SETI Needs Your Help to Resume Search for Extraterrestrial Life

I think we've built/done plenty of cool things as a society and I don't think ending the space program negates that (or what was achieved with the space program in the first place).

I would really be more comfortable with a space program being funded directly by people like yourself in the form of donations to a gov-independent organization, because I for one don't really care all that much about continued space exploration and don't think the government should pay for it. Not that they don't spend tons of money on other stupid stuff, but hey, one step at a time...

Weren't the Pyramids an expression of ego, and the Colosseum a sports arena? That said, I love the Sagan Series and agree with the spirit of your post.

>It's disgusting that we can spend as many billions of dollars a year as we do on blowing each other up, but things like "Let's see what's on the other side of that proverbial mountain" get defunded because they're "pointless".

?? The SETI institute is a California non-profit organization. The government cannot defund it, because it receives no government funding. It is financed entirely by private contributors.

Well said

Can I upvote more than once? Getting out beautiful soup and 1000 proxies

Looked it up on the SETI website. First thing I found that has a real, direct impact:

> The signal processing techniques used for Project Phoenix have already been applied to the detection of breast cancer.

Check it out (http://www.seti.org/) there are lots of thing SETI does, and not just searching for little green men.

SETI@Home did some meta-useful work pioneering crowdsourcing of scientific-computing resources (later used by Folding@Home and others). No idea about the actual results of the data collection/analysis, though. Obviously they haven't succeeded in the headline goal of finding extraterrestrial intelligence, but I would be surprised if they haven't found something interesting about analyzing vast quantities of signals (and anomalies in those signals) along the way.

Plus, I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt because they're asking for an amount of money ($200k) that, by the standards of scientific research grants, is extremely small, so it's not taking a huge risk.

Personally I wish the resources were put into folding@home and other similar projects. SETI did at least create the technology for this, which is great, but I personally don't find the project itself as anything useful.

> Has SETI actually found anything scientifically useful?

Would you also reject a research grant for a potential cancer cure based on the fact that the researcher hasn't cured cancer?

Yes, it's found a wealth of evidence that there aren't currently alien radio signals being beamed at us. At least, in the directions we've looked, at the frequencies we've checked, within our feeble human understanding of what a signal should look like, we haven't seen any signals.

That's useful information. But the returns rapidly diminish. The first thirty seconds you use checking to see if your car keys are under the couch is time well spent. But if you're still looking under your couch two hours later... well, it's possible your car keys ain't there.

This does virtually nothing to get us off the planet. Yes, I can construct a lengthy chain of events whereby a discovery that wouldn't have happened without this donation encourages us to further our space program, but just mailing money to Burt Rutan is more likely to have a direct result.

Thank you. Seriously thank you.

That didn't take too long :)

Can you buy anything with bitcoins other than drugs right now?

edit: I know someone will roll their eyes at this comment and proceed to defend bitcoin, but seriously - what can SETI buy with bitcoins that's useful to them? And "anything people are willing to sell, man, it's just a currency!" is a trivial answer.

I just went through the donation checkout process, and they only accept Visa and Mastercard.