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SETI Institute suspends search for aliens
- worldvoyageur 15y agoThis is sad to read, but perhaps an opportunity in disguise. It is a risk for any firm to be highly dependent on one customer for most of its revenue and SETI appears to have been highly dependent on US government funding. It is dangerous to make conclusions based on a newspaper article, but it seems they found $50 million in private donations way back when to build the network. Now they can't find $2.5 million per year to run it? If nothing else, something is seriously wrong if donors that ponied up $50 million to build the Ferrari no longer want to shell out $2.5 million run it. The quote: "if everybody contributed just 3 extra cents on their 1040 tax forms, we could find out if we have cosmic company." suggests that the organization is focused on government funding, rather than individual donors - and continues this focus even after an evident failure of that model to keep things running. Meeting the needs of government funders and meeting the needs of donors are entirely different things. In my experience, you can have one or the other, but not both. They should step back and rethink how they can make their non-profit work primarily based on voluntary donations. The world is full of non-profits that manage it with budgets much larger than the $2.5 million/year SETI appears to need. Link to send SETI money: http://www.seti.org/page.aspx?pid=1468 http://www.seti.org/page.aspx?pid=1468
- d4nt 15y agoI wouldn't be surprised if SETI did this to promote their cause and raise more private donations, but the journalist is spinning it into a "Government cuts science spending" story to suit their agenda. The story will still serve its purpose though. I just donated $10, only another 499,999 more and they're home and dry.
- xnerdr 15y agoI'd be reluctant to invest more in an investment that has never paid off. They're searching for signs of life. Signs found so far = 0. Thats a pretty bad ROI.
- robryan 15y agoSure with that kind of short term thinking we will never get anywhere. It is far to early to call the investment a failure, in relative timescales it would be like calling a new school a failure because it had a bad first day.
- xnerdr 15y agoLet's say we get a signal. Then what? Even if we do find a signal, there is no payoff. The money is better invested elsewhere, then, once we are better able to capitalize upon a signal being found, then, we should invest in finding one. Right now, its premature.
- sgt 15y agoThat's pretty narrow-minded thinking. Life isn't all about whether something pays off or not. There's science out there that you cannot capitalize on, but it's still worth it. It should be anyway, if humanity wants to progress as a species.
- blake8086 15y agoI agree with you. Very few people have thought through what would happen if SETI found a clear signal. Say intelligence is only 20 light years away from us and they say "Hi! Here we are!" What possible step could we take? They are soo far away.
- gjm11 15y agoWe could talk to them. We could listen to them. Chances are at least one side would have something useful to learn from the other. (Think about how much we know that we didn't 100 years ago. Unless this hypothetical other intelligent civilization, having developed independently of ours, happens to be within 100 years of progress of us in every respect, someone's going to learn something.)
- Bud 15y agoYou're forgetting about the existence of Republicans. Clearly, what we'd do is immediately fund a massive space army to go and attack the aliens.
- patio11 15y agoSETI doesn't sell search for life, SETI sells "I have donated money to SETI." After you understand this, it is the Rosetta Stone for non-profit fundraising. (And the enduring support for the space program among geeks, which is non-profit spending using other people's money that actually funds military hardware R&D.) There are many people who buy Ferraris to be the kind of person that buys Ferraris, rather than to drive. Seriously, there are like magazines you can buy so you can aspire to one day not driving a Ferrari.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- noibl 15y ago> The quote: "if everybody contributed just 3 extra cents on their 1040 tax forms, we could find out if we have cosmic company." suggests that the organization is focused on government funding, rather than individual donors It also suggests that the problem of finding intelligent life is basically a financial one. s/we could/there is a very slim chance that &/
- watchandwait 15y agoOr, we could take the cost of one day of our Libyan Kinetic Military Action ($100 million) and fund this program for a generation.
- ssharp 15y agoOr we could take the 2.5 million for SETI and help people get access to safe drinking water, food, and vaccines. After all, people on Earth suffering should be a higher priority than looking for spacemen, right? edit: This might have come across as snarky - that wasn't my intention. I just wanted to show that you can argue that any government spending can be spent better, and/or more morally, somewhere else.
- burgerbrain 15y ago"After all, people on Earth suffering should be a higher priority than looking for spacemen, right?" Of course not. That line of reasoning is always flawed, as it is presumably always typed on a computer that was purchased with funds that weren't used for free water/food/vaccines.
- mrleinad 15y agoOnce worldwide military funding goes down to the level of the rest of budgets everywhere, we can talk about which one deserves more money than the other. Until then, anything is a joke. A sad joke. And we're the clowns.
- stevenj 15y agoThis needs to be crowd-sourced. Surely there are 5 million people who'd be willing to donate a dollar each for this.
- huhtenberg 15y agoSurely there's at least one Bill Gates who could spare 5 mil :)
- rhizome 15y agoSeems like more of a Paul Allen thing to me.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- barisme 15y agoBill Gates might rather cure river blindness, malaria and cholera. He's at that stage when a billionaire thinks about humanitarian legacy. Similar to Andrew Carnegie and the moguls of that generation.
- demallien 15y agoDiscovering another instance of intelligent life would be one of the most profound transformational experiences that we could have as a species. I would think that there would be more than one billionaire out there that would like their name to be associated with such a discovery.
- StavrosK 15y agoThe cost/effectiveness ratio is much higher, though.
- Tyrannosaurs 15y agoPossibly, but the chances of it happening are very very small, even with adequate funding.
- urbanjunkie 15y agoAlthough I think the seti@home project was one of the groundbreaking distributed/crowdworking projects, my personal opinion is that the actual search for ETI is a waste of time (not factoring in any advances in science/engineering that have been derived from the project). I'm a firm believer in the most common solution to the Fermi Paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox) - ie there's nothing else out there - because for any civilisation that's even slightly more advanced than us (for galactic values of slightly), the effort to make a noticeable impact on galaxy is reasonably trivial.
- barisme 15y agoAgree with your 1st paragraph. As for whether there's anything out there, I don't know. But if there is, it's optimistic to assume their technology would be related to ours in such a way that we could detect it with a few dishes plunked down in a valley. Besides that, the news would be at least 2.5 million year old. ;)
- iwwr 15y agoAn alternative solution to the Fermi paradox would be that radio signals fade into the background fairly quickly. SETI only has the ability to pick up signals coming just few light-years away (if emitted by an Earth-like radio culture). It would be expected that a more advanced civilization would prefer to use highly focused directional beams (perhaps lasers), signals which won't (easily) get picked up by those to whom they're not intended. Even now, as communication bandwidth is increasing, it's mostly as ground-based fiber optics.
- barisme 15y agoYes or 'they' might use a form of energy that is totally foreign to us. Maybe it's not even a beam or a ray. Maybe it's micro-black-hole-oscillation (yeah, made that up). I mean, who knows? It's all hypothetical anyway. And here we are spending money on a bunch of dishes that pick up a specific range of radio frequency. Stick the same dishes on top of a sports bar and at least we can all watch football.
- barisme 15y agoA better use of funds would be grants or investments in non-government space exploration / cargo / communications / research. That could be nonprofits or companies like Elon Musk's SpaceX. The latter is actually producing something we need. SETI will detect radio signals from an intelligent source, sure. "We have detected extraterrestrial intelligence, and it is us." It's better for US interests if the source is speaking English, not Russian (only program capable now of delivering astronauts to ISS) or Chinese. So don't mourn the loss of SETI funding. Celebrate when you find out that it's going to something more productive.
- sliverstorm 15y agoOf course, realistically speaking the money will probably just be appropriated by some Senator to build roads in Montana going nowhere.
- barisme 15y agoMaybe. At least some though are working on a bill to mandate a permanent base on the moon. That's a decent piece of high ground. And if it has a core of iron as has recently been suggested, could lead to some interesting research. Might even shed light on some phenomena down here on the blue ball.
- ck2 15y agoPart of me hopes the secret reason for this is they've actually discovered some so they don't feel they need to keep looking right now. Paul Allen is still worth billions, can't he help a little more?
- prawn 15y agoI often think about that - if life elsewhere were discovered, what would be the repercussions of letting the public know? If the gap between replies were 10 or more years, how many people would just give up work figuring it was pointless? Would society as we know it collapse?
- russell_h 15y agoSearching for aliens seems like the ultimate high risk/high reward investment opportunity. If someone secretly made contact with an advanced extraterrestrial civilization the potential for profit would be huge. On the other hand, good luck executing on that.
- jackowayed 15y agoI'm not sure there's that much chance for profit even if you do find aliens, at least not directly from the information you'd get from the aliens. These aliens would be many light years away. (absolute minimum ~5, right?) So for a long time you'd just be receiving signals (because it would take at the very least 10 years for your first message to get to them and them to respond). First of all, the signals you'd receive would probably be worthless. Even if you manage to understand them despite the fact that they likely use some totally different language and encode information in radio waves in a different way, it's not like we frequently broadcast "this is everything you need to know to build a computer" or anything super-useful. There might be some useful mentions of science they've developed (the equivalent of our NPR science programs), but it probably wouldn't be in enough detail (especially since their lay people would presumably have a much more advanced scientific base if they're so far beyond us) for us to really get anything out of it. In the meantime, people have probably heard that you got alien signals, and they'd eventually figure out how to receive and decode the signals too. Maybe you could patent it or something, but again, if they're far enough away, your patent might run out before you do much with it. You'd get somewhat of a head start, I guess. And since this whole thing would take so long to cash in, and your investors took an absurd risk, they'd expect at least 1000x on their money.
- danenania 15y agoThere is also the possibility that extraterrestrials exist and communicate in ways we can't conceive of.
- sliverstorm 15y agoYes, this is possible. I'd argue though that if 2 instances of life exist (them and us), n instances must exist, (and thus some must use radio waves) because it clearly demonstrates humanity wasn't a freak septillion-to-one occurrence that shouldn't have happened.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- DanielBMarkham 15y agoThe search for extraterrestrial life is something that even proponents say could take a very long time. So why in heck are they getting politically-sensitive, year-by-year funding? This is exactly the type of project that requires a trust, which I believe Allen set up. People as smart as that, it'd be idiotic to do this any other way. Who would want to start a 100-year project betting that the United States government would feel one way or the other about it 50 years from now?
- bfe 15y agoThe beginning of the article is incorrect in identifying the Allen Array as the array in the film "Contact". That was the Very Large Array.
- HelloBeautiful 15y agoSeth Shostak's podcast - http://radio.seti.org/ http://radio.seti.org/ . Highly recommended ;-)
- erik_p 15y agothis sounds like it has the potential for the largest kickstarter funded project to date!
- MichaelApproved 15y ago"There is a huge irony," said SETI Director Jill Tartar, "that a time when we discover so many planets to look at, we don't have the operating funds to listen." That sounds more unfortunate than ironic. It would be ironic if funding went directly from SETI to the satellite which found the planets.
- mcorrientes 15y agoI feel really sorry about it and I hope they'll make it. Maybe they should consider writing more appreciated applications. They could write more applications which involve people for the AI search. I don't know what could reduce time to find AI, but I would bet SETI could get many volunteers if they just would provide a social network application (e.g. facebook). There must be more than just calculation distribution.
- suprafly 15y agoThey should 'open-source' this project.
- ignifero 15y agoMy worst fear comes alive, people; they walk among us, suspending our search projects.
- tsycho 15y agoThe second foundation is here!
- AllenKids 15y agoGoogle to the rescue! Seriously, first they are both located at Mountain View. Second it is not that much money to begin with, at least for Google. Third it totally fits Google's pet project description - wildly awesome but realistically little chance to produce result.
- javanix 15y agoJust in case anyone didn't bother reading the article - SETI is not calling off all of their searches, just shutting down one of its main radio arrays in Mountain View. Their other time-shared operations sound like they'll continue. Not really sure why people feel like misrepresenting articles like this all the time, but this is one of them.
- kordless 15y agoI think they piggyback on top of the Arecibo scope, but don't get to choose where to point it.
- T-hawk 15y agoThe article misrepresents itself. "Said SETI Director Jill Tarter, 'that a time when we discover so many planets to look at, we don't have the operating funds to listen.'" It's a pretty naked sympathy appeal for money. "Honestly, if everybody contributed just 3 extra cents on their 1040 tax forms", etc. Anyone around here familiar with the "Iron Law of Bureaucracy" coined by Jerry Pournelle? For every sufficiently large organization, self-preservation and expansion inevitably crowd out the organization's ostensible purpose. SETI's primary purpose is not to find extraterrestrial intelligence. SETI's primary purpose is to ensure the continued existence of and wages paid to SETI. Actually finding the aliens is a secondary goal. (I am not ragging on SETI in particular here, that happens for every bureaucracy. The primary purpose of NASA is to get NASA and its contractors hired and paid, not to explore space. The primary purpose of TSA is to get TSA workers hired and paid, not to secure airways. The primary purpose of unions in education is to get themselves hired and paid, not to educate. These organizations do accomplish their stated goals to some and varying degrees of success, but never at any cost of imperiling their own demesne.)
- joeguilmette 15y agoIf they dont have any funding its going to be kind of hard to accomplish goal #1, right?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- kordless 15y agoThis seems like massive mis-management of money. Paul Allen contributed $50M to build the array. Whoever was managing that project should have thought about sticking back 30% or so for running it after it got built. Didn't have enough to build all the scopes? Build a few at a time. Presumably this is what happens when you don't have clear goals and objectives laid out - and oversight to make sure you don't screw it up. Pretty sad. They should be asking for new leadership and $20M to run it for 10 years.
- seats 15y agoIt makes me wonder how much Paul Allen was involved with it besides the money grant. You'd think he'd actually enjoy geeking out on some of the details and be involved enough to either a) prevent mismanagement or b) have enough confidence in what they are doing to continue to commit funds to it.
- gammarator 15y agoMy understanding (via astronomer scuttlebutt) is that the SETI institute fell massively short of the private fundraising goals it set at the outset of the project. (In fairness, this was during the economic crisis.) Paul Allen's funds were intended to start the hardware off, and then the privately raised funds would yield the operational/expansion budget. So, not so much mismanagement as overoptimistic budgeting. (Building a few telescopes at a time is likely a false economy, given the costs of paying engineering/fabrication costs over a longer period.) All that said, it's going to be harder to get private donors to contribute towards telescopes in the future...
- adestefan 15y agoWith donations you don't always get to allocate money in the most appropriate manner. The $50M could have been directed for construction only or it might have had a fixed split attached (e.g. 75% construction, 25% maintenance).
- growt 15y agoSome TV-Channel on alpha centauri just lost a viewer. Or maybe not, since we didn't find the channel yet.
- ApracticalUser 15y agoi wasted so much computing time for SETI back in the day
- arecibodrake 15y agoDoes anyone have any insight as to how they justify 2.5 million dollars per year in operating expenses?