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Astronomers want public funds for intelligent life search

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Astronomers want public funds for intelligent life search

#61

Post by onetimemanytime »

glutamate wrote: post #43
onetimemanytime wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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. USA spends more on healthcare than (prob) anyone else. Basic needs will never be solved, as the yardstick will also move. >> Money for finding extra-terrestrial life would be better spent on earth fixing the…

> USA spends more on healthcare than (prob) anyone else. Basic needs will never be solved, as the yardstick will also move. Agree, in a privatised healthcare system the fee-for-service problem will indeed prevent basic needs from ever being met.

You missed the point entirely. if USA already spends a lot of money (albeit in the wrong direction...maybe) in healthcare, how will the healthcare problem be solved if it spends another, say $200M ? You can argue reform, not that it needs a few more hundred million to "solve the problem"

Re: Astronomers want public funds for intelligent life search

#62

Post by oefrha »

koheripbal wrote: post #52
valgor wrote: post #48

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 r…

Additionally, of all the pure science research we do with public money, the discovery of alien intelligence would have probably the greatest impact on human day-to-day life. Many of the other commenters seem to believe the research would fail. .... something we obviously cannot possibly know without doing the research. The only thing prior SETI research has demonstrated is that no one is purposely beaming a signal ri…

> greatest impact

I would use “biggest” to remove the ambiguity. The impact wouldn’t necessarily be positive; we’ve had enough movies to remind us that. I can’t think of another area of research where there’s a significant chance that the eventual outcome is completely uncontrollable.

Btw, I’m a high energy physicist and I totally believe there are other intelligent beings in the universe, simply because I don’t think we’re special. We’re just dusts in the who happen to be able t peek a little into the laws of the universe, that’s all. (As a aside, despite all the particle accelerator generating black hole nonsense, my field is pretty safe for humanity.)

Re: Astronomers want public funds for intelligent life search

#63

Post by Razengan »

gus_massa wrote: post #60
Razengan wrote: post #47

We have already found alien species. Right here on this very same planet: Dinosaurs. We would have never even known about their existence if we had not chanced upon their remains. So it's not just the vast distances of space that separates species from each other, it's also incomprehensible stretches of time. Just from the amount of variables involved and their ranges (the number of planets, the extreme environments…

Dinosaurs are just beakless ducks. If you want to blow your mind, take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ediacaran_biota

Those are really interesting!

The point was that even if we could physically visit planets or reach them with communications, we would have to do it in the right time bracket. Any life (of interest) on them may have long since passed on, or not capable of interaction yet.

Mars may have once had life, and we may never know of it.

Re: Astronomers want public funds for intelligent life search

#64

Post by LatteLazy »

koheripbal wrote: post #55
LatteLazy wrote: post #51

As long as no one tries to contact anyone, why not.

SETI has demonstrated that no one is beaming a signal right at us. There might be a reason for that, other than them simple not existing.

Exactly. Welcome to the dark forest.

Re: Astronomers want public funds for intelligent life search

#65

Post by tgflynn »

There's one simple metric for SETI progress that I would like to see and have always had trouble finding.

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 ?

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.

Re: Astronomers want public funds for intelligent life search

#66

Post by rs23296008n1 »

koheripbal wrote: post #54
rs23296008n1 wrote: post #25

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. 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…

If this were the bar for doing pure research, we'd never do any pure research ever. The average quality of life in the US has never been higher.

I'm not convinced looking for aliens is basic research. Its more like applied science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_research

Life expectancy for the US is dropping. Multiple modern issues of maladjustment are likely causes. Spending searching-for-aliens money on schools, education etc instead would be actually beneficial. Schools have active shooter drills now. That is NOT an indicator of increasing quality of life. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/09/us-life-expectancy-has-been-...

Plenty of cracks in society. Pure research might actually help. We actually know far less about nutrition than we could - thats just one example.

We're much better off going to the moon, mining asteroids and living in space rather than searching for aliens. Plenty of the tech, knowledge and experience from even attempting to live in space has already had tangible benefits for those on earth.

Re: Astronomers want public funds for intelligent life search

#67

Post by cletus »

I used to be a big fan of SETI but I've come around to thinking it's probably a complete waste of time.

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:

- 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.

- Gravity is a tyrant. Spinning a habitat achieves much the same thing without the negatives (as in the cost of launch).

- This is entirely feasible on solar power alone. The importance of this is that practical fusion power is not a prerequisite.

- This requires no new science. It's largely an engineering problem (albeit a significant one).

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.

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:

- Stars generate heat

- If the habitats hit by the energy from the star will heat up

- In space you can only radiate heat away

- If you don't remove that heat you'll ultimately fry

- The wavelength from radiating heat is determined by the temperature of that object

The standard counter to this is:

Q: What if you recycle the heat instead?

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.

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.

So that's why I think SETI is pointless.

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?

Re: Astronomers want public funds for intelligent life search

#68

Post by throwawayhhakdl »

valgor wrote: post #48

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 r…

> High risk with the highest reward

I don’t understand people who think this way. Let’s imagine there is definitely an alien and we find it. Assume it follows a similar tech trajectory as humans.

If we find it in the millions of years of pre-civilization we got nothing. Probably don’t even notice it. If we get it the thousands of years before communication tech, we also get squat. If we get it in the couple hundred years between comm tech and the present, we maybe can do something? If we go beyond the present either they have killed themselves, or they’re inconceivably more advanced than us and the idea that we found them before they found us is kind of laughable. The probability that we’re the first civilization to have “found” them is laughable.

By all means, space and communication tech is interesting. Go make it. If finding aliens would have some philosophical value to you, go look for them. But to think that they’re likely to change society seems weird.

Re: Astronomers want public funds for intelligent life search

#69

Post by tgflynn »

Revolutionisto wrote: post #27
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I'm excited by such news, let's not jump from "things we don't understand" to "god/magic/aliens". For now, it's "cool event we don't know how to explain". Good enough. Life is full of that and if we try to force label on it, we miss the fun of figuring out what's going on seriously.

I certainly can’t explain exactly what it is. However, a few facts stand out: 1. Detected object moves erratically at high speeds, with exceptionally high acceleration. Controlled translational and angular acceleration of the object occur in the footage. 2. Navy pilots in both encounters reported that the object was not visible at close range but only showed up on radar, in particular only on radar that was recently…

There's no hard evidence that it was an actual physical (massive) object. There is evidence (mostly testimonial) that it was visible to radar, infrared and visible light sensors and the human eye.

Is there anything that has those characteristics and is not an object ? Yes, plasma phenomena are one example.

Re: Astronomers want public funds for intelligent life search

#70

Post by goatlover »

koheripbal wrote: post #52
valgor wrote: post #48

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 r…

Additionally, of all the pure science research we do with public money, the discovery of alien intelligence would have probably the greatest impact on human day-to-day life. Many of the other commenters seem to believe the research would fail. .... something we obviously cannot possibly know without doing the research. The only thing prior SETI research has demonstrated is that no one is purposely beaming a signal ri…

We don't have to be totally alone, we just have to be rare enough that there's no detectable civilization in range at this time. If you multiply the probabilities of complex, intelligent life evolving that happened to be broadcasting signals into space a few decades to centuries ago (depending on how many light years away they are), then it's a reasonable conclusion that what we're looking for is rare.

If the closest ETs are 20,000 light years away, would we ever find out about them? Space is vast and time is deep. We could have missed the most recent civilization in range of detection by a million years.

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