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Astronomers want public funds for intelligent life search

89 points by aluket 7y ago

rosybox 7y ago
I don't know why taxpayers should have to pay for the search for E.T.. That's a hard sell. Probably not what the founders had in mind when they gave the government the power to take money out of the pockets of the country's citizenry. I'm all for the social contract, investing in infrastructure, and making sure everyone has affordable housing and medicine, but this is a tough fucking sell. Get some rich scifi enthusiast to fund a grant. Some people just see the country's coffers as a free for all for any crazy idea. That money belongs to the public it came from and should be used to the benefit of its people with utmost seriousness it deserves. What the government can spend its money on is a zero-sum gane and any dollars we can invest into kids getting better meals or finding a biomarker for detecting ALS would be better spent than figuring out if UFOs are real.
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  You know what's a tragic waste for me? Most of the US military budget, its spending on the War on Drugs, its tax cuts to billionaires and corporate welfare. Let's cut those in half and talk again about SETI, which I would be happy to fund a hundred times over if it meant less killing, fewer unjust incarcerations for victimless crimes, more economic equality, and less concentration of money and power in the hands of the elites.
  - Mirioron 7y ago
    I think it isn't so easy to say that what the US military does is a waste of your money. A lot of US foreign policy is about "free trade" that's beneficial to the US. If you were to cut off the US military then you'd likely have consequences for global trade. Perhaps you're right that it's a waste of your money, but I think that this is not at all a straightforward conclusion. Eg imagine if Iran just decided to stop oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz with their military. How would you deal with this without a sizable military yourself? Edit: or imagine that some country decides that they don't like goods related to the US going through Panama so they decide to occupy it. It's not US territory, but the loss of that will harm the US economy.
    - opless 7y ago
      You mean like ... South Korea, New Zeland, and the UK who are already there? Seriously, the USA aren't the only armed forces that patrol the area.
      - bigyikes 7y ago
        Are you prepared to rely on foreign governments protecting your interests? And what happens if those countries you mentioned adopt the same mindset?
        opless 7y ago
        I'm quite happy with the two UK Navy frigates patrolling the area. The UK has a significantly smaller defence budget than the USA does. Which kinda proves my point.
        Mirioron 7y ago
        And the UK can do that because the UK is willing to rely on the US. Now that relations with the US are straining in the West other western countries are increasing their military spending/cooperation. (Eg EU army.)
        opless 7y ago
        Sorry, but according to news sources a coalition of non-US vessels are doing the bulk of patrols out there in the strait of Hormuz whilst the US is only seemingly wanting to lend 'command and control' style support. Elsewhere the UK assists the US in Syria and Afghanistan. It's not the other way around. But feel free to tell me how great the american way of doing things is. What with fantastic provision of basic healthcare for its citizens, and sensible gun control oh yes and affordable education.
        Mirioron 7y ago
        It's not about who patrols the Strait of Hormuz. It's about who and what backs them up. If the Iranians decide to sink the frigates there (to do their blockade) then they can expect a visit from a US carrier group. If there is no force that can be projected there then it becomes about who can move more stuff there. Seeing as that's literally next to Iran, Iran is going to win. Look at Crimea if you want an example of what can happen if there's no force that can back you up.
  - CryptoPunk 7y ago
    How can a tax cut be part of a budget? The budget constitutes tax dollars spent, not foregone.
- asimovfan 7y ago
  There is the slight probability of all problems being solved if we find some aliens :)
  - RobertoG 7y ago
    Yes, unfortunately, there is also the slight probability of being eat by predators if some aliens find us.
  - xvilka 7y ago
    And a big probability of creating a lot of new problems (e.g. a "dark forest" theory). In my opinion, these money are better spent on any other applied or fundamental research.
garrygosh 7y ago
Depends on which country does it. Are you feeding your poor? Then go for it.
hhas01 7y ago
Eh, before we go looking for intelligent life up there, how about finding some down here first?
kilroy123 7y ago
I often imagine there is something like "subspace" or faster-than-light communication, and species across our galaxy are a bunch of chatterboxes chatting away. The only problem is we don't know how to tune in to join the conversation. I still think we should keep trying to find them, though.
- russdill 7y ago
  Spoil sport reminder that any FTL communication also allows you to send messages to the past.
- Razengan 7y ago
  > I often imagine there is something like "subspace" or faster-than-light communication, and species across our galaxy are a bunch of chatterboxes chatting away. I like to imagine, for the science fiction that I might write, a hypothetical phenomenon that allows instantaneous communication between two points (objects/particles/portals) but only after they have been "synced" or "bound" with each other, which must be done during physical contact. So, you might construct two such "hyperspace modems", bind them with each other, then incur the initial cost of physically transporting one of them to another star system however many light years away, which may take years or decades but once it's there, communication between the two points would be instantaneous.
  - lovemenot 7y ago
    That's interesting. You could call your story Spooky Action. The Spooky channel need not be used exclusively by so-called advanced civilisations. In fact there are species on Earth now that are known to interact in evolutionarily useful ways with quantum effects. Of course, if Spooky is just entanglement the modem would be destroyed upon a single use. However, there could be an effectively unlimited supply of them occurring naturally. This feels more feasible than SETI's hypothesis. Space was much smaller and was probably at just the right temperature to support life at a very early stage of the Universe.
- lowdose 7y ago
  When we find them there will be people that want to initiate contact. For centuries we were convinced the shark was the Apex predator of sea. I'm not really looking forward to the day we come across the orcas of the universe.
aSplash0fDerp 7y ago
I crunched for years on seti@home at the turn of the century and have always been a fan of the project. It makes sense to increased research funding now that they have a long list of newly discovered planets to target, but what other scientific endeavors do they retire to open up any meaningful government funding? With trillion dollar deficits in the forecast, earmarking new money does not sound like an easy task to achieve.
- RobertoG 7y ago
  Debt is different from deficits. I suppose you mean "trillion dollar debt". Note that deficit could be (or not) inflationary, but debt is the accumulate of money already spent in the economy.
  - melling 7y ago
    No I think he does mean trillion dollar deficit. The US deficit is over $1 trillion a year. The debt is over $23 trillion.
    - anewhope 7y ago
      There’s something fascinating about the previous comment. A knee-jerk rejection of the scale. I immediately suspected that commenter hails from somewhere in Europe. The scale is way different here, and in online communities that is often lost as people talk past each other. I think when solving problems there is benefit in thinking about what happens at several different scales.
      - RobertoG 7y ago
        It was certainly a knee-jerk reaction and totally my fault. I see the concepts of debt and deficit so frequently mixed that it's already in my muscle memory. Your knee-jerk reaction was half right, by the way: I'm somewhere in Europe where billions and trillions have different meaning.
- redis_mlc 7y ago
lovemenot 7y ago
It always feels to me like so much hubris. Humans are unique on this planet, (we humans have determined it so), by virtue of our so-called intelligence. Not only does this intelligence make us unique on this planet, but the nature of that uniqueness is itself unique across the galaxy and beyond. Intelligence is the thing worthy of discovery. So we go actively looking for other living species which exhibit that precise characteristic which we admire so much in ourselves. Using catch-phrases like "are we alone?" - Guys, take a look around you. Just observing the millions of bacteria on your hand should suffice to answer that question in the negative. But apparently, we knew that as a species we are not actually alone. Yet we felt lonely because nobody else here matches up to our self-serving criteria of significance; intelligence. So within a few decades of having as a species learned how to control radio waves ourselves, Frank Drake comes up with the idea that of course any species worthy of our interest would be controlling radio waves too. Perhaps this characterisation is too harsh. But the alternative is surely that we are just looking under the lamp-post for our keys, because that's where the light is. We want to find extraterrestrial life. Very good, fully approve. But there's no realistic way to do this outside of the solar system. So we make some preposterous assumptions and hope to get funding based solely on human vanity.
- zabana 7y ago
  What's even more interesting is that it seems to be mostly (keyword here is mostly) an obsession within the post-renaissance western hemisphere.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- majos 7y ago
  I’m confused. Seems natural for us to look for intelligent signals from space, since unintelligent life is not going to put together the machinery to send interstellar messages. How do you think we should be searching? It’s fine to say we’re not looking for the right thing, but do you have an alternative?
onetimemanytime 7y ago
I'm all for it. Poverty and inequality will "never" be solved and a tiny fraction of our GDP going to this, will not be be felt. On the other hand, it may change our life, maybe even short term...money on research can bring results.
- chr1 7y ago
  While i agree that shooting down any research with "think about poverty" is a bad argument, I think there are still much more important ways to spend money than this: anti-aging drugs developed by sens.org, gene drive to kill mosquitos, any technologies to build colony on mars etc . This is why it is important to have many people deciding for themselves on what to spend their money. If there are enough people who are interested in finding aliens they can redirect their part of GDP, but there should be a way for others to not be forced to spend their tax money on it.
  - drjesusphd 7y ago
    The government has been in the business of basic research since science was a thing. Funding from taxes is a more fundamental component of the scientific process than peer review (a more recent development).
Revolutionisto 7y ago
Apparently what seems to be alien life was already observed on Earth a few years back. We just needed sufficiently good radar to see through their cloaking veils in the visible light spectrum. Cool hint as to what’s possible with technology and the laws of physics! As documented in the NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-flying-object-navy.amp.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings-navy-pilots.amp.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings...
- BiteCode_dev 7y ago
  While I'm excited by such news, let's not jump from "things we don't understand" to "god/magic/aliens". For now, it's "cool event we don't know how to explain". Good enough. Life is full of that and if we try to force label on it, we miss the fun of figuring out what's going on seriously.
  - Revolutionisto 7y ago
    I certainly can’t explain exactly what it is. However, a few facts stand out: 1. Detected object moves erratically at high speeds, with exceptionally high acceleration. Controlled translational and angular acceleration of the object occur in the footage. 2. Navy pilots in both encounters reported that the object was not visible at close range but only showed up on radar, in particular only on radar that was recently updated from a version released in the 1980s. 3. Testimonies were confirmed by multiple independent pilots, cleared by the U.S. Navy, and pilots were deemed to be mentally fit as they were later deployed to active duty in the Middle East. Those are just facts from the case. Feel free to draw your own hypotheses or conclusions. I certainly had fun doing so. :)
    - Revolutionisto 7y ago
      Also, there’s that one quote...“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” or something along those lines.
    - 7y ago
rs23296008n1 7y ago
The US hasn't even stabilised its environment, healthcare and any number of other important areas of basic human needs. Money for finding extra-terrestrial life would be better spent on earth fixing the mess. Or use it to get us to mars. At least that fits with a "plan B" since humans existing "only on earth" is still a bad idea. Same goes for moon exploration / asteroid mining. Good ideas. Raw resources shouldn't be so rare as they currently are. But sending a message to aliens? We've already done this. For decades. More than a century. Ever since we started transmitting Tv/radio. They either know we're here or they will. Or we're off limits. Or we're too far away. Or we're too scary. "They live in what kind of atmosphere?"
- onetimemanytime 7y ago
  >>The US hasn't even stabilised its environment, healthcare and any number of other important areas of basic human needs. Money for finding extra-terrestrial life would be better spent on earth fixing the mess. USA spends more on healthcare than (prob) anyone else. Basic needs will never be solved, as the yardstick will also move. >>Money for finding extra-terrestrial life would be better spent on earth fixing the mess. Let's say that USA decides to spend $100-$500 Million a year on extra-terrestrial stuff...that's a rounding error in a $4.746 trillion budget.
  - glutamate 7y ago
    > USA spends more on healthcare than (prob) anyone else. Basic needs will never be solved, as the yardstick will also move. Agree, in a privatised healthcare system the fee-for-service problem will indeed prevent basic needs from ever being met.
    - onetimemanytime 7y ago
      You missed the point entirely. if USA already spends a lot of money (albeit in the wrong direction...maybe) in healthcare, how will the healthcare problem be solved if it spends another, say $200M ? You can argue reform, not that it needs a few more hundred million to "solve the problem"
timwaagh 7y ago
It really sounds like a good hobby project for a very rich person.
- mongol 7y ago
  Indeed. Tax payer money should be used carefully.
DrNuke 7y ago
As usual, public resources are limited, so any lobby really needs to step up their game or participate in politics actively, win elections and divert some funds from elsewhere... another way is asking a patron, you have Musk, Gates, Bezos, Zuck & Cook for a cap in hand chat... the third way is to make military believe they would have some sort of unassailable advantage, which in this case may be pitched in the form of Mr Octopus from deeeeep space telepathically sending them the secret of the ultimate weapon, a bit like The Mezga Family animated series from Hungary, fifty years ago.
fukpaywalls 7y ago
Don't bother looking for intelligence in WashingDC or most part of the US for that matter. Save the money.
imvetri 7y ago
Appreciate lives on Earth.
Razengan 7y ago
We have already found alien species. Right here on this very same planet: Dinosaurs. We would have never even known about their existence if we had not chanced upon their remains. So it's not just the vast distances of space that separates species from each other, it's also incomprehensible stretches of time. Just from the amount of variables involved and their ranges (the number of planets, the extreme environments in which we have already observed life), it's obvious that we are not alone. BUT we may never meet anyone. Just like how there's billions of people on Earth but millions die alone, to use a topical metaphor given Valentine's Day. :)
- gus_massa 7y ago
  Dinosaurs are just beakless ducks. If you want to blow your mind, take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ediacaran_biota https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ediacaran_biota
  - Razengan 7y ago
    Those are really interesting! The point was that even if we could physically visit planets or reach them with communications, we would have to do it in the right time bracket. Any life (of interest) on them may have long since passed on, or not capable of interaction yet. Mars may have once had life, and we may never know of it.
- Mike345845 7y ago
  No, Dinosaurs are not extra-terrestrial aliens, which is what SETI is looking for. And they are not "true" aliens (what's the correct term for this?) Dinosaurs and Humans share a common ancestor. We evolved from the same origin. We both have DNA. We are literally cousins. SETI is searching for life that originated from dead matter independently from earthlings. Those extra terrestrial beings may not necessarily have the same basic structure (DNA) as us.
valgor 7y ago
I think some commenters are forgetting how science is done. Just because you are researching X does not mean your only output is X. An investment into SETI is an investment in science and technology. All the arguments on this forum about why we should not allocate funds to SETI can be used in the same manner for why we should not investment in pure mathematics or any other potentially "useless" human endeavor. SETI researchers will come up with novel ways to solve their problems and invent new technologies along the way, the same as every other branch of science and engineering. It's how we got SETI@home and now boinc is used for lots of problems like protein folding (1). Plus, for those of us that have read Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu (2), we understand that SETI research is the biggest gamble in scientific research. High risk with the highest reward. What could fundamentally change humanity more than definitively finding intelligent life out there? Lastly, some commenters need to go read Carl Sagan's Contact. He goes over all of this nay-saying! [1] https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/ https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/ [2] https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-Liu/dp/0765382032/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3CG8PHFJR8N2Q&keywords=three+body+problem&qid=1581770260&sprefix=three+body+%2Caps%2C156&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-Liu/dp/07653...
- lovemenot 7y ago
  Some wonderful fiction quoted here. Let me quote another great fiction writer: “Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” ― Douglas Adams
- koheripbal 7y ago
  Additionally, of all the pure science research we do with public money, the discovery of alien intelligence would have probably the greatest impact on human day-to-day life. Many of the other commenters seem to believe the research would fail. .... something we obviously cannot possibly know without doing the research. The only thing prior SETI research has demonstrated is that no one is purposely beaming a signal right at us. ...which is actually pretty informative. ...after all, being totally alone in the universe seems somewhat less plausible than the opposite.
  - 7y ago
LatteLazy 7y ago
As long as no one tries to contact anyone, why not.
- koheripbal 7y ago
  SETI has demonstrated that no one is beaming a signal right at us. There might be a reason for that, other than them simple not existing.
  - LatteLazy 7y ago
    Exactly. Welcome to the dark forest.
tgflynn 7y ago
There's one simple metric for SETI progress that I would like to see and have always had trouble finding. What is the radius within which SETI can exclude the existence of a civilization currently using Earth-like electromagnetic communications technology and how many star systems are believed to lie within that radius ? How will proposed SETI efforts expand that radius ? I think this is kind of a key metric that could tell us a lot about how widespread technological civilizations might be in the galaxy.
- Dominisi 7y ago
  The issue with using general "Earth-like electromagnetic communications technology" is the inverse square law. Our own communications aren't distinguishable from the cosmic background radiation even at our closest neighbor. The only way we would find something is if they pointed a VERY powerful noise source directly at us, or us at them. And even then, we are looking at maybe a 100 lightyear bubble (~600 main sequence stars).
  - tgflynn 7y ago
    > The only way we would find something is if they pointed a VERY powerful noise source directly at us, or us at them. Do you mean we could detect ordinary technological EM radiation if we pointed a sufficiently high-gain antenna at the transmitting planet ? Otherwise if SETI assumes someone is sending an interstellar signal on purpose, I would question its value, because there's no strong reason to think anyone is doing that. I realize we did it once, but an argument can be made (and has been) that it was a fairly stupid thing to do.
cletus 7y ago
I used to be a big fan of SETI but I've come around to thinking it's probably a complete waste of time. This will probably get dismissed as "optimistic futurism" but I find the argument compelling that the future of any civilization is a Dyson Swarm for many reasons such as: - Planets are inefficient uses of mass to create living area. IIRC 1% of the mass of Mercury could make enough living area from habitats to house at least a million times as many people as we have now. - Gravity is a tyrant. Spinning a habitat achieves much the same thing without the negatives (as in the cost of launch). - This is entirely feasible on solar power alone. The importance of this is that practical fusion power is not a prerequisite. - This requires no new science. It's largely an engineering problem (albeit a significant one). I deliberately use the term "Swarm" here not "Sphere", which is true to the original concept. "Sphere" suggests this is a solid shell. That was never the intent. No known or theorized material could support a solid shell around the Sun. If you accept this premise then it's about the most un-subtle thing you could do and should be easily detectable millions of light years away in the IR spectrum. Why? Simple: - Stars generate heat - If the habitats hit by the energy from the star will heat up - In space you can only radiate heat away - If you don't remove that heat you'll ultimately fry - The wavelength from radiating heat is determined by the temperature of that object The standard counter to this is: Q: What if you recycle the heat instead? A: You can improve the efficiency but you can never perfectly consume all that heat. To do so would be to violate thermodynamics. If that's possible, well then all bets are off. A thousand years ago we were stabbing each others with swords. In a thousand years the above scenario is far from overly optimistic (IMHO). So in a cosmic blink of an eye we go from undetectable (from a SETI perspective) to being detectable from tens or hundreds of millions of light years away. So that's why I think SETI is pointless. Some say "you never know what fruit science will bear". While true, taken further this means it doesn't matter what science you invest in so why is SETI special?
- mhh__ 7y ago
  What do you actually think the IR spectrum would look like given that it would still be very close to a star that could potentially already saturate the measurement?
  - 7y ago
Nasrudith 7y ago
Reminds me of the one theory that SETI was largely cover for signals intelligence spying in the cold war. Personally I suspect that while we may discover interesting details of radio-astronomy but I highly doubt we will discover anything of worth related to alien life through it.
badrabbit 7y ago
How does this benefit the public in the foreseeable future? Why should the public fund it? Why not stick to private funding? Look at SpaceX, there are plenty of rich people and them aside, people interested in this subject should contribute. I know this is an unpopular view here but I just don't get why the public has to fund this using tax dollars. We all have views on what tax money should be spent on but can we not agree that the public should benefit from it with some guarantee of success.even if they succeed there is no guarantee it will benefit anyone. scifi aside, known physics does not permit anything to travel to our solar system faster than a few million years. Maybe aliens left some useful information in a format humans can somehow decode, is this very very small chance of succeess worth considering the pursuit beneficial to the public? There are many very urgent things that need funding. Even wild ideals like universal basic income or a CO2 cleaning factory can be useful to the public in the foreseeable future. I get that this will not neccesarily take away from other projects,but heck, I would rather see it go to pay off 0.0001% of national debt than this. People can donate,billionaires exist.

89 points by aluket 7y ago

I don't know why taxpayers should have to pay for the search for E.T.. That's a hard sell. Probably not what the founders had in mind when they gave the government the power to take money out of the pockets of the country's citizenry. I'm all for the social contract, investing in infrastructure, and making sure everyone has affordable housing and medicine, but this is a tough fucking sell. Get some rich scifi enthusiast to fund a grant. Some people just see the country's coffers as a free for all for any crazy idea. That money belongs to the public it came from and should be used to the benefit of its people with utmost seriousness it deserves. What the government can spend its money on is a zero-sum gane and any dollars we can invest into kids getting better meals or finding a biomarker for detecting ALS would be better spent than figuring out if UFOs are real.

pmoriarty 7y ago
You know what's a tragic waste for me? Most of the US military budget, its spending on the War on Drugs, its tax cuts to billionaires and corporate welfare. Let's cut those in half and talk again about SETI, which I would be happy to fund a hundred times over if it meant less killing, fewer unjust incarcerations for victimless crimes, more economic equality, and less concentration of money and power in the hands of the elites.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  I think it isn't so easy to say that what the US military does is a waste of your money. A lot of US foreign policy is about "free trade" that's beneficial to the US. If you were to cut off the US military then you'd likely have consequences for global trade. Perhaps you're right that it's a waste of your money, but I think that this is not at all a straightforward conclusion. Eg imagine if Iran just decided to stop oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz with their military. How would you deal with this without a sizable military yourself? Edit: or imagine that some country decides that they don't like goods related to the US going through Panama so they decide to occupy it. It's not US territory, but the loss of that will harm the US economy.
  - opless 7y ago
    You mean like ... South Korea, New Zeland, and the UK who are already there? Seriously, the USA aren't the only armed forces that patrol the area.
    - bigyikes 7y ago
      Are you prepared to rely on foreign governments protecting your interests? And what happens if those countries you mentioned adopt the same mindset?
      - opless 7y ago
        I'm quite happy with the two UK Navy frigates patrolling the area. The UK has a significantly smaller defence budget than the USA does. Which kinda proves my point.
        Mirioron 7y ago
        And the UK can do that because the UK is willing to rely on the US. Now that relations with the US are straining in the West other western countries are increasing their military spending/cooperation. (Eg EU army.)
        opless 7y ago
        Sorry, but according to news sources a coalition of non-US vessels are doing the bulk of patrols out there in the strait of Hormuz whilst the US is only seemingly wanting to lend 'command and control' style support. Elsewhere the UK assists the US in Syria and Afghanistan. It's not the other way around. But feel free to tell me how great the american way of doing things is. What with fantastic provision of basic healthcare for its citizens, and sensible gun control oh yes and affordable education.
        Mirioron 7y ago
        It's not about who patrols the Strait of Hormuz. It's about who and what backs them up. If the Iranians decide to sink the frigates there (to do their blockade) then they can expect a visit from a US carrier group. If there is no force that can be projected there then it becomes about who can move more stuff there. Seeing as that's literally next to Iran, Iran is going to win. Look at Crimea if you want an example of what can happen if there's no force that can back you up.
- CryptoPunk 7y ago
  How can a tax cut be part of a budget? The budget constitutes tax dollars spent, not foregone.
asimovfan 7y ago
There is the slight probability of all problems being solved if we find some aliens :)
- RobertoG 7y ago
  Yes, unfortunately, there is also the slight probability of being eat by predators if some aliens find us.
- xvilka 7y ago
  And a big probability of creating a lot of new problems (e.g. a "dark forest" theory). In my opinion, these money are better spent on any other applied or fundamental research.

garrygosh 7y ago

Depends on which country does it. Are you feeding your poor? Then go for it.

hhas01 7y ago

Eh, before we go looking for intelligent life up there, how about finding some down here first?

kilroy123 7y ago

I often imagine there is something like "subspace" or faster-than-light communication, and species across our galaxy are a bunch of chatterboxes chatting away. The only problem is we don't know how to tune in to join the conversation. I still think we should keep trying to find them, though.

russdill 7y ago
Spoil sport reminder that any FTL communication also allows you to send messages to the past.
Razengan 7y ago
> I often imagine there is something like "subspace" or faster-than-light communication, and species across our galaxy are a bunch of chatterboxes chatting away. I like to imagine, for the science fiction that I might write, a hypothetical phenomenon that allows instantaneous communication between two points (objects/particles/portals) but only after they have been "synced" or "bound" with each other, which must be done during physical contact. So, you might construct two such "hyperspace modems", bind them with each other, then incur the initial cost of physically transporting one of them to another star system however many light years away, which may take years or decades but once it's there, communication between the two points would be instantaneous.
- lovemenot 7y ago
  That's interesting. You could call your story Spooky Action. The Spooky channel need not be used exclusively by so-called advanced civilisations. In fact there are species on Earth now that are known to interact in evolutionarily useful ways with quantum effects. Of course, if Spooky is just entanglement the modem would be destroyed upon a single use. However, there could be an effectively unlimited supply of them occurring naturally. This feels more feasible than SETI's hypothesis. Space was much smaller and was probably at just the right temperature to support life at a very early stage of the Universe.
lowdose 7y ago
When we find them there will be people that want to initiate contact. For centuries we were convinced the shark was the Apex predator of sea. I'm not really looking forward to the day we come across the orcas of the universe.

aSplash0fDerp 7y ago

I crunched for years on seti@home at the turn of the century and have always been a fan of the project. It makes sense to increased research funding now that they have a long list of newly discovered planets to target, but what other scientific endeavors do they retire to open up any meaningful government funding? With trillion dollar deficits in the forecast, earmarking new money does not sound like an easy task to achieve.

RobertoG 7y ago
Debt is different from deficits. I suppose you mean "trillion dollar debt". Note that deficit could be (or not) inflationary, but debt is the accumulate of money already spent in the economy.
- melling 7y ago
  No I think he does mean trillion dollar deficit. The US deficit is over $1 trillion a year. The debt is over $23 trillion.
  - anewhope 7y ago
    There’s something fascinating about the previous comment. A knee-jerk rejection of the scale. I immediately suspected that commenter hails from somewhere in Europe. The scale is way different here, and in online communities that is often lost as people talk past each other. I think when solving problems there is benefit in thinking about what happens at several different scales.
    - RobertoG 7y ago
      It was certainly a knee-jerk reaction and totally my fault. I see the concepts of debt and deficit so frequently mixed that it's already in my muscle memory. Your knee-jerk reaction was half right, by the way: I'm somewhere in Europe where billions and trillions have different meaning.
redis_mlc 7y ago

lovemenot 7y ago

It always feels to me like so much hubris. Humans are unique on this planet, (we humans have determined it so), by virtue of our so-called intelligence. Not only does this intelligence make us unique on this planet, but the nature of that uniqueness is itself unique across the galaxy and beyond. Intelligence is the thing worthy of discovery. So we go actively looking for other living species which exhibit that precise characteristic which we admire so much in ourselves. Using catch-phrases like "are we alone?" - Guys, take a look around you. Just observing the millions of bacteria on your hand should suffice to answer that question in the negative. But apparently, we knew that as a species we are not actually alone. Yet we felt lonely because nobody else here matches up to our self-serving criteria of significance; intelligence. So within a few decades of having as a species learned how to control radio waves ourselves, Frank Drake comes up with the idea that of course any species worthy of our interest would be controlling radio waves too. Perhaps this characterisation is too harsh. But the alternative is surely that we are just looking under the lamp-post for our keys, because that's where the light is. We want to find extraterrestrial life. Very good, fully approve. But there's no realistic way to do this outside of the solar system. So we make some preposterous assumptions and hope to get funding based solely on human vanity.

zabana 7y ago
What's even more interesting is that it seems to be mostly (keyword here is mostly) an obsession within the post-renaissance western hemisphere.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
majos 7y ago
I’m confused. Seems natural for us to look for intelligent signals from space, since unintelligent life is not going to put together the machinery to send interstellar messages. How do you think we should be searching? It’s fine to say we’re not looking for the right thing, but do you have an alternative?

onetimemanytime 7y ago

I'm all for it. Poverty and inequality will "never" be solved and a tiny fraction of our GDP going to this, will not be be felt. On the other hand, it may change our life, maybe even short term...money on research can bring results.

chr1 7y ago
While i agree that shooting down any research with "think about poverty" is a bad argument, I think there are still much more important ways to spend money than this: anti-aging drugs developed by sens.org, gene drive to kill mosquitos, any technologies to build colony on mars etc . This is why it is important to have many people deciding for themselves on what to spend their money. If there are enough people who are interested in finding aliens they can redirect their part of GDP, but there should be a way for others to not be forced to spend their tax money on it.
- drjesusphd 7y ago
  The government has been in the business of basic research since science was a thing. Funding from taxes is a more fundamental component of the scientific process than peer review (a more recent development).

Revolutionisto 7y ago

Apparently what seems to be alien life was already observed on Earth a few years back. We just needed sufficiently good radar to see through their cloaking veils in the visible light spectrum. Cool hint as to what’s possible with technology and the laws of physics! As documented in the NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-flying-object-navy.amp.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings-navy-pilots.amp.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings...

BiteCode_dev 7y ago
While I'm excited by such news, let's not jump from "things we don't understand" to "god/magic/aliens". For now, it's "cool event we don't know how to explain". Good enough. Life is full of that and if we try to force label on it, we miss the fun of figuring out what's going on seriously.
- Revolutionisto 7y ago
  I certainly can’t explain exactly what it is. However, a few facts stand out: 1. Detected object moves erratically at high speeds, with exceptionally high acceleration. Controlled translational and angular acceleration of the object occur in the footage. 2. Navy pilots in both encounters reported that the object was not visible at close range but only showed up on radar, in particular only on radar that was recently updated from a version released in the 1980s. 3. Testimonies were confirmed by multiple independent pilots, cleared by the U.S. Navy, and pilots were deemed to be mentally fit as they were later deployed to active duty in the Middle East. Those are just facts from the case. Feel free to draw your own hypotheses or conclusions. I certainly had fun doing so. :)
  - Revolutionisto 7y ago
    Also, there’s that one quote...“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” or something along those lines.
  - 7y ago

rs23296008n1 7y ago

The US hasn't even stabilised its environment, healthcare and any number of other important areas of basic human needs. Money for finding extra-terrestrial life would be better spent on earth fixing the mess. Or use it to get us to mars. At least that fits with a "plan B" since humans existing "only on earth" is still a bad idea. Same goes for moon exploration / asteroid mining. Good ideas. Raw resources shouldn't be so rare as they currently are. But sending a message to aliens? We've already done this. For decades. More than a century. Ever since we started transmitting Tv/radio. They either know we're here or they will. Or we're off limits. Or we're too far away. Or we're too scary. "They live in what kind of atmosphere?"

onetimemanytime 7y ago
>>The US hasn't even stabilised its environment, healthcare and any number of other important areas of basic human needs. Money for finding extra-terrestrial life would be better spent on earth fixing the mess. USA spends more on healthcare than (prob) anyone else. Basic needs will never be solved, as the yardstick will also move. >>Money for finding extra-terrestrial life would be better spent on earth fixing the mess. Let's say that USA decides to spend $100-$500 Million a year on extra-terrestrial stuff...that's a rounding error in a $4.746 trillion budget.
- glutamate 7y ago
  > USA spends more on healthcare than (prob) anyone else. Basic needs will never be solved, as the yardstick will also move. Agree, in a privatised healthcare system the fee-for-service problem will indeed prevent basic needs from ever being met.
  - onetimemanytime 7y ago
    You missed the point entirely. if USA already spends a lot of money (albeit in the wrong direction...maybe) in healthcare, how will the healthcare problem be solved if it spends another, say $200M ? You can argue reform, not that it needs a few more hundred million to "solve the problem"

timwaagh 7y ago

It really sounds like a good hobby project for a very rich person.

mongol 7y ago
Indeed. Tax payer money should be used carefully.

DrNuke 7y ago

As usual, public resources are limited, so any lobby really needs to step up their game or participate in politics actively, win elections and divert some funds from elsewhere... another way is asking a patron, you have Musk, Gates, Bezos, Zuck & Cook for a cap in hand chat... the third way is to make military believe they would have some sort of unassailable advantage, which in this case may be pitched in the form of Mr Octopus from deeeeep space telepathically sending them the secret of the ultimate weapon, a bit like The Mezga Family animated series from Hungary, fifty years ago.

fukpaywalls 7y ago

Don't bother looking for intelligence in WashingDC or most part of the US for that matter. Save the money.

imvetri 7y ago

Appreciate lives on Earth.

Razengan 7y ago

We have already found alien species. Right here on this very same planet: Dinosaurs. We would have never even known about their existence if we had not chanced upon their remains. So it's not just the vast distances of space that separates species from each other, it's also incomprehensible stretches of time. Just from the amount of variables involved and their ranges (the number of planets, the extreme environments in which we have already observed life), it's obvious that we are not alone. BUT we may never meet anyone. Just like how there's billions of people on Earth but millions die alone, to use a topical metaphor given Valentine's Day. :)

gus_massa 7y ago
Dinosaurs are just beakless ducks. If you want to blow your mind, take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ediacaran_biota https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ediacaran_biota
- Razengan 7y ago
  Those are really interesting! The point was that even if we could physically visit planets or reach them with communications, we would have to do it in the right time bracket. Any life (of interest) on them may have long since passed on, or not capable of interaction yet. Mars may have once had life, and we may never know of it.
Mike345845 7y ago
No, Dinosaurs are not extra-terrestrial aliens, which is what SETI is looking for. And they are not "true" aliens (what's the correct term for this?) Dinosaurs and Humans share a common ancestor. We evolved from the same origin. We both have DNA. We are literally cousins. SETI is searching for life that originated from dead matter independently from earthlings. Those extra terrestrial beings may not necessarily have the same basic structure (DNA) as us.

valgor 7y ago

I think some commenters are forgetting how science is done. Just because you are researching X does not mean your only output is X. An investment into SETI is an investment in science and technology. All the arguments on this forum about why we should not allocate funds to SETI can be used in the same manner for why we should not investment in pure mathematics or any other potentially "useless" human endeavor. SETI researchers will come up with novel ways to solve their problems and invent new technologies along the way, the same as every other branch of science and engineering. It's how we got SETI@home and now boinc is used for lots of problems like protein folding (1). Plus, for those of us that have read Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu (2), we understand that SETI research is the biggest gamble in scientific research. High risk with the highest reward. What could fundamentally change humanity more than definitively finding intelligent life out there? Lastly, some commenters need to go read Carl Sagan's Contact. He goes over all of this nay-saying! [1] https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/ https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/ [2] https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-Liu/dp/0765382032/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3CG8PHFJR8N2Q&keywords=three+body+problem&qid=1581770260&sprefix=three+body+%2Caps%2C156&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-Liu/dp/07653...

lovemenot 7y ago
Some wonderful fiction quoted here. Let me quote another great fiction writer: “Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” ― Douglas Adams
koheripbal 7y ago
Additionally, of all the pure science research we do with public money, the discovery of alien intelligence would have probably the greatest impact on human day-to-day life. Many of the other commenters seem to believe the research would fail. .... something we obviously cannot possibly know without doing the research. The only thing prior SETI research has demonstrated is that no one is purposely beaming a signal right at us. ...which is actually pretty informative. ...after all, being totally alone in the universe seems somewhat less plausible than the opposite.
- 7y ago

LatteLazy 7y ago

As long as no one tries to contact anyone, why not.

koheripbal 7y ago
SETI has demonstrated that no one is beaming a signal right at us. There might be a reason for that, other than them simple not existing.
- LatteLazy 7y ago
  Exactly. Welcome to the dark forest.

tgflynn 7y ago

There's one simple metric for SETI progress that I would like to see and have always had trouble finding. What is the radius within which SETI can exclude the existence of a civilization currently using Earth-like electromagnetic communications technology and how many star systems are believed to lie within that radius ? How will proposed SETI efforts expand that radius ? I think this is kind of a key metric that could tell us a lot about how widespread technological civilizations might be in the galaxy.

Dominisi 7y ago
The issue with using general "Earth-like electromagnetic communications technology" is the inverse square law. Our own communications aren't distinguishable from the cosmic background radiation even at our closest neighbor. The only way we would find something is if they pointed a VERY powerful noise source directly at us, or us at them. And even then, we are looking at maybe a 100 lightyear bubble (~600 main sequence stars).
- tgflynn 7y ago
  > The only way we would find something is if they pointed a VERY powerful noise source directly at us, or us at them. Do you mean we could detect ordinary technological EM radiation if we pointed a sufficiently high-gain antenna at the transmitting planet ? Otherwise if SETI assumes someone is sending an interstellar signal on purpose, I would question its value, because there's no strong reason to think anyone is doing that. I realize we did it once, but an argument can be made (and has been) that it was a fairly stupid thing to do.

cletus 7y ago

I used to be a big fan of SETI but I've come around to thinking it's probably a complete waste of time. This will probably get dismissed as "optimistic futurism" but I find the argument compelling that the future of any civilization is a Dyson Swarm for many reasons such as: - Planets are inefficient uses of mass to create living area. IIRC 1% of the mass of Mercury could make enough living area from habitats to house at least a million times as many people as we have now. - Gravity is a tyrant. Spinning a habitat achieves much the same thing without the negatives (as in the cost of launch). - This is entirely feasible on solar power alone. The importance of this is that practical fusion power is not a prerequisite. - This requires no new science. It's largely an engineering problem (albeit a significant one). I deliberately use the term "Swarm" here not "Sphere", which is true to the original concept. "Sphere" suggests this is a solid shell. That was never the intent. No known or theorized material could support a solid shell around the Sun. If you accept this premise then it's about the most un-subtle thing you could do and should be easily detectable millions of light years away in the IR spectrum. Why? Simple: - Stars generate heat - If the habitats hit by the energy from the star will heat up - In space you can only radiate heat away - If you don't remove that heat you'll ultimately fry - The wavelength from radiating heat is determined by the temperature of that object The standard counter to this is: Q: What if you recycle the heat instead? A: You can improve the efficiency but you can never perfectly consume all that heat. To do so would be to violate thermodynamics. If that's possible, well then all bets are off. A thousand years ago we were stabbing each others with swords. In a thousand years the above scenario is far from overly optimistic (IMHO). So in a cosmic blink of an eye we go from undetectable (from a SETI perspective) to being detectable from tens or hundreds of millions of light years away. So that's why I think SETI is pointless. Some say "you never know what fruit science will bear". While true, taken further this means it doesn't matter what science you invest in so why is SETI special?

mhh__ 7y ago
What do you actually think the IR spectrum would look like given that it would still be very close to a star that could potentially already saturate the measurement?
- 7y ago

Nasrudith 7y ago

Reminds me of the one theory that SETI was largely cover for signals intelligence spying in the cold war. Personally I suspect that while we may discover interesting details of radio-astronomy but I highly doubt we will discover anything of worth related to alien life through it.

badrabbit 7y ago

How does this benefit the public in the foreseeable future? Why should the public fund it? Why not stick to private funding? Look at SpaceX, there are plenty of rich people and them aside, people interested in this subject should contribute. I know this is an unpopular view here but I just don't get why the public has to fund this using tax dollars. We all have views on what tax money should be spent on but can we not agree that the public should benefit from it with some guarantee of success.even if they succeed there is no guarantee it will benefit anyone. scifi aside, known physics does not permit anything to travel to our solar system faster than a few million years. Maybe aliens left some useful information in a format humans can somehow decode, is this very very small chance of succeess worth considering the pursuit beneficial to the public? There are many very urgent things that need funding. Even wild ideals like universal basic income or a CO2 cleaning factory can be useful to the public in the foreseeable future. I get that this will not neccesarily take away from other projects,but heck, I would rather see it go to pay off 0.0001% of national debt than this. People can donate,billionaires exist.