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There's a missing term: "How much of our potential budget are we spending trying to fill in the other estimates?" SETI is incredibly poorly funded compared to

There's a missing term: "How much of our potential budget are we spending trying to fill in the other estimates?" SETI is incredibly poorly funded compared to other science. For a long time it was barely funded at all. There's been an uptick recently, but a project like Breakthrough Listen runs on $10m/yr and gets ridiculously constrained access to telescope time. The remaining SETI projects get by on less than $5m/yr. So SETI as a whole gets about as much funding as one episode of The Mandalorian. No wonder we haven't found anything. We're barely even looking.

denton-scratch 5y ago
Why would we allocate ginormous budgets to a project like SETI? Suppose we detected a radio signal from a location outside the solar system, that seemed to bespeak intelligence. That means it must be at least 1.5 LY away. But we haven't yet detected an exoplanet around Alpha Centauri, let alone one with goldilocks properties. But for the sake of argument, let's suppose that we detect a radio signal from Alpha Centauri, and a matching exoplanet. I suppose that would make it reasonable to conclude that (a) we have neighbours, and (b) that they're probably common. But we have only highly-speculative and fantastically expensive ideas about how we might get a human to Alpha Centauri. It would, for example, require a Generation spaceship. I suppose we could imagine exchanging scientific knowledge with the beings of Alpha Centauri, over a radio link - with a ping time of 3 years. And the bandwidth isn't going to be that impressive, either. I totally believe that there is other intelligent life in the Universe; but I simply don't believe that, if they are really intelligent, they would burn their resources on a project that might not be complete before they become extinct. I doubt they're anything like as close as Alpha Centauri, and therefore I doubt that we'll ever encounter them physically. From that point of view, it doesn't make much difference to anything whether they exist or not.

denton-scratch 5y ago

Why would we allocate ginormous budgets to a project like SETI? Suppose we detected a radio signal from a location outside the solar system, that seemed to bespeak intelligence. That means it must be at least 1.5 LY away. But we haven't yet detected an exoplanet around Alpha Centauri, let alone one with goldilocks properties. But for the sake of argument, let's suppose that we detect a radio signal from Alpha Centauri, and a matching exoplanet. I suppose that would make it reasonable to conclude that (a) we have neighbours, and (b) that they're probably common. But we have only highly-speculative and fantastically expensive ideas about how we might get a human to Alpha Centauri. It would, for example, require a Generation spaceship. I suppose we could imagine exchanging scientific knowledge with the beings of Alpha Centauri, over a radio link - with a ping time of 3 years. And the bandwidth isn't going to be that impressive, either. I totally believe that there is other intelligent life in the Universe; but I simply don't believe that, if they are really intelligent, they would burn their resources on a project that might not be complete before they become extinct. I doubt they're anything like as close as Alpha Centauri, and therefore I doubt that we'll ever encounter them physically. From that point of view, it doesn't make much difference to anything whether they exist or not.