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SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

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Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#61

Post by iwwr »

barisme wrote: post #16
iwwr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An alternative solution to the Fermi paradox would be that radio signals fade into the background fairly quickly. SETI only has the ability to pick up signals coming just few light-years away (if emitted by an Earth-like radio culture). It would be expected that a more advanced civilization would prefer to use highly focused directional beams (perhaps lasers), signals which won't (easily) get picked up by those to wh…

Yes or 'they' might use a form of energy that is totally foreign to us. Maybe it's not even a beam or a ray. Maybe it's micro-black-hole-oscillation (yeah, made that up). I mean, who knows? It's all hypothetical anyway. And here we are spending money on a bunch of dishes that pick up a specific range of radio frequency. Stick the same dishes on top of a sports bar and at least we can all watch football.

The advantage of SETI is that the radio equipment can be used for radio astronomy just as well. So the money spent has dual use (almost complementary).

Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#62

Post by DavidChouinard »

xnerdr wrote: post #35
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…

I'd be reluctant to invest more in an investment that has never paid off. They're searching for signs of life. Signs found so far = 0. Thats a pretty bad ROI.

The lack of results is an important result in of itself.

Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#63

Post by prawn »

ck2 wrote: post #7

Part of me hopes the secret reason for this is they've actually discovered some so they don't feel they need to keep looking right now. Paul Allen is still worth billions, can't he help a little more?

I often think about that - if life elsewhere were discovered, what would be the repercussions of letting the public know? If the gap between replies were 10 or more years, how many people would just give up work figuring it was pointless? Would society as we know it collapse?

Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#64

Post by michaelcampbell »

thangalin wrote: post #18
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…

I ran Seti@Home for years; after I found out about Folding@Home, I switched over; disease research yields short- and long-term benefits. http://folding.stanford.edu/

I have multi multi-core machines, so I run seti@home as well as a (much larger timeshare of) rosetta@home. I agree that disease research has a much more probable impact, but the implications of a successful SETI search are not trivial either.

I also run Einstein@home, and world community grid.

Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#65

Post by AllenKids »

Google to the rescue!

Seriously, first they are both located at Mountain View. Second it is not that much money to begin with, at least for Google. Third it totally fits Google's pet project description - wildly awesome but realistically little chance to produce result.

Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#66

Post by jonnathanson »

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.

It's possible we won't get to a point where we're ready to do something with a signal unless and until a signal convinces us that getting there is worth the investment (an interesting chicken-and-egg problem).

Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#67

Post by CamperBob »

danenania wrote: post #20
jackowayed wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure there's that much chance for profit even if you do find aliens, at least not directly from the information you'd get from the aliens. These aliens would be many light years away. (absolute minimum ~5, right?) So for a long time you'd just be receiving signals (because it would take at the very least 10 years for your first message to get to them and them to respond). First of all, the signals you'd recei…

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

I suspect that they communicate in ways that we can conceive of, and have recently started to communicate, ourselves.

Specifically, if you're broadcasting radio or TV signals that look like anything other than random noise from the perspective of an uncorrelated receiver, then you're wasting energy. Human history suggests that there's a window of about 100 years between the time when a civilization learns RF theory and starts to generate coherent signals, and the time when they learn information theory and stop.

Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#68

Post by nopassrecover »

xnerdr wrote: post #35
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…

I'd be reluctant to invest more in an investment that has never paid off. They're searching for signs of life. Signs found so far = 0. Thats a pretty bad ROI.

Though this could be said for nearly all research until it is complete.

Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#69

Post by JeremyBanks »

sliverstorm wrote: post #21
jackowayed wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure there's that much chance for profit even if you do find aliens, at least not directly from the information you'd get from the aliens. These aliens would be many light years away. (absolute minimum ~5, right?) So for a long time you'd just be receiving signals (because it would take at the very least 10 years for your first message to get to them and them to respond). First of all, the signals you'd recei…

your investors took an absurd risk If there's life out there, we'll probably find it eventually. Considering life is a binary condition (there or not there) and we haven't found anything to strongly indicate the odds of life existing elsewhere are very small, I certainly wouldn't call the odds of finding life absurdly bad.

If there's life out there, we'll probably find it eventually.

I don't know. I would like to think that this is so, but it seems hard to reconcile with the Fermi paradox (referring to intelligent life, at least). We do not know the probability of intelligent life developing, but I consider it plausible that the probability is such that although other life exits, it is beyond the limits of known methods of communication (e.g. extragalactic).

Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#70

Post by javanix »

Just in case anyone didn't bother reading the article - SETI is not calling off all of their searches, just shutting down one of its main radio arrays in Mountain View. Their other time-shared operations sound like they'll continue.

Not really sure why people feel like misrepresenting articles like this all the time, but this is one of them.

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