$200M gift propels scientific research in the search for life beyond Earth
seti.org
seti.org
Seeing this news makes me wish more donors donated to science at the department level, or to every lab in a given department. Money is so incredibly tight in Academia that the entry level job (being a graduate student) typically gives people around minimum wage or less for five years to make a life with. This is an absolutely terrible incentive for attracting some of the best and the brightest to enter the funnel of knowledge production workers (e.g. grad students, post-docs, researchers, and professors.)
I don't know how this can be fixed systemically, but donors could help change the incentives and improve the quality of science for all.
For everyone who complains about the quality of the scientific literature, the replication crisis, the golden quarter, I think part of it ultimately stems from the way the funnel is set up.
But is not graduate school in some broad sense competing with the likes of startup accelerators et al.? Don't get me wrong, I think that's a good thing in the abstract. But 5 years of minimum wage while working for someone who likely has paltry managerial skills, with the prospects of an increasingly shaky academic job market. My point is that it's too bad for society that the competition is so drastically one sided.
As an adversarial opinion on _that_, what seems to have happened is that the "best and brightest" filter in academia is further filtered to "those who also have the well-off family background to support that". See also the Victorian "gentleman scientist".
Sure, this filter does serve to cut down on the numbers, but I can see problems with using this filter, e.g. the effect on those excluded, and the biases that it will introduce. I would not call it a good thing on the whole.
Given the size of university endowments, and the enormous tuitions, this sounds like misaligned incentives rather than paucity.
The current state of the system for graduate students is bad, but it is not improved by allowing private investment.
people who are very good at making money make stupid investments?
> industrially motivated ideas
which drive increased prosperity in our economy
> it is not improved by allowing private investment
wow. Maybe we shouldn't allow things like inventing semiconductors, jet engines, television, etc.
Absolutely, particularly when the "investment" is a donation to charity or a university that's more to assuage guilt or plaster a name for posterity than it is for any return.
People that do end up with a great deal of money aren't always the sharpest crayons in the sun - many have luck and good advisors.
And you know this, how?
> always
If you have to insert this word, you've created a strawman.
> > always
> If you have to insert this word, you've created a strawman.
It's a strawman to say that "something isn't always true?" Really? Come on.
Just because someone makes a lot of money doesn't mean they are intelligent or did so upon their own virtue. And it doesn't necessarily mean they're good at investments and capital allocation.
>> it is not improved by allowing private investment
> wow. Maybe we shouldn't allow things like inventing semiconductors, jet engines, television, etc.
An incredibly sizable portion of technological development in the U.S. in the past 100 years is due to government (i.e., public) funding, not private funding.
Never mind semiconductors, jet engines, television, internet phones, AI, electric cars, engines, steel making, typewriters, the whole textile industry, telephones, CDs, electric guitars, autotune, cameras, need I go on?
> Just because someone makes a lot of money doesn't mean they are intelligent or did so upon their own virtue. And it doesn't necessarily mean they're good at investments and capital allocation.
Maybe read biographies of Musk, Jobs, Gates, Bezos, Buffet, Rockefeller, Walton, Sears, etc., then tell me how stupid they are.
> Maybe read biographies of Musk, Jobs, Gates, Bezos, Buffet, Rockefeller, Walton, Sears, etc., then tell me how stupid they are.
I don't need to because I know what the words "cult of personality" mean.
Neither did I.
> My point was that we don't owe everything to private investments.
I didn't say everything.
> I don't need to because ...
A credible case needs more than saying you don't need to know anything about them.
assumptions like that can get one killed
Maybe they don't want the best and the brightest?
If the professors don’t leave / the pipeline doesn’t dry up as a result, why pay more?
Wikipedia somehow separates him from the "original" seven founders, though: [1]
> Qualcomm was created in July 1985by seven former Linkabit employees led by Irwin Jacobs. Other co-founders included Andrew Viterbi, Franklin Antonio, Adelia Coffman, Andrew Cohen, Klein Gilhousen, and Harvey White.
It seems that he's been a long-time supporter of SETI.
Glad that this money will go towards scientific research.
EDIT: the source cited by Wikipedia [2] actually includes Franklin Antonio among the original seven founders:
> The company was founded in 1985 by seven communications industry veterans -- Franklin Antonio, Adelia Coffman, Andrew Cohen, Klein Gilhousen, Irwin Jacobs, Andrew Viterbi and Harvey White.
[0]: https://www.seti.org/longtime-seti-champion-franklin-antonio...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm
[2]: http://edition.cnn.com/2007/BUSINESS/08/10/qualcomm.facts/
No cloud! Too expensive! (my opinion comes being a brief stint as a contributor in data taking for the CMS detector at the LHC. Accelerator ran, threw off data, which went into storage for ad hoc analysis by project collaborators; all data released into the public domain and freely available)
https://home.cern/news/news/knowledge-sharing/cms-completes-...
So-called "close" SETI looking for emitters in our outer solar system.
“The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.”
From rational point of view (history of Indians, general history) and philosophical point of view (great filter) it is safer to keep quiet.
A lot of scientists got killed by their own inventions. And active Seti should be banned since very few can bring doom on others - without even asking them if they agree for that. Did anyone from the active seti community ask for consent? Nope. They know most people would be against it. UN and governments should be too. Although if they were some assholes would start doing it just in spite.
That's a very tiny window in time, and after that the bulk of the comms goes optical or to satellites using far lower power levels than your typical radio or TV station. Ironically the first thing ET might be able to hear and what we might be able to hear from ET's is "CQ CQ ... ".
Would be very expensive, take a few decades at least, and the profit comes from...governments? Haha not sure about that yet. Might have to pitch it as a planetary defense company and also build tech to zap asteroids etc.
Basically, NASA is doing the great hard science obviously, but is outdone in pacing and tech by SpaceX and other startups; NASA plans to send 1-5? 550 AU missions eventually. But they're in no rush. I want to rush it.
Would be very expensive but I think cheaper per mission, if you start off with a plan to send a lot of them.
Might take in full some tens or hundreds of billions. YC I am aware will not fund on that level haha, but maybe they would have an eye for wanting to start it off.
Here's a cool video describing solar sails that are supposed to be able to accelerate up to a final velocity of 22 AU/year, which get things to 550AU in 25 years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQFqDKRAROI&t=883s
This video was based on the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08421
I really find it difficult to believe that 200m into science education funding will make less of an impact on the chances of finding alien life than directing it at Seti.
Point being, education is a very large field, with a very large capability to burn money in operational expenses, spending it all on doing a little bit more of the same thing it's already doing.
SETI, in contrast, is a small, underfunded corner of STEM R&D, at the bleeding edge of astrophysics, signals processing and a bunch of other fields. Pouring $200M there has a much greater chance of pushing some actual research or technology development, with gains flowing back to society and economy (including to science education). SETI has much less space for grifters, and it's much easier to spot money going the wrong way.
Or, in short, a cup filled with water will make more visible impact when poured into a portable bottle, than when poured into a lake.
I agree with your other point that data crunching is not necessarily going to help. Low-power RF emission from lightyears away will be well below the noise floor. Some more innovative, speculative approaches would be a better use of that money, even if they all lead to dead ends.
Whether it's a good angle, I don't know. But it's a perfectly reasonable one, methinks.
I just began reading it with my 10yo daughter. The beginning discusses how Fermi raised the important question "where are they?", and we just started on how the Drake equation provides a set of smaller, more obtainable questions to answer.
Like I imagine tons of people will be hitting them up for pet projects of varying quality after this announcement.
Though looking at Wikipedia, they have been around since 1984, with many high profile donors, so maybe they are institutionally able to deal with huge variations in budget?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI_Institute
My (uninformed) guess is that $200 M must to be the biggest gift by an order of magnitude, or maybe 2.
Or are these kind of estate gifts split up over multiple years, with strings attached? Either that or you just get one huge check :)
As mentioned in the press release, contribution will be used at least in part as an endowment, providing perpetual funding for ongoing programs.
Also, it is my understanding that large philanthropic gifts, particularly from estates, often come in the form of non-cash assets such as stocks or other financial instruments. So probably not a $200m check, but a very nice nest egg to fund SETI projects for decades to come.
I offered since my bank had already pitched me on establishing a charitable gift fund that would allow me to claim the tax credits this year but disburse the money to registered charities in the future.
https://www.nasa.gov/general/lunar-crater-radio-telescope-lc...
- Many thought Earth was at the center of the universe. First we found it circled the Sun.
- Next, we found our solar system was nothing special in the Milk Way Galaxy, and the Milky Way was nothing special in the universe.
- Many thought humans were distinct from other animals. Then we discovered that all animals just evolutionary descendants of some primordial cells.
The journey cannot stop. The search for extraterrestrial life might succeed or it might not. But what it does is that it humbles us. It reminds us that we must not be the only life in the Universe. Only by searching for that life can we truly acknowledge our humble position in the cosmos. And counter the arrogance of the Homo Sapiens.
I.e. the kind of coordination game theory decrees as effectively impossible. Were such event to happen, whatever mechanism drove it could be used to reduce emissions and implement effective climate change mitigations pretty much on the spot. And if it generalizes as solution to coordination problems, it would literally solve all major issues plaguing humanity to date.
What if we could all just teleport anywhere we wanted at any time, instantly!? Like most things of this sort, unfortunately, we exist in the real world where such a naive fantasy will stay as just that; a naive fantasy.
Is it so naive to believe that eventually, we as humans can eventually overcome our stone age instincts and stop slaughtering each other on a big enough scale to necessitate some amount of militarism?
I for one would be greatly disappointed if we could not achieve that eventually. In today's age, I agree that it's hardly possible, there are simply too many parts of the world without sufficient education or still in the grip of authoritarianism or religious fanatics, but once we've overcome that, it should surely be possible eventually?
... eh, maybe I'm just naive. But as MLK so nicely put it, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice, and I'd really like to believe that.
Money spent on one area doesn't mean the resulting innovations or knowledge stay there, they cross over and enrich other areas.