SETI Institute suspends search for aliens
mercurynews.com
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It is a risk for any firm to be highly dependent on one customer for most of its revenue and SETI appears to have been highly dependent on US government funding.
It is dangerous to make conclusions based on a newspaper article, but it seems they found $50 million in private donations way back when to build the network. Now they can't find $2.5 million per year to run it?
If nothing else, something is seriously wrong if donors that ponied up $50 million to build the Ferrari no longer want to shell out $2.5 million run it.
The quote: "if everybody contributed just 3 extra cents on their 1040 tax forms, we could find out if we have cosmic company." suggests that the organization is focused on government funding, rather than individual donors - and continues this focus even after an evident failure of that model to keep things running. Meeting the needs of government funders and meeting the needs of donors are entirely different things. In my experience, you can have one or the other, but not both.
They should step back and rethink how they can make their non-profit work primarily based on voluntary donations. The world is full of non-profits that manage it with budgets much larger than the $2.5 million/year SETI appears to need.
Link to send SETI money: http://www.seti.org/page.aspx?pid=1468
Even if we do find a signal, there is no payoff. The money is better invested elsewhere, then, once we are better able to capitalize upon a signal being found, then, we should invest in finding one. Right now, its premature.
What possible step could we take? They are soo far away.
For instance, you're assuming that if we get a signal, from aliens, we will learn absolutely nothing of value from it.
I think we've got a few smart people hanging out on Earth; more than enough to learn something valuable from alien signals. For instance, we might learn how aliens send radio signals, which might have some relevance to our own communication technologies. We might learn something about alien linguistics, which might have applications here on Earth that could be beneficial. We might learn what alien porn looks like, and I know that most of you reading this comment would be very interested in that.
What seems vanishingly unlikely is that we'd learn NOTHING of value.
Edit: Or the results of the research can be completely serendipitous products that are only tenuously related to the original research - my favorite example of this being the best known product of high energy physics research.
There are many people who buy Ferraris to be the kind of person that buys Ferraris, rather than to drive. Seriously, there are like magazines you can buy so you can aspire to one day not driving a Ferrari.
> The quote: "if everybody contributed just 3 extra cents on their 1040 tax
forms, we could find out if we have cosmic company." suggests that the
organization is focused on government funding, rather than individual donors
s/we could/there is a very slim chance that &/
edit: This might have come across as snarky - that wasn't my intention. I just wanted to show that you can argue that any government spending can be spent better, and/or more morally, somewhere else.
Of course not. That line of reasoning is always flawed, as it is presumably always typed on a computer that was purchased with funds that weren't used for free water/food/vaccines.
Until then, anything is a joke. A sad joke. And we're the clowns.
Not really sure why people feel like misrepresenting articles like this all the time, but this is one of them.
It's a pretty naked sympathy appeal for money. "Honestly, if everybody contributed just 3 extra cents on their 1040 tax forms", etc.
Anyone around here familiar with the "Iron Law of Bureaucracy" coined by Jerry Pournelle? For every sufficiently large organization, self-preservation and expansion inevitably crowd out the organization's ostensible purpose. SETI's primary purpose is not to find extraterrestrial intelligence. SETI's primary purpose is to ensure the continued existence of and wages paid to SETI. Actually finding the aliens is a secondary goal.
(I am not ragging on SETI in particular here, that happens for every bureaucracy. The primary purpose of NASA is to get NASA and its contractors hired and paid, not to explore space. The primary purpose of TSA is to get TSA workers hired and paid, not to secure airways. The primary purpose of unions in education is to get themselves hired and paid, not to educate. These organizations do accomplish their stated goals to some and varying degrees of success, but never at any cost of imperiling their own demesne.)
You're joking, right?
So you're saying that the purpose of everything is to make money, not to make what those enterprises were built to do in the first place?
No wonder capitalism is the root of almost all our evils nowadays.. I feel really sorry for you.
One puts money above everything. The other considers it a mean for a higher purpose.
Can you tell the difference?
It's also very true for a lot of startups - too much of the founders time is spent ensuring the startup gets more access to funds. It's a terrible trap to get into, and circumvented only by bootstrapping to a revenue phase.
That sounds more unfortunate than ironic. It would be ironic if funding went directly from SETI to the satellite which found the planets.
SETI will detect radio signals from an intelligent source, sure. "We have detected extraterrestrial intelligence, and it is us." It's better for US interests if the source is speaking English, not Russian (only program capable now of delivering astronauts to ISS) or Chinese. So don't mourn the loss of SETI funding. Celebrate when you find out that it's going to something more productive.
Presumably this is what happens when you don't have clear goals and objectives laid out - and oversight to make sure you don't screw it up.
Pretty sad. They should be asking for new leadership and $20M to run it for 10 years.
So, not so much mismanagement as overoptimistic budgeting.
(Building a few telescopes at a time is likely a false economy, given the costs of paying engineering/fabrication costs over a longer period.)
All that said, it's going to be harder to get private donors to contribute towards telescopes in the future...
Surely there are 5 million people who'd be willing to donate a dollar each for this.
There have also been some cogent arguments that it might be in the best interests of our own self-preservation to not broadcast our presence, for now, just because we are still technologically primitive. Being loud represents a big wager that anything else within hearing distance is friendly.
I'm mostly disappointed at this announcement because it is part of a trend in dwindling government support for exploration.
Putting it simply for the first time it would be us and them where us is our species rather than the us that happen to be on an arbitrary lump of earth, speak the same language or worship the same god.
It could be the next psychological development stage for our species as it grows up. I'd like to have my name associated with that.
We have barely uttered a sound in the universe.
Of course, light goes really, really fast compared to anything physics says we can possibly manage for things with more rest mass than photons. Although there could be aliens on another spiral arm, or Andromeda, communication would take longer than the lifetime of our civilization; and material trade would take longer than the lifetime of our species.
For instance, back in the 1990's, I had a NeXT, a couple Apollos, an SGI Challenge, and a few Macs cranking away on SETI@Home blocks, some of those machines running 24/7.
Edit: just read the letter to donors; looks like the near-term problem was cuts by the state of California to the UC Berkeley budget.
First of all, the signals you'd receive would probably be worthless. Even if you manage to understand them despite the fact that they likely use some totally different language and encode information in radio waves in a different way, it's not like we frequently broadcast "this is everything you need to know to build a computer" or anything super-useful. There might be some useful mentions of science they've developed (the equivalent of our NPR science programs), but it probably wouldn't be in enough detail (especially since their lay people would presumably have a much more advanced scientific base if they're so far beyond us) for us to really get anything out of it.
In the meantime, people have probably heard that you got alien signals, and they'd eventually figure out how to receive and decode the signals too. Maybe you could patent it or something, but again, if they're far enough away, your patent might run out before you do much with it. You'd get somewhat of a head start, I guess.
And since this whole thing would take so long to cash in, and your investors took an absurd risk, they'd expect at least 1000x on their money.
Specifically, if you're broadcasting radio or TV signals that look like anything other than random noise from the perspective of an uncorrelated receiver, then you're wasting energy. Human history suggests that there's a window of about 100 years between the time when a civilization learns RF theory and starts to generate coherent signals, and the time when they learn information theory and stop.
"We've searched dozens of these floor tiles for several common types of pheremone trails. If there were intelligent life up there, we would have seen its messages by now."
If there's life out there, we'll probably find it eventually.
Considering life is a binary condition (there or not there) and we haven't found anything to strongly indicate the odds of life existing elsewhere are very small, I certainly wouldn't call the odds of finding life absurdly bad.
That's quite possible, but you'd want a highly-advanced technological organization - some bacteria-type things in Martian ice would be a scientific breakthrough, but unlikely to be massively profitable.
I don't know. I would like to think that this is so, but it seems hard to reconcile with the Fermi paradox (referring to intelligent life, at least). We do not know the probability of intelligent life developing, but I consider it plausible that the probability is such that although other life exits, it is beyond the limits of known methods of communication (e.g. extragalactic).
Consider gravity. Is its effect instantaneous? That is, gravity varies as the inverse of the square distance between two bodies. If, say, the Earth were to suddenly get much closer to the Moon, would that gravitational effect be "instant"? Or does it propagate at the speed of light?
If gravitation is somehow "instant", then one could imagine an apparatus which allows you to transmit information instantaneously. (You would need a way to measure the effect of gravity from the sending body; perhaps by measuring the height of waves formed in a planetary-sized sphere of water.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Relativity#Gravitationa...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity#Causality_an...
I'm just trying to think this through, so we identify some sort of signal. I'll bet that there will be detractors, with legitimate arguments, why wouldn't there be? It's not going to be an English message encoded in a format we can't dispute. Maybe it's a bad assumption but assuming the aliens use radio technology, it seems at least somewhat reasonable to assume that they'd use it to communicate with themselves before attempting to communicate with others, for those aliens, we'd most likely intercept their communications signals rather than directed communication with us or others. Communications which happened years and years ago. The best case scenario would be one of the near by stars having alien life that happened to be listening too and in that case should we get a signal and send one back it would still be on the order of a decade long cycle. What's the average case? A century long communication cycle? Assuming both parties are listening and engaged? Likewise, if they're sufficently advanced, wouldn't they compress and encrypt their communications and it should appear to be entropy to us?
I think there are a lot of things you should do just to do. The best upside here seems like hope or an easing of the beliefs about the universe, it just seems like we'd have to get really really lucky to actually communicate with something else and it could take centuries to establish that. Which in a round about sort of way makes it seem like shutting down a telescope for a few years isn't so harmful after all. Then let's just toss in nuclear proliferation, Islam fundamentalism (as well as other religious zealotry over the centuries,) AIDS in Africa (imagine should it some how become more communicable...) hunger, and global warming as issues that might affect our ability to concentrate on a problem for a century or more, is stoppage that bad?
Paul Allen is still worth billions, can't he help a little more?
Seriously, first they are both located at Mountain View. Second it is not that much money to begin with, at least for Google. Third it totally fits Google's pet project description - wildly awesome but realistically little chance to produce result.
Maybe they should consider writing more appreciated applications.
They could write more applications which involve people for the AI search.
I don't know what could reduce time to find AI, but I would bet SETI could get many volunteers if they just would provide a social network application (e.g. facebook).
There must be more than just calculation distribution.
I'm a firm believer in the most common solution to the Fermi Paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox) - ie there's nothing else out there - because for any civilisation that's even slightly more advanced than us (for galactic values of slightly), the effort to make a noticeable impact on galaxy is reasonably trivial.
Edit: I agree that SETI makes no sense to contact such entities though.
Putting a dyson sphere around a star changes its energy output, shifting it far into the infrared. Putting a matrioshka brain around a star is even more dramatic a change--but it still has the same gravitational effect on other stars. But no, unfortunately that doesn't explain the effects of "dark matter."
I also run Einstein@home, and world community grid.
1. This implies that there is a direct way that everyone who runs Folding@Home could, instead, have donated their electrical costs directly to a charitable organization.
2. The article fails to address how Folding@Home eases scientific contributions by the masses. I agree that $12.65 million can save many lives -- provided it was not split across scores of charities.
3. Folding@Home has the potential to save hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives.
Either you are paying for all of your electrical bill or you're not.
If you are paying for all of it, then yes, you can donate your electrical costs! just don't run Folding@Home and send Oxfam or whatever a Paypal donation at the end of the year.
If you are not paying for all of it, if someone is sharing the bill or footing the bill entirely, then donating directly may harm your pocketbook, yes. But in such a situation, does it really still make sense to force the other to pay for all the electricity you are using? The overall economics are bad per the original note, it's an inefficient way to turn someone else's money into charity. What right do you have to burn the electricity like there's no tomorrow, for that matter? (If you weren't going to use a year's worth of electricity, then whomever is paying for your electricity is poorer by that $10 as surely as if you had pick-pocketed him of $10.)
> 2. The article fails to address how Folding@Home eases scientific contributions by the masses.
'Scientific contributions'? What contributions? If you just mean, let the masses feel like they're doing something useful, then Folding@Home could do us all a favor and make the main loop of the daemon a call to sleep()! If you mean, actual scientific progress, that overlaps with your point #3 which I'll get to.
> I agree that $12.65 million can save many lives -- provided it was not split across scores of charities.
A dollar is a dollar, no matter where it comes from. If you and 99 other people each donate $100 to 100 charities, then it's the same as if each person donated $10,000 to just 1 charity. The only difference is whatever overhead there might be; and even if we say that our Folding@Home contributors lose 50% to overhead and the charities wind up getting only $6 million in their bank accounts to use, that's still thousands more lives saved than by running Folding@Home and wasting the same amount of money!
> 3. Folding@Home has the potential to save hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives.
This is the key question. If Folding@Home has expected value of thousands of lives a year, then running it is fine. But if it's not producing...
For these sort of stakes, one would hope that one had really good evidence. But let's lower standards and merely ask for ordinary evidence. What reason do you have to think Folding@Home has such extraordinary potential? It has been operating for nearly 11 years. 11! And nothing that has saved a single life. (You are free to provide a counter-example.) At what point do we stop talking about its potential to save millions of lives and about the possibility of teapots in orbit around Mercury?