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).<p>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?<p>Lastly, some commenters need to go read Carl Sagan's Contact. He goes over all of this nay-saying!<p>[1] <a href="https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/" rel="nofollow">https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/</a>
[2] <a href="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" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-Liu/dp/07653...</a>
I used to be a big fan of SETI but I've come around to thinking it's probably a complete waste of time.<p>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:<p>- 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.<p>- Gravity is a tyrant. Spinning a habitat achieves much the same thing without the negatives (as in the cost of launch).<p>- This is entirely feasible on solar power alone. The importance of this is that practical fusion power is not a prerequisite.<p>- This requires no new science. It's largely an engineering problem (albeit a significant one).<p>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.<p>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:<p>- Stars generate heat<p>- If the habitats hit by the energy from the star will heat up<p>- In space you can only radiate heat away<p>- If you don't remove that heat you'll ultimately fry<p>- The wavelength from radiating heat is determined by the temperature of that object<p>The standard counter to this is:<p>Q: What if you recycle the heat instead?<p>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.<p>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.<p>So that's why I think SETI is pointless.<p>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?
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.
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.<p>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?<p>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.
There's one simple metric for SETI progress that I would like to see and have always had trouble finding.<p>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 ?<p>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.
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.<p>The only problem is we don't know how to tune in to join the conversation.<p>I still think we should keep trying to find them, though.
I crunched for years on seti@home at the turn of the century and have always been a fan of the project.<p>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?<p>With trillion dollar deficits in the forecast, earmarking new money does not sound like an easy task to achieve.
Reminds me of the one theory that SETI was largely cover for signals intelligence spying in the cold war.<p>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.
We have <i>already</i> found alien species.<p><i>Right here</i> on this very same planet:<p>Dinosaurs.<p>We would have never even known about their existence if we had not chanced upon their remains.<p>So it's not just the vast distances of space that separates species from each other, it's also incomprehensible stretches of <i>time.</i><p>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.<p>BUT we may never meet anyone.<p>Just like how there's billions of people on Earth but millions die alone, to use a topical metaphor given Valentine's Day. :)
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.
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:<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-flying-object-navy.amp.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-...</a><p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings-navy-pilots.amp.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>But sending a message to aliens? We've already done this. For decades. More than a century. Ever since we started transmitting Tv/radio.<p>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 <i>what kind of atmosphere</i>?"
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.