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SETI never made much sense as a means to find aliens. As a means to get funding and interest in radioastronomy, by spinning more than a bit on the chances of it
by yyyk 6y ago
SETI never made much sense as a means to find aliens. As a means to get funding and interest in radioastronomy, by spinning more than a bit on the chances of it ever working, it made a lot of sense.
A radio signal could be either intentional or unintentional. An unintentional signal being found is extremely unlikely. Radio isn't very useful for interplanetary communication, so the purpose must be local. But every civilization would have the desire to conserve energy, and it takes a very little time (compared to galaxy-scale distances) to improve it to the point it's very weak. Humanity switched very quickly from weak radio signals (because the power sources were weak) to very weak radio signals (because we knew better what we were doing) to digital. That's a very short time frame and a weak signal. Not likely to be detected.
As for an intentional signal, well, if a powerful enough alien wants to be noticed, it will be. One could always come up with weird scenarios ("they want to test us so they're intentionally sending weak signals") but that's a very double edged sword ("they want to test us to see if they need to exterminate us") which doesn't justify SETI.
- lowmemcpu 6y ago> As a means to get funding and interest in radioastronomy, by spinning more than a bit on the chances of it ever working, it made a lot of sense. This sent me looking for the total half-century $ cost of SETI, but couldn't find it. Have any idea if that's been calculated?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- yyyk 6y agoI didn't find much, but I have an idea for calculation: * Most of their projects have a relatively static cost[0] year-by-year. * The big variable is SETI@home. From the SETI PoV it's zero-cost, but that's not the case for society (compute, electricity, pollution). It's not difficult to find TFLOPS estimates via BOINC or wiki. Translating that back to cost is rather difficult, for me at least. Most people did not buy computers for this. Network bandwidth cost is also difficult to estimate. I suspect main component is power for processing. But electricity estimates vary widely depending on hardware used, I dunno how to estimate the average consumption per TLOPS. [0] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-annual-cost-of-operating-SETI-Is-it-worth-the-money https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-annual-cost-of-operating-S...