91–100 of 109 posts
This needs to be crowd-sourced. Surely there are 5 million people who'd be willing to donate a dollar each for this.
Edit: just read the letter to donors; looks like the near-term problem was cuts by the state of California to the UC Berkeley budget.
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/
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.
The article misrepresents itself. "Said SETI Director Jill Tarter, 'that a time when we discover so many planets to look at, we don't have the operating funds to listen.'" It's a pretty naked sympathy appeal for money. "Honestly, if everybody contributed just 3 extra cents on their 1040 tax forms", etc. Anyone around here familiar with the "Iron Law of Bureaucracy" coined by Jerry Pournelle? For every sufficiently la…
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.
"We've searched dozens of these floor tiles for several common types of pheremone trails. If there were intelligent life up there, we would have seen its messages by now."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/
Does Folding@Home really yield a lot? I did some quick figuring ( http://www.gwern.net/Notes.html#charitable-supercomputing ) and that project costs a lot, while, as far as I can tell, delivering little especially compared to alternate charities.
1. This implies that there is a direct way that everyone who runs Folding@Home could, instead, have donated their electrical costs directly to a charitable organization.
2. The article fails to address how Folding@Home eases scientific contributions by the masses. I agree that $12.65 million can save many lives -- provided it was not split across scores of charities.
3. Folding@Home has the potential to save hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives.
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/
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.
The article misrepresents itself. "Said SETI Director Jill Tarter, 'that a time when we discover so many planets to look at, we don't have the operating funds to listen.'" It's a pretty naked sympathy appeal for money. "Honestly, if everybody contributed just 3 extra cents on their 1040 tax forms", etc. Anyone around here familiar with the "Iron Law of Bureaucracy" coined by Jerry Pournelle? For every sufficiently la…
You're joking, right?
So you're saying that the purpose of everything is to make money, not to make what those enterprises were built to do in the first place?
No wonder capitalism is the root of almost all our evils nowadays.. I feel really sorry for you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Until then, anything is a joke. A sad joke. And we're the clowns.