy any work trivially. Intellectual property rules will undoubtably have to change to adapt. To suggest they should simply be done away with seems a bit simplistic to me.
To suggest intellectual property isn't real misses the point. Of course it isn't real; "property" isn't real. It's a concept we made up because it is useful. Is intellectual property useful? I think so; some huge fraction of the things of value our society produces are informational.
Oh, and pulling quotes from the "Controversy" section of a neutrality-disputed wikipedia article doesn't really do much for your argument. I'm aware that there are other people who agree with you on the internet; I'm quite capable of thinking they're wrong too.