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This is good. The idea that an astrophysicist would ever think seriously one could find ET by just scanning the sky and finding ET signals is baffling. If anyon
by credit_guy 4y ago
This is good. The idea that an astrophysicist would ever think seriously one could find ET by just scanning the sky and finding ET signals is baffling. If anyone learned how to do a Fermi problem, they could quickly do a back of the envelope estimation and realize there's zero chance to detect such a signal. The space is simply too large, stupendously large, and signals decay with the square of the distance (at least). This SETI at home experiment was a waste of compute from the beginning. It was a good distributed compute framework, too bad to use it on such a pointless task.
- thegrim33 4y agoI'm trying to find a way to say this that isn't too negative, but do you really think you're that much smarter than everyone that's been involved in SETI over the decades? That everyone that's worked on it was incapable of doing the "simple envelope estimation" that you've done? You have such a level of hubris that you can just write off the whole idea, assuming that everyone involved with it have no idea what they're doing?
- credit_guy 4y agoI explicitly said I don't think any astrophysicist believed that. Every single one is able to do that back of the envelope calculation, and I suspect that those involved in the SETI project actually did it. They just didn't care. As long as the population was ok with a search for ETs, the money kept coming.