11–20 of 107 posts
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. The only problem is we don't know how to tune in to join the conversation. I still think we should keep trying to find them, though.
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?
With trillion dollar deficits in the forecast, earmarking new money does not sound like an easy task to achieve.
I crunched for years on seti@home at the turn of the century and have always been a fan of the project. 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? With trillion dollar deficits in the forecast, earmarking new money does not sound like an easy task to…
Note that deficit could be (or not) inflationary, but debt is the accumulate of money already spent in the economy.
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 enthusi…
There is the slight probability of all problems being solved if we find some aliens :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know what's a tragic waste for me? Most of the US military budget, its spending on the War on Drugs, its tax cuts to billionaires and corporate welfare. Let's cut those in half and talk again about SETI, which I would be happy to fund a hundred times over if it meant less killing, fewer unjust incarcerations for victimless crimes, more economic equality, and less concentration of money and power in the hands of t…
I think it isn't so easy to say that what the US military does is a waste of your money. A lot of US foreign policy is about "free trade" that's beneficial to the US. If you were to cut off the US military then you'd likely have consequences for global trade. Perhaps you're right that it's a waste of your money, but I think that this is not at all a straightforward conclusion. Eg imagine if Iran just decided to stop…
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.
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.
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.
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.
I crunched for years on seti@home at the turn of the century and have always been a fan of the project. 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? With trillion dollar deficits in the forecast, earmarking new money does not sound like an easy task to…
What I told people was that Seti@Home was a waste of time, but Mersenne Prime finding was a useful idea:
"GIMPS, founded in 1996, has discovered the last 17 Mersenne primes."
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 enthusi…
There is the slight probability of all problems being solved if we find some aliens :)
In my opinion, these money are better spent on any other applied or fundamental research.
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. So we go actively looking for other living species which exhibit that precis…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know what's a tragic waste for me? Most of the US military budget, its spending on the War on Drugs, its tax cuts to billionaires and corporate welfare. Let's cut those in half and talk again about SETI, which I would be happy to fund a hundred times over if it meant less killing, fewer unjust incarcerations for victimless crimes, more economic equality, and less concentration of money and power in the hands of t…
I think it isn't so easy to say that what the US military does is a waste of your money. A lot of US foreign policy is about "free trade" that's beneficial to the US. If you were to cut off the US military then you'd likely have consequences for global trade. Perhaps you're right that it's a waste of your money, but I think that this is not at all a straightforward conclusion. Eg imagine if Iran just decided to stop…