7 ms·

Why Only Americans Are Interested in the Hunt for Alien Life

29 points by vmorgulis 10y ago

treehau5 10y ago
Maybe the rest of the world realizes it would go something like this, "OK found them!" "Awesome! Yay! Hurray!" celebration for weeks, maybe months, hysterical articles, news headlines, further research initiatives, etc Decades later, still have hunger, famine, rising global temperatures, scarce resources, disease, cancer, wars mongering superpowers, and corporate greed, etc
ggggtez 10y ago
They don't even answer the question. I guess he suggests that Americans are still explorers and other countries aren't. That's hardly an explanation.
- betrothed 10y ago
  From the article: So I've resorted to amateur sociology to provide justification. Unlike the countries of Europe, America still resonates to its pioneering heritage, and that heritage is stunningly recent.
anon1234321 10y ago
Because Europe is a malaised society that lost its vigor, its lust for glory and adventure, long ago.
- pmyjavec 10y ago
  America hasn't exactly helped Europe out by displacing millions of refugees and creating a humanitarian crisis on their door step. Not to mention doing practically nothing to tackle climate change for the last 30 years. Sure Europe is in a difficult place right now, but who knows, they might emerge beter off and more ready for space exploration down the track?
  - tracker1 10y ago
    wrt climate change, any plan that excludes China and India is short sighted and wrong, which almost every proposed plan has done. Beyond this, the U.S. would do more to reduce emissions by eliminating "express/air" delivery services. Most plans/suggestions don't even look at the economics, or secondary factors. Like open-mining of rare minerals, mercury, etc in the mfg of low-energy light bulbs. I'm all for reducing pollution and waste... I have a hyper-sensitive sense of smell, and the smog even in Phx is getting to be too much, let alone other cities I've been to. And, littering in general just pisses me off... but having 4-5 containers for recycling to sort things into, and then having that basically be a jobs program for sorters, when in the end most of it is still land-filled is a bit wasteful in itself. There needs to be some pragmatism in terms of getting the biggest bang for the buck, and ineffective feel-good programs aren't the way to do get real impacting change. ---- In terms of trade, not allowing trade with countries that don't meet or exceed U.S. quality of life requirements for workers would be a start. Disallowing diesel ships the ability to dock in U.S. ports over the next decade would do a lot as well. Disallowing airmail transport of packages, or heavily taxing would help a lot too. Tax credits for hiring employees with less than a 20 minute commute could also go a long way too. Include employees able to work from home at least 60% of the time. Enacting a national energy tax on companies with over 1000 employees could be a large impact as well. It's possible to do a lot of these things without creating a lot of hard to manage subsidies that will exist long beyond the reasons for making them in the first place.
  - anon1234321 10y ago
    None of those are related to Europe's malaise. The fire that drives people to build great things, to push themselves harder, to try to make a better life for themselves, has been extinguished in Europeans.
    - internaut 10y ago
      We have a positive surplus of intelligent ambitious people in Japan, Europe and America. What we don't have is savings or capital. This malaise is generational, not regional.
- dang 10y ago
  Please don't post continental slurs here.
  - mSparks 10y ago
    please take your life somewhere else.
  - anon1234321 10y ago
    That's not a slur, it's an opinion about cultural differences quite relevant to the discussion. Is it now a HackerNews rule to deny the existence of cultural differences?
    - dang 10y ago
      We've banned this account for trolling. Please don't create accounts to break the HN guidelines with.
disposablezero 10y ago
Given the U.S. propensity for religiousity, perhaps another effort is searching the universe for God?
- TheOsiris 10y ago
  dude, if you think the US ranks even near the top 25 countries in terms of religiosity then you need to travel more
  - throwaway2016a 10y ago
    While that is true as a percentage of the population, as for total number of religious people the US is in the top 5 just due to population size. [1] Also, some US states are larger than entire countries and the percentages vary greatly by state. So depending on where you live in the United States it may feel like literally everyone is religious. I live in a relatively liberal part of the country and I still feel the need to stay in the closet as an atheist for fear or being disowned by my community and family. But back to the topic at hand, I think finding aliens would be definitive proof that at the very least the part about God creating earth as something unique and special is bogus. In other words I think the origional poster is completely wrong. If you believe in God you should fear finding aliens. Philosophically many religious people have trouble reconciling with evolution, never mind another living creature on a planet other than our own. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_coun... - yeah I know I shouldn't use Wikipedia as a source but I only have so much time to debate on Hacker News per day and finding quality sources takes time :(
- betrothed 10y ago
  Quackery. May as well toss in some Freudian penis analogy for rockets too. An interest in the prospects of space aliens is definitely escapism, but most people interested in the scholarly fields of astrophysics and astronomy are rational enough to confront life without clinging to spiritual mysticism or superstition. Metaphysical experience, ethics, and philosophy are topics of interest, but why should it be that the topic of space aliens must invade such tiresome and belabored subjects. What are they, Klingons?
hubert123 10y ago
didnt China just build a massive radio station for space?..
Tepix 10y ago
The author is misinformed. Jurij Milner who is Russian, is giving an unprecedented 100 million USD for SETI purposes as part of the Breakthrough Listen project.
acd 10y ago
I am Swedish and interested. There is 100-200 billion galaxies. The estimated number of stars in the universe is between 10^22 to 10^24. Each star on average has more than planet in orbit. That means its at lest 10^22 planets. 10000000000000000000000. Whats the probability we are the only one with intelligent life on it? Here is a Russian billionare funding interstellar space craft. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/russian-billionaire-unveils-big-plan-build-tiny-interstellar-spacecraft http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/russian-billionaire-u... We should work together in peace to discover these new planets. http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Herschel/How_many_stars_are_there_in_the_Universe http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Herschel/How... http://www.space.com/25303-how-many-galaxies-are-in-the-universe.html http://www.space.com/25303-how-many-galaxies-are-in-the-univ... http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-resources/how-many-stars-are-there/ http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-resources/how-many-...
- placebo 10y ago
  While I definitely don't exclude the possibility of life on other planets, I don't think we have yet any way to calculate the probability of its existence. I can think of two possibilities to estimate the probability of life outside earth. The first requires knowing, given set of planets excluding earth, how many of them have life on them. We obviously can't use this method yet. Another method is knowing exactly what it takes to create life and then calculating the probability of this process occurring outside earth. We haven't yet managed to synthesise life in a lab (despite headlines which try to claim the contrary). This does not mean we won't be able to create it eventually, but the fact remains that can't yet assess what more is left to make it work. Therefore, you can't assess the probability for it to work anywhere else. Bottom line, I can see no serious formula (Drake's or other) which can give us any estimate at the moment.
- gpsx 10y ago
  I am going to take the opposing view here on the likelihood of extraterrestrial life. But I do want to say that I think it is good someone is out there looking for it. I have been known to be wrong quite a bit. I don't think 10^22 is a very big number. If we try to guess the probability of life evolving at random, I can see it being negligible given that number of planets. First we can try to calculate something easier, the famous monkeys banging on keyboards to try to type Hamlet. If we put 1 trillion monkeys on each planet, and let them try for a trillion years, with three attempts per day to make the math easier, we get a total of 10^49 attempts. We'll consider a keyboard with 50 keys. 10^49 is roughly 50^29, which means we can expect one lucky monkey to get 29 characters into the play. That is impressive but not very far into a play with 30,557 words (150,000 characters?). (http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/plays_numwords.php http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/plays_numwo...) Now consider human DNA. I am not a biology expert so I may not have my DNA right. But it looks like a typical human DNA molecule contains 500,000 to 2,500,000 nucleotides (http://wow-really.blogspot.com/2006/11/your-dna-would-reach-moon.html http://wow-really.blogspot.com/2006/11/your-dna-would-reach-...). I believe there are 4 possibilities for each nulceotide. That means 4^2,500,000 or 10^1,500,000. That is a lot of possibilities. Worse even then typing Hamlet. And that would be if we just had monkeys supplied with adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine putting DNA together. Never mind that these are each complicated molecules in themselves that have to be assembled at random. So how did we even get here? Well, thanks to quantum mechanics we have almost endless opportunities to end up here. It just seems unlikely that we and some other life ended up in the universe together.
mcv 10y ago
I'm absolutely interested in the hunt for alien life. It's just that I don't think SETI (looking for technological radio signals) is a good way to find it. No signal we've sent into space can be detected from more than half a lightyear away. Radio broadcasts lose power over distance far to quickly to be detectable over interstellar distances, unless you're transmitting with the power of a star. You could send a tight beam of course, but then you need know where to send it. Aliens have to know we're here and they need to care enough to spend significant resource to send us a message. So while I'd love to see a sign of extraterrestrial life, I don't think searching for radio transmissions is the way to go.
kirykl 10y ago
Age of life on earth: ~3,800,000,000 years Age of earth life knowing about electromagnetic radiation: ~217 years Radio SETI will arguably only help us find a species in our relative window of technology. But I think it's worth working on.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Hydraulix989 10y ago
This feels like one of those articles where the author justifies the truth of some non-obvious "fact" without first showing that it is true. Like is it really a thing that "only Americans are interested in searching for alien life" -- I am American, and I wasn't aware (and many of my friends aren't American).

29 points by vmorgulis 10y ago

Maybe the rest of the world realizes it would go something like this, "OK found them!" "Awesome! Yay! Hurray!" celebration for weeks, maybe months, hysterical articles, news headlines, further research initiatives, etc Decades later, still have hunger, famine, rising global temperatures, scarce resources, disease, cancer, wars mongering superpowers, and corporate greed, etc

ggggtez 10y ago

They don't even answer the question. I guess he suggests that Americans are still explorers and other countries aren't. That's hardly an explanation.

betrothed 10y ago
From the article: So I've resorted to amateur sociology to provide justification. Unlike the countries of Europe, America still resonates to its pioneering heritage, and that heritage is stunningly recent.

anon1234321 10y ago

Because Europe is a malaised society that lost its vigor, its lust for glory and adventure, long ago.

pmyjavec 10y ago
America hasn't exactly helped Europe out by displacing millions of refugees and creating a humanitarian crisis on their door step. Not to mention doing practically nothing to tackle climate change for the last 30 years. Sure Europe is in a difficult place right now, but who knows, they might emerge beter off and more ready for space exploration down the track?
- tracker1 10y ago
  wrt climate change, any plan that excludes China and India is short sighted and wrong, which almost every proposed plan has done. Beyond this, the U.S. would do more to reduce emissions by eliminating "express/air" delivery services. Most plans/suggestions don't even look at the economics, or secondary factors. Like open-mining of rare minerals, mercury, etc in the mfg of low-energy light bulbs. I'm all for reducing pollution and waste... I have a hyper-sensitive sense of smell, and the smog even in Phx is getting to be too much, let alone other cities I've been to. And, littering in general just pisses me off... but having 4-5 containers for recycling to sort things into, and then having that basically be a jobs program for sorters, when in the end most of it is still land-filled is a bit wasteful in itself. There needs to be some pragmatism in terms of getting the biggest bang for the buck, and ineffective feel-good programs aren't the way to do get real impacting change. ---- In terms of trade, not allowing trade with countries that don't meet or exceed U.S. quality of life requirements for workers would be a start. Disallowing diesel ships the ability to dock in U.S. ports over the next decade would do a lot as well. Disallowing airmail transport of packages, or heavily taxing would help a lot too. Tax credits for hiring employees with less than a 20 minute commute could also go a long way too. Include employees able to work from home at least 60% of the time. Enacting a national energy tax on companies with over 1000 employees could be a large impact as well. It's possible to do a lot of these things without creating a lot of hard to manage subsidies that will exist long beyond the reasons for making them in the first place.
- anon1234321 10y ago
  None of those are related to Europe's malaise. The fire that drives people to build great things, to push themselves harder, to try to make a better life for themselves, has been extinguished in Europeans.
  - internaut 10y ago
    We have a positive surplus of intelligent ambitious people in Japan, Europe and America. What we don't have is savings or capital. This malaise is generational, not regional.
dang 10y ago
Please don't post continental slurs here.
- mSparks 10y ago
  please take your life somewhere else.
- anon1234321 10y ago
  That's not a slur, it's an opinion about cultural differences quite relevant to the discussion. Is it now a HackerNews rule to deny the existence of cultural differences?
  - dang 10y ago
    We've banned this account for trolling. Please don't create accounts to break the HN guidelines with.

disposablezero 10y ago

Given the U.S. propensity for religiousity, perhaps another effort is searching the universe for God?

TheOsiris 10y ago
dude, if you think the US ranks even near the top 25 countries in terms of religiosity then you need to travel more
- throwaway2016a 10y ago
  While that is true as a percentage of the population, as for total number of religious people the US is in the top 5 just due to population size. [1] Also, some US states are larger than entire countries and the percentages vary greatly by state. So depending on where you live in the United States it may feel like literally everyone is religious. I live in a relatively liberal part of the country and I still feel the need to stay in the closet as an atheist for fear or being disowned by my community and family. But back to the topic at hand, I think finding aliens would be definitive proof that at the very least the part about God creating earth as something unique and special is bogus. In other words I think the origional poster is completely wrong. If you believe in God you should fear finding aliens. Philosophically many religious people have trouble reconciling with evolution, never mind another living creature on a planet other than our own. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_coun... - yeah I know I shouldn't use Wikipedia as a source but I only have so much time to debate on Hacker News per day and finding quality sources takes time :(
betrothed 10y ago
Quackery. May as well toss in some Freudian penis analogy for rockets too. An interest in the prospects of space aliens is definitely escapism, but most people interested in the scholarly fields of astrophysics and astronomy are rational enough to confront life without clinging to spiritual mysticism or superstition. Metaphysical experience, ethics, and philosophy are topics of interest, but why should it be that the topic of space aliens must invade such tiresome and belabored subjects. What are they, Klingons?

hubert123 10y ago

didnt China just build a massive radio station for space?..

Tepix 10y ago

The author is misinformed. Jurij Milner who is Russian, is giving an unprecedented 100 million USD for SETI purposes as part of the Breakthrough Listen project.

acd 10y ago

I am Swedish and interested. There is 100-200 billion galaxies. The estimated number of stars in the universe is between 10^22 to 10^24. Each star on average has more than planet in orbit. That means its at lest 10^22 planets. 10000000000000000000000. Whats the probability we are the only one with intelligent life on it? Here is a Russian billionare funding interstellar space craft. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/russian-billionaire-unveils-big-plan-build-tiny-interstellar-spacecraft http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/russian-billionaire-u... We should work together in peace to discover these new planets. http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Herschel/How_many_stars_are_there_in_the_Universe http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Herschel/How... http://www.space.com/25303-how-many-galaxies-are-in-the-universe.html http://www.space.com/25303-how-many-galaxies-are-in-the-univ... http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-resources/how-many-stars-are-there/ http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-resources/how-many-...

placebo 10y ago
While I definitely don't exclude the possibility of life on other planets, I don't think we have yet any way to calculate the probability of its existence. I can think of two possibilities to estimate the probability of life outside earth. The first requires knowing, given set of planets excluding earth, how many of them have life on them. We obviously can't use this method yet. Another method is knowing exactly what it takes to create life and then calculating the probability of this process occurring outside earth. We haven't yet managed to synthesise life in a lab (despite headlines which try to claim the contrary). This does not mean we won't be able to create it eventually, but the fact remains that can't yet assess what more is left to make it work. Therefore, you can't assess the probability for it to work anywhere else. Bottom line, I can see no serious formula (Drake's or other) which can give us any estimate at the moment.
gpsx 10y ago
I am going to take the opposing view here on the likelihood of extraterrestrial life. But I do want to say that I think it is good someone is out there looking for it. I have been known to be wrong quite a bit. I don't think 10^22 is a very big number. If we try to guess the probability of life evolving at random, I can see it being negligible given that number of planets. First we can try to calculate something easier, the famous monkeys banging on keyboards to try to type Hamlet. If we put 1 trillion monkeys on each planet, and let them try for a trillion years, with three attempts per day to make the math easier, we get a total of 10^49 attempts. We'll consider a keyboard with 50 keys. 10^49 is roughly 50^29, which means we can expect one lucky monkey to get 29 characters into the play. That is impressive but not very far into a play with 30,557 words (150,000 characters?). (http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/plays_numwords.php http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/plays_numwo...) Now consider human DNA. I am not a biology expert so I may not have my DNA right. But it looks like a typical human DNA molecule contains 500,000 to 2,500,000 nucleotides (http://wow-really.blogspot.com/2006/11/your-dna-would-reach-moon.html http://wow-really.blogspot.com/2006/11/your-dna-would-reach-...). I believe there are 4 possibilities for each nulceotide. That means 4^2,500,000 or 10^1,500,000. That is a lot of possibilities. Worse even then typing Hamlet. And that would be if we just had monkeys supplied with adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine putting DNA together. Never mind that these are each complicated molecules in themselves that have to be assembled at random. So how did we even get here? Well, thanks to quantum mechanics we have almost endless opportunities to end up here. It just seems unlikely that we and some other life ended up in the universe together.

mcv 10y ago

I'm absolutely interested in the hunt for alien life. It's just that I don't think SETI (looking for technological radio signals) is a good way to find it. No signal we've sent into space can be detected from more than half a lightyear away. Radio broadcasts lose power over distance far to quickly to be detectable over interstellar distances, unless you're transmitting with the power of a star. You could send a tight beam of course, but then you need know where to send it. Aliens have to know we're here and they need to care enough to spend significant resource to send us a message. So while I'd love to see a sign of extraterrestrial life, I don't think searching for radio transmissions is the way to go.

kirykl 10y ago

Age of life on earth: ~3,800,000,000 years Age of earth life knowing about electromagnetic radiation: ~217 years Radio SETI will arguably only help us find a species in our relative window of technology. But I think it's worth working on.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Hydraulix989 10y ago

This feels like one of those articles where the author justifies the truth of some non-obvious "fact" without first showing that it is true. Like is it really a thing that "only Americans are interested in searching for alien life" -- I am American, and I wasn't aware (and many of my friends aren't American).