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Comment by wnc3141 | Hacker News Reader

Are there any trickle down technologies or scientific discoveries making the search itself worthwhile? In terms of an economic development perspective?

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I think your comment is sarcastic, but Poe's Law in the age of $ > all makes it impossible to tell. If it's genuine I'd only emphasize that the point of money is to be able to do great things. GDP doesn't matter whatsoever, but the betterment of lifestyles and civilization that it's supposed to* correlate against does. And discovering a species, regardless of how simply or complex, on another planet would be one of the greatest discoveries and achievements in human history, with immense scientific and philosophical value.

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* - kind of funny, but the reason GDP was invented was a local jurisdiction claiming it was being overtaxed. But needless to say the reason countries obsess over it today is not to try to reduce their tax burden.

Genuine question. I do not doubt that pursuing the question would be worthwhile. However given how far off we are from achieving this aim, does the effort itself provide value elsewhere from the diffusion of innovation in the same way the Apollo program is said to have done.

Let me turn the question around on you. Imagine the Apollo program somehow provided no value whatsoever beyond what it achieved - putting a man on the Moon. Would it have been worth it to do it? To me, the answer there is undoubtedly yes. The whole point of all the 'value' in existence is to achieve these great things.

Without these great achievements, I'm not even entirely sure the direction our species has taken could be argued to be good. Declining fertility, urban cityscapes that feel increasingly dystopic, working vastly more than even hunter-gathers did (or do), and more. But to what end? There needs to be some payoff to go down this road. For one who is not into consumerism, the only payoff I can see is in these great milestones that probably could not be achieved without going down this path we've chosen.

>urban cityscapes that feel increasingly dystopic,

This sounds US-specific. Lots of cities are quite nice to live in, and quite far from "dystopic" (dystopian?).

Discovering life outside of earth would be the greatest human achievement for the next 5000 years, but you’re worried about if it’s worthwhile?

"Is it worthwhile?" is not a bad question to ask.

If someone proposed to use all of our resources to discover life outside of Earth, we would probably agree that's not the best use of our resources.

But this means there's an upper bound to the cost we're willing to bear. Which leads to the question, how much resources should we devote to finding life outside of Earth? The answer to that question is, yes, dependent on the expected economic outcome of finding extraterrestrial life.

Absolutely in that sense the ends justify the means. I was just wondering what we can get from the means themselves given how far off achieving that end appears.

What if they treated humans the same way human empires treated other humans in America, Canada, Australia, South America , New Zealand

A common enemy to unite all of humanity will certainly provide economic development.

Is this a joke question? Imagine if we discovered an alien civilization that had a population of trillions - if they subscribed to our SaaS app, the scaling and network effects would be insane.

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