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Comment by p-e-w | Hacker News Reader

While I do share a certain romantic admiration for the grandeur of SETI's goals, I have to agree with those who call this a waste of money and brainpower in our times.

The most ludicrous AGI apocalypse scenarios seem orders of magnitude more likely than finding conclusive evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. A second terrestrial intelligence is about to emerge, and the consequences of that might conceivably be far worse than a literal alien invasion.

Whatever resources are available for speculative anticipation of encounters with non-human intelligences should surely be directed towards hypothetical AGIs, rather than towards hypothetical beings from Epsilon Eridani.

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Mankind puts immense amounts of its metal capacity into firing ways to better advertise things. Your argument doesn’t really stand when Adtech takes orders of magnitude more resource

That's an equally bogus argument. "Mankind" isn't a singular entity with a unified will. Some people spending their mental capacity on adtech has nothing whatsoever with other people deciding to spend theirs on SETI (or not), and there's nothing wrong with people deciding to do adtech.

It’s science. It’s not in preparation for some kind of imminent encounter whose likelihood is weighed against some other event, but simply trying to understand our universe.

Maybe AI can do much better at interpreting signals than humans do, and we should build this lunar station so that the post-human AGI can listen to calls from other distant AGIs. It would certainly have more patience for interstellar communication than us.

Science is a human endeavor, and like all human endeavors, it is subject to human limitations and resource constraints. Humanity surviving is a prerequisite for doing SETI, and that means preferentially allocating resources to projects that work on mitigating existential threats, everything else being equal.

Now, I'm not asking that carpenters be reassigned to work on AI extinction scenarios. That wouldn't make sense, because it's not their area of expertise. But if you are already going to spend resources on hypothetical non-human intelligences, surely the kind of intelligence we are by far most likely to actually encounter deserves the most attention. And in the absence of unlimited resources (i.e., in reality), that goes at the expense of lower priority intelligence scenarios.

Note that these people are asking for a telescope to be built on the moon. That's an absolutely enormous expense, that, needless to say, wouldn't be funded by those scientists but by society as a whole. Resources are limited, so every decision to fund something means not funding something else. Priorities are a thing, and "it's science" doesn't change that.

I find it fascinating that people in 2023 argue with „resource constraints“ when talking about scientific projects. Those guys working on that are experts, they wouldnt do much else, the money spent on this is comparatively a joke in comparison to other spendings with much more questionable reasoning, and starting to question the gain of a project in the scientific space is never really an argument; it lies within the basic idea of science to question and reach out of our comfort zone

> starting to question the gain of a project in the scientific space is never really an argument

It most certainly is, at least in the real world. The ISS has cost more than $150 billion so far. That's not "a joke", it's the GDP of a mid-size country. I very much do hope that everyone involved is asking themselves hard questions about whether this expense is justified by whatever has been gained in return. Science is not a magical la-la-land where people have the right to piss away truckloads of public money on projects they feel are important, simply by virtue of invoking vague platitudes about the "need for humanity to know".

There are an endless number of scientific projects all looking for resources to fund them. If (potential) gain isn't the right criterion for prioritization, then I don't know what is.

It's also about curiosity and fun. The public can fund something they find interesting for the sake of it.

> The ISS has cost more than $150 billion so far.

Wow, a whole three "midlife crisis ceo twitter buyouts".

It'd be cathartic if our kids referred to a gigantic financial blunder in the billions of dollars as pulling an "Elon".

> The ISS has cost more than $150 billion so far.

The UK's "High Speed 2" project is currently budgeted to cost about $125 billion for its ~300mi extent. I very much do hope that everyone involved is asking themselves hard questions about whether this expense is justified by whatever has been gained in return. The UK is not a magical la-la-land where people have the right to piss away truckloads of public money on projects they feel are important, simply by virtue of invoking vague platitudes about the "need to reduce journey time from 71 to 52 minutes".

The ISS seems like a bargain.

And people only looking at the ISS as a "science experiment" are seriously misunderstanding the social impacts as well, especially when it comes to operations that span multiple countries and the relations between them. It's a public spot of cooperation that helps us not only when it comes to science, but when it comes to agree with each other.

Science spending is small in comparison to the the subsidies that get handed out every year to just the banking industry

It's never really an argument for you and yet we are still arguing. SETI is a waste of money. I guess those experts will have to just sit and twiddle their fingers because "they wouldnt do much else". Money wasted is money wasted, doesn't matter how much it is. Sure, for people like you, it's easy to waste other people's money.

> Note that these people are asking for a telescope to be built on the moon. That's an absolutely enormous expense

Less than it cost to send a roadster to Mars. The cost of two superbowl’s worth of adds. The revenue from a moderately successful movie.

By that logic we should only work on what eradicates threat to humanity’s survival. Ok, let’s axe half of the sciences.

Then we could argue that as a species, well before thinking about cutting the budget for space related studies we should cut the military budget. From the perspective of survival of the human species, it is quite stupid to spend money to find more effective ways of killing each other, while any scientific endeavor would be more valuable as long as the primary goal isn't "how to better kill the enemy".

> That's an absolutely enormous expense, that, needless to say, wouldn't be funded by those scientists but by society as a whole.

Looks like you forgot to read the article before commenting.

What enormous expense? They're talking about a cost of $200 million. That is chump change for the _individual billionaire philanthropist_ funding it out of his own pocket, not "society as a whole". This is his play money. Some billionaires own super yachts and other toys that cost multiple times that amount. The Eclipse superyacht cost $1.5 billion, owned by a Russian oligarch. That's 7.5 times the cost of this moon telescope, for one stupid yacht, that itself is a drop in the ocean of expensive toys in the world.

The thing with humanity progress, is that you have to start a lot of completely different efforts in parallel, because history has proven that there is no way to know what will play the biggest role in the future.

"No one has yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of numbers or relativity, and it seems unlikely that anyone will do so for many years." — G. H. Hardy (1941)

It seems odd to me (this is also with reference to some of your child comments) that you rely on knowledge gained from previous efforts to suggest future efforts are pointless.

But beyond that I don't really see how these concerns are supposed to be competing for resources. Yes, resources are finite, but I don't see why you suppose they aren't sufficient to saturate both these concerns and then some.

There also seems to be value in the project in that it is a stepping stone towards being extra terrestrial ourselves. Establishing a powered listening post on the far side of the moon is likely to be very educational.

> I have to agree with those who call this a waste of money and brainpower in our times.

They're looking at a cost of $200 Million, funded out of pocket by one billionaire philanthropist. That's his pocket money. The cost is negligible on a global scale. 0.00019% of GDP.

Maybe complain about military expenditures or corporate subsidies first?

This argument is along the lines of ‘why do grandmasters waste their time on chess? They should direct their brainpower to things that really matter’

I see two potential AGI apocalypses described in scenarios like this.

1. Skynet type scenario where machines rule and somehow we can’t pull the plug on them.

2. Humans hoping to make money and gain power and weird positive feedback loops cause AI to goad humans into war with each other, causing massive world conflict, destroying the earth.

I cannot for the life of me fathom number 1 ever happening. How many data centers or aircraft carriers or really anything electronic or mechanized continue working without massive human intervention to keep those power outlets or engines going? I can’t think of anything. Why do we keep fearing this? I don’t care how much the AI evolves and iterates in silicon, it cannot escape this law of our physical universe and need for a physical connection to the real world we live in. It needs an army of humans, the great generalists, supporting it, to even survive.

Now if you fear #2, well that is more plausible and it seems we are living in it now.

In the late 80s many people were of a similar opinion about attempts to find extrasolar planets.

I think there is value in having this proposal written and published.

Even if it does not get built anytime soon (say because today‘s society thinks this is a waste of money), having the idea discussed in public helps and might inform future decisions.

For example, we still reread proposals like the Dyson sphere, space elevators, a next-gen LHC, etc. . None of this is either technologically feasible today nor realistically fundable, but it shows the ambition and might spark discussions.

There are plenty of terrestrial intelligences. Just because they don't want to talk to you doesn't mean they don't exist. In fact, It's rather egotistical to create an artificial "intelligence" that wants to talk to you. It's probably more interesting to wonder why the intelligences that are here have little interest in interacting with us then to create new ones that will fawn over us like chatgpt does now.

why does it seem more likely? from an objective standpoint, why is there a higher likelihood for that?

I would actually disagree. Extraterrestrial life is essentially guaranteed (statistically) but conlusive evidence is exceptionally difficult and who knows how far away any life would be. But there is absolutely nothing to suggest AGI is possible, let alone ASI. At best they are both equally unlikely in that people are biased by how much science fiction they read, and thats how they attribute likelihood. HN just likes to go on and on about AGI and whatever but its just overhyping as usual

Nitpick: Our own intelligence suggests that an artificial general intelligence is possible. First time seeing ASI but, any quality you can attribute to a human has the potential to be replicated by dint of the mechanical nature of our bodies.

I'm not saying we'll get there - I don't think 'we' as a culture even really understands what is meant by intelligence - but we know its possible because we exist.

I'm open to the possibility of achieving an artificial intelligence, but for other reasons.

Most of the people talking about AGI now are assuming it is possible to achieve that with today's computer architectures, maybe just more powerful than what we have now. But to be fair, the fact that our body is intelligent says very little about the possibility that also a PC could be intelligent, as their inner workings are extremely different. To be sure that a computer can be intelligent, you have either to build a computer AGI and show that it is intelligent or you have to prove that intelligence is computable.

I make no claims about the hardware it would run on, simply that our bodies are evidence that intelligence can be evoked from a system that fits largely inside the human skull, certainly no larger than the human body. That alone is sufficient evidence that the goal of creating a recognizably similar intelligence is not impossible.

Also, most of the people talking about AI and intelligence don't know jack from shit. Other people have wondered if the differences between computer hardware traits and brain traits (one has relatively few but highly reliable and completely integrated units, the other is the inverse) is crucial and have been working on neuromorphic hardware. Other groups have focused on modeling and simulating at various levels with the goal of creating medically relevant models (one day), with stunning results in modeling specific neuron's firing behavior, and interesting if not at all medically plausible simulations of the behavior of groups of neurons interacting and performing tasks.

Talking about how smart a computer chip can be is irrelevant when the hardware is instead designed to function like neurons do. A simulation of intelligence that performs by doing what a brain does in the way that a brain does it has a strong argument for being akin to intelligence - especially if you construct the simulation such that it must deal with human experiences, such as persistent embodiment in a stimulating environment with multiple competing needs.

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