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Sad? I don't see anyone crying. It's not as if the entire scientific community is just dropping whatever they're doing to work on this. The value of an endea

Sad? I don't see anyone crying. It's not as if the entire scientific community is just dropping whatever they're doing to work on this. The value of an endeavor is its likelihood of success times its potential reward. So while the probability that these people will succeed is very, very low, the potentially incalculable rewards of discovering alien life offset that.

hodwik 11y ago
> Sad? I don't see anyone crying. Most of the world is crying -- we're dying of a thousand different wounds, and science, what was supposed to be our greatest hope, has become a sort of masturbatory worship of safe data. It's lost direction. Rather than working on real, hard problems they're arguing about escapist nonsense. The only way the Drake equation gives high answers for our chances of contacting aliens is if you put in absurdly high values for ne through L. Sure, there are aliens, but they are tens of millions of lightyears away. FTL travel and communication will only ever be fantasy. You will not meet them, get over it.
EC1 11y ago
This is no different than my Father coming home every night without food telling us the same thing, that when he wins big we'll have all the bread in the world. He never won, then he died. People wasting time on things that have an extremely low probability is still a waste of time at the expense of everyone else currently living on the planet. If anything, discovering alien life will probably end us.
- lazypenguin 11y ago
  How short-sighted and small minded. In the pursuit of answering these questions the people involved develop new techniques and new knowledge that ultimately aid in our overall scientific progress.
  - EC1 11y ago
    Yes but you haven't said anything tangible. This does nothing for people suffering from lack of fundamental necessities. How much hubris do you need to completely skip our planet and get right to fantasy? I'd get it if we were all so smart we solved everything we needed to but we can't even solve our own planet. Your casual philandering with space exploration doesn't put anything on anyone's table but your own, much like how lots of minds are wasted crunching pointless numbers for data startups.
    - lazypenguin 11y ago
      Nor have you provided any evidence that it has negatively affected society, your argument is weak. As a matter of fact, NASA has made hundreds of contributions to society, particularly in material sciences. Here is a list I found on a pop-culture site after a few seconds of googling (I am sure there are more detailed lists elsewhere): http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/50-years-50-giant-leaps-how-nasa-rocked-our-world-879377.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/50-years-50-giant-... I believe it is quite common for knowledge to permeate across domains (e.g. math->computer science->internet or astrobiology->biology->medicine). You adopt a naive view where you make the assumption that the works of these scientists are trivial because YOU don't see the benefit to our society. With that sort of reasoning we should never embark on any endeavor where we are unsure the outcome would benefit us.
      - EC1 11y ago
        By virtue of not pursuing something that doesn't efficiently get basic necessities to everyone, I don't need evidence as you're doing the work for me. Great, but they could have added more if they abandoned space altogether and used all those billions on aid. There is quite literally no point in wasting money on manned interplanetary missions. It's futile because we can't move at light speed, so even if we did find something it'd prompt an "oh, ok, cool" and everyone would move on. And we'd still have slavery and poverty and starvation.
    - xenophonf 11y ago
      casual philandering with space exploration Pure research is such a critical part of scientific advancement. Where would we be today without all of the work done by military rocketry and civilian space programs? Without various nations' space programs, scientists working on diseases including malaria, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis would not have had access over the last twenty years to high-bandwidth communications services via communications satellites at hospitals, clinics, laboratories, and schools scattered across some of the most remote areas of the African continent---to name just one region with which I have direct involvement. I cannot even begin to stress how important that kind of access is even in this modern age of relatively good 2G/3G coverage (there are still plenty of locations in which we work to cure disease where satellite communications are still a necessity). It made it possible for our scientists to not only train their colleagues in country and raise up new generations of skilled doctors, nurses, and scientists, but also to access the sum total of scientific knowledge from places where good people frequently suffer and die from the kinds of endemic disease rarely seen in the West. Maybe searching web sites or holding conference calls seems droll and ordinary to you, but to our scientists and their colleagues, getting Internet access via satellite in the middle of sub-Saharan Africa during the late 90s and early 00s was revolutionary. So much good work---the fruit of which we see bearing now, like not just one but several effective malaria vaccines as well as mosquito population control programs---became possible, all because fifty years ago, people started "philandering" with space exploration. How much hubris do you need to think that you alone know how best to allocate not only the scarce resources of this planet but also the lives of every single human being on this planet, and to sit in judgment of what work is worthy and what isn't? To transcend the current boundaries of human knowledge and engineering skill has a direct impact on our (collective) lives, and for the better. This world is not zero-sum; it is not in thermodynamic equilibrium. For some people to work in space for the eventual benefit of mankind as a whole does not require other people to suffer and die of want and neglect (quite the opposite, in fact).
- lutusp 11y ago
  > People wasting time on things that have an extremely low probability is still a waste of time at the expense of everyone else currently living on the planet. If your views were policy, we would have no modern medicine or agriculture, people would have an average lifetime of 30 years, and ignorance would be the norm In other words, we would live in the world that actually existed when your views were policy. > ... that when he wins big we'll have all the bread in the world. He never won, then he died. He didn't win because he didn't understand probability, like most lottery players today. He would have been better off spending his limited resources on feeding and educating his children. I'm sure he loved his children and was a valuable person, but the story might have had a nicer outcome if he had had an education -- an education with roots in science.
- shepardrtc 11y ago
  Your analogy assumes that - as a species - we're spending all or most of our resources on this endeavor when we're actually spending next to nothing on it. And if alien life will end us, perhaps we should discover them before they discover us.
- jameshart 11y ago
  Lovelock's work at NASA philosophizing about the possible chemical processes which might go on on other planets led to his considering life+atmosphere as a combined system, which directly drove a lot of scientific investigation of the effect of human activity on the atmosphere and the atmosphere's effect on life, and therefore to much of our current understanding about global warming. This kind of research is not isolated, it helps us understand planetary dynamics and find other examples of planet-scale atmospheric systems which help us learn more about our own.

hodwik 11y ago

> Sad? I don't see anyone crying. Most of the world is crying -- we're dying of a thousand different wounds, and science, what was supposed to be our greatest hope, has become a sort of masturbatory worship of safe data. It's lost direction. Rather than working on real, hard problems they're arguing about escapist nonsense. The only way the Drake equation gives high answers for our chances of contacting aliens is if you put in absurdly high values for ne through L. Sure, there are aliens, but they are tens of millions of lightyears away. FTL travel and communication will only ever be fantasy. You will not meet them, get over it.

EC1 11y ago

This is no different than my Father coming home every night without food telling us the same thing, that when he wins big we'll have all the bread in the world. He never won, then he died. People wasting time on things that have an extremely low probability is still a waste of time at the expense of everyone else currently living on the planet. If anything, discovering alien life will probably end us.

lazypenguin 11y ago
How short-sighted and small minded. In the pursuit of answering these questions the people involved develop new techniques and new knowledge that ultimately aid in our overall scientific progress.
- EC1 11y ago
  Yes but you haven't said anything tangible. This does nothing for people suffering from lack of fundamental necessities. How much hubris do you need to completely skip our planet and get right to fantasy? I'd get it if we were all so smart we solved everything we needed to but we can't even solve our own planet. Your casual philandering with space exploration doesn't put anything on anyone's table but your own, much like how lots of minds are wasted crunching pointless numbers for data startups.
  - lazypenguin 11y ago
    Nor have you provided any evidence that it has negatively affected society, your argument is weak. As a matter of fact, NASA has made hundreds of contributions to society, particularly in material sciences. Here is a list I found on a pop-culture site after a few seconds of googling (I am sure there are more detailed lists elsewhere): http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/50-years-50-giant-leaps-how-nasa-rocked-our-world-879377.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/50-years-50-giant-... I believe it is quite common for knowledge to permeate across domains (e.g. math->computer science->internet or astrobiology->biology->medicine). You adopt a naive view where you make the assumption that the works of these scientists are trivial because YOU don't see the benefit to our society. With that sort of reasoning we should never embark on any endeavor where we are unsure the outcome would benefit us.
    - EC1 11y ago
      By virtue of not pursuing something that doesn't efficiently get basic necessities to everyone, I don't need evidence as you're doing the work for me. Great, but they could have added more if they abandoned space altogether and used all those billions on aid. There is quite literally no point in wasting money on manned interplanetary missions. It's futile because we can't move at light speed, so even if we did find something it'd prompt an "oh, ok, cool" and everyone would move on. And we'd still have slavery and poverty and starvation.
  - xenophonf 11y ago
    casual philandering with space exploration Pure research is such a critical part of scientific advancement. Where would we be today without all of the work done by military rocketry and civilian space programs? Without various nations' space programs, scientists working on diseases including malaria, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis would not have had access over the last twenty years to high-bandwidth communications services via communications satellites at hospitals, clinics, laboratories, and schools scattered across some of the most remote areas of the African continent---to name just one region with which I have direct involvement. I cannot even begin to stress how important that kind of access is even in this modern age of relatively good 2G/3G coverage (there are still plenty of locations in which we work to cure disease where satellite communications are still a necessity). It made it possible for our scientists to not only train their colleagues in country and raise up new generations of skilled doctors, nurses, and scientists, but also to access the sum total of scientific knowledge from places where good people frequently suffer and die from the kinds of endemic disease rarely seen in the West. Maybe searching web sites or holding conference calls seems droll and ordinary to you, but to our scientists and their colleagues, getting Internet access via satellite in the middle of sub-Saharan Africa during the late 90s and early 00s was revolutionary. So much good work---the fruit of which we see bearing now, like not just one but several effective malaria vaccines as well as mosquito population control programs---became possible, all because fifty years ago, people started "philandering" with space exploration. How much hubris do you need to think that you alone know how best to allocate not only the scarce resources of this planet but also the lives of every single human being on this planet, and to sit in judgment of what work is worthy and what isn't? To transcend the current boundaries of human knowledge and engineering skill has a direct impact on our (collective) lives, and for the better. This world is not zero-sum; it is not in thermodynamic equilibrium. For some people to work in space for the eventual benefit of mankind as a whole does not require other people to suffer and die of want and neglect (quite the opposite, in fact).
lutusp 11y ago
> People wasting time on things that have an extremely low probability is still a waste of time at the expense of everyone else currently living on the planet. If your views were policy, we would have no modern medicine or agriculture, people would have an average lifetime of 30 years, and ignorance would be the norm In other words, we would live in the world that actually existed when your views were policy. > ... that when he wins big we'll have all the bread in the world. He never won, then he died. He didn't win because he didn't understand probability, like most lottery players today. He would have been better off spending his limited resources on feeding and educating his children. I'm sure he loved his children and was a valuable person, but the story might have had a nicer outcome if he had had an education -- an education with roots in science.
shepardrtc 11y ago
Your analogy assumes that - as a species - we're spending all or most of our resources on this endeavor when we're actually spending next to nothing on it. And if alien life will end us, perhaps we should discover them before they discover us.
jameshart 11y ago
Lovelock's work at NASA philosophizing about the possible chemical processes which might go on on other planets led to his considering life+atmosphere as a combined system, which directly drove a lot of scientific investigation of the effect of human activity on the atmosphere and the atmosphere's effect on life, and therefore to much of our current understanding about global warming. This kind of research is not isolated, it helps us understand planetary dynamics and find other examples of planet-scale atmospheric systems which help us learn more about our own.