Arecibo is just data collection, and you're right, it's a trivial expense. The data reduction is where the real cost is: Look at seti@home's stats for computers working the problem. Make a reasonable estimate how many of those are left on overnight just to boost someone's score on the s@h hall of fame list. Multiply by a reasonable power consumption number. I'm no Enrico Fermi, but my back of the envelope calculation some while back came out to about the equivalent of a full-sized nuclear plant just to provide the power for all the computers left running overnight to process s@h packets. Even if I'm off by a factor of 10, it'd still be a good-sized fossil-fuel plant. That's too high a cost, in my book, I stopped running the app.
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Arecibo is just data collection, and you're right, it's a trivial expense. The data reduction is where the real cost is: Look at seti@home's stats for computers working the problem. Make a reasonable estimate how many of those are left on overnight just to boost someone's score on the s@h hall of fame list. Multiply by a reasonable power consumption number. I'm no Enrico Fermi, but my back of the envelope calculation some while back came out to about the equivalent of a full-sized nuclear plant just to provide the power for all the computers left running overnight to process s@h packets. Even if I'm off by a factor of 10, it'd still be a good-sized fossil-fuel plant. That's too high a cost, in my book, I stopped running the app.