Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

mercurynews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 109 posts

Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#51

Post by narag »

sliverstorm wrote: post #22
danenania wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also the possibility that extraterrestrials exist and communicate in ways we can't conceive of.

Yes, this is possible. I'd argue though that if 2 instances of life exist (them and us), n instances must exist, (and thus some must use radio waves) because it clearly demonstrates humanity wasn't a freak septillion-to-one occurrence that shouldn't have happened.

This would be relevant for civilizations like ours, using waves to purposedly contact with others, but not for signals used to communicate with spaceships or colonies of the same alien civilization.

Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#52

Post by sgt »

xnerdr wrote: post #46
robryan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure with that kind of short term thinking we will never get anywhere. It is far to early to call the investment a failure, in relative timescales it would be like calling a new school a failure because it had a bad first day.

Let's say we get a signal. Then what? Even if we do find a signal, there is no payoff. The money is better invested elsewhere, then, once we are better able to capitalize upon a signal being found, then, we should invest in finding one. Right now, its premature.

That's pretty narrow-minded thinking. Life isn't all about whether something pays off or not. There's science out there that you cannot capitalize on, but it's still worth it. It should be anyway, if humanity wants to progress as a species.

Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#53

Post by watchandwait »

noibl wrote: post #42
worldvoyageur wrote: post #2

This is sad to read, but perhaps an opportunity in disguise. It is a risk for any firm to be highly dependent on one customer for most of its revenue and SETI appears to have been highly dependent on US government funding. It is dangerous to make conclusions based on a newspaper article, but it seems they found $50 million in private donations way back when to build the network. Now they can't find $2.5 million per y…

> The quote: "if everybody contributed just 3 extra cents on their 1040 tax forms, we could find out if we have cosmic company." suggests that the organization is focused on government funding, rather than individual donors It also suggests that the problem of finding intelligent life is basically a financial one. s/we could/there is a very slim chance that &/

Or, we could take the cost of one day of our Libyan Kinetic Military Action ($100 million) and fund this program for a generation.

Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#54

Post by dkersten »

crocowhile wrote: post #48
dkersten wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, using that computing power for folding@home would have been much more beneficial, IMHO.

BOINC was actually developed to support SETI@HOME. Without the pulling power of SETI who knows if you had all the others spinoffs. As for many other kind of research, space research often brings very unexpected innovations.

That is very true. I didn't mean to imply that nothing good came out of it at all - obviously they developed some great tech to help their search for alien life, which can be reapplied elsewhere.

Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#55

Post by ssharp »

watchandwait wrote: post #53
noibl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The quote: "if everybody contributed just 3 extra cents on their 1040 tax forms, we could find out if we have cosmic company." suggests that the organization is focused on government funding, rather than individual donors It also suggests that the problem of finding intelligent life is basically a financial one. s/we could/there is a very slim chance that &/

Or, we could take the cost of one day of our Libyan Kinetic Military Action ($100 million) and fund this program for a generation.

Or we could take the 2.5 million for SETI and help people get access to safe drinking water, food, and vaccines. After all, people on Earth suffering should be a higher priority than looking for spacemen, right?

edit: This might have come across as snarky - that wasn't my intention. I just wanted to show that you can argue that any government spending can be spent better, and/or more morally, somewhere else.

Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#56

Post by steve19 »

metageek wrote: post #49
thaumaturgy wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm rather bullish on matters of space exploration, but I'm pretty skeptical about just how profoundly transformational a SETI discovery would be. If there were such a discovery, it would be beset by difficult-to-imagine communication challenges, not the least of which is a years- or decades-long delay between sending a signal and receiving any response. There have also been some cogent arguments that it might be in…

We're already being loud. We've been leaking radio transmissions into space for the past century.

We have been leaking analog radio transmissions for such a short period of time during the lifetime of the universe that any other life out there would most likely be either underdeveloped or overdeveloped to receive the transmissions.

We have barely uttered a sound in the universe.

Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#59

Post by khafra »

steve19 wrote: post #56
metageek wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're already being loud. We've been leaking radio transmissions into space for the past century.

We have been leaking analog radio transmissions for such a short period of time during the lifetime of the universe that any other life out there would most likely be either underdeveloped or overdeveloped to receive the transmissions. We have barely uttered a sound in the universe.

The mind-blowingly relevant picture: http://proto-knowledge.blogspot.com/2011/02/human-radio-bubb...

Of course, light goes really, really fast compared to anything physics says we can possibly manage for things with more rest mass than photons. Although there could be aliens on another spiral arm, or Andromeda, communication would take longer than the lifetime of our civilization; and material trade would take longer than the lifetime of our species.

Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#60

Post by khafra »

wladimir wrote: post #13
urbanjunkie wrote: post #4

Although I think the seti@home project was one of the groundbreaking distributed/crowdworking projects, my personal opinion is that the actual search for ETI is a waste of time (not factoring in any advances in science/engineering that have been derived from the project). I'm a firm believer in the most common solution to the Fermi Paradox ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox ) - ie there's nothing else out t…

We might be seeing their impact on the galaxy all around us. How would we know? They might work on different (time)scales. Edit: I agree that SETI makes no sense to contact such entities though.

Assuming such beings work on the same physics we do, they need massive amounts of energy to run a galactic civilization; and they have the same sources available that we do: Stars; and for extra credit black holes.

Putting a dyson sphere around a star changes its energy output, shifting it far into the infrared. Putting a matrioshka brain around a star is even more dramatic a change--but it still has the same gravitational effect on other stars. But no, unfortunately that doesn't explain the effects of "dark matter."

Post reply on HN