Comment by worldvoyageur | Hacker News Reader

Comment by worldvoyageur | Hacker News Reader

This is sad to read, but perhaps an opportunity in disguise.

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

SETI doesn't sell search for life, SETI sells "I have donated money to SETI." After you understand this, it is the Rosetta Stone for non-profit fundraising. (And the enduring support for the space program among geeks, which is non-profit spending using other people's money that actually funds military hardware R&D.)

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.

I wouldn't be surprised if SETI did this to promote their cause and raise more private donations, but the journalist is spinning it into a "Government cuts science spending" story to suit their agenda. The story will still serve its purpose though. I just donated $10, only another 499,999 more and they're home and dry.

  > 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

It also suggests that the problem of finding intelligent life is basically a financial one.

s/we could/there is a very slim chance that &/

Or, we could take the cost of one day of our Libyan Kinetic Military Action ($100 million) and fund this program for a generation.

Or we could take the 2.5 million for SETI and help people get access to safe drinking water, food, and vaccines. After all, people on Earth suffering should be a higher priority than looking for spacemen, right?

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.

"After all, people on Earth suffering should be a higher priority than looking for spacemen, right?"

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.

Once worldwide military funding goes down to the level of the rest of budgets everywhere, we can talk about which one deserves more money than the other.

Until then, anything is a joke. A sad joke. And we're the clowns.

I'd be reluctant to invest more in an investment that has never paid off. They're searching for signs of life. Signs found so far = 0. Thats a pretty bad ROI.

Sure with that kind of short term thinking we will never get anywhere. It is far to early to call the investment a failure, in relative timescales it would be like calling a new school a failure because it had a bad first day.

Let's say we get a signal. Then what?

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.

That's pretty narrow-minded thinking. Life isn't all about whether something pays off or not. There's science out there that you cannot capitalize on, but it's still worth it. It should be anyway, if humanity wants to progress as a species.

It's possible we won't get to a point where we're ready to do something with a signal unless and until a signal convinces us that getting there is worth the investment (an interesting chicken-and-egg problem).

I agree with you. Very few people have thought through what would happen if SETI found a clear signal. Say intelligence is only 20 light years away from us and they say "Hi! Here we are!"

What possible step could we take? They are soo far away.

We could talk to them. We could listen to them. Chances are at least one side would have something useful to learn from the other. (Think about how much we know that we didn't 100 years ago. Unless this hypothetical other intelligent civilization, having developed independently of ours, happens to be within 100 years of progress of us in every respect, someone's going to learn something.)

You're forgetting about the existence of Republicans. Clearly, what we'd do is immediately fund a massive space army to go and attack the aliens.

You're assuming a lot by saying "there is no payoff".

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.

Actually quite a lot of research has no apparent practical payoff - it's still worth doing though.

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.

The lack of results is an important result in of itself.

Though this could be said for nearly all research until it is complete.

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