101–109 of 109 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is also the possibility that extraterrestrials exist and communicate in ways we can't conceive of.
http://xkcd.com/638/ "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."
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…
SETI doesn't sell search for life, SETI sells "I have donated money to SETI." After you understand this, it is the Rosetta Stone for non-profit fundraising. (And the enduring support for the space program among geeks, which is non-profit spending using other people's money that actually funds military hardware R&D.) There are many people who buy Ferraris to be the kind of person that buys Ferraris, rather than to dri…
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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…
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…
It's also very true for a lot of startups - too much of the founders time is spent ensuring the startup gets more access to funds. It's a terrible trap to get into, and circumvented only by bootstrapping to a revenue phase.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The primary purpose of NASA is to get NASA and its contractors hired and paid, not to explore space 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.
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.
The primary purpose of NASA is to get NASA and its contractors hired and paid, not to explore space 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.
Is this not a reasonable suggestion? Any organisation which is unable to ensure its financial survival will by definition go extinct and so be unable to achieve anything else.
One puts money above everything. The other considers it a mean for a higher purpose.
Can you tell the difference?
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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.
You write, "$12.65 million is a lot of money. What could we do with that?" Here are some issues: 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 -- provide…
Either you are paying for all of your electrical bill or you're not.
If you are paying for all of it, then yes, you can donate your electrical costs! just don't run Folding@Home and send Oxfam or whatever a Paypal donation at the end of the year.
If you are not paying for all of it, if someone is sharing the bill or footing the bill entirely, then donating directly may harm your pocketbook, yes. But in such a situation, does it really still make sense to force the other to pay for all the electricity you are using? The overall economics are bad per the original note, it's an inefficient way to turn someone else's money into charity. What right do you have to burn the electricity like there's no tomorrow, for that matter? (If you weren't going to use a year's worth of electricity, then whomever is paying for your electricity is poorer by that $10 as surely as if you had pick-pocketed him of $10.)
> 2. The article fails to address how Folding@Home eases scientific contributions by the masses.
'Scientific contributions'? What contributions? If you just mean, let the masses feel like they're doing something useful, then Folding@Home could do us all a favor and make the main loop of the daemon a call to sleep()! If you mean, actual scientific progress, that overlaps with your point #3 which I'll get to.
> I agree that $12.65 million can save many lives -- provided it was not split across scores of charities.
A dollar is a dollar, no matter where it comes from. If you and 99 other people each donate $100 to 100 charities, then it's the same as if each person donated $10,000 to just 1 charity. The only difference is whatever overhead there might be; and even if we say that our Folding@Home contributors lose 50% to overhead and the charities wind up getting only $6 million in their bank accounts to use, that's still thousands more lives saved than by running Folding@Home and wasting the same amount of money!
> 3. Folding@Home has the potential to save hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives.
This is the key question. If Folding@Home has expected value of thousands of lives a year, then running it is fine. But if it's not producing...
For these sort of stakes, one would hope that one had really good evidence. But let's lower standards and merely ask for ordinary evidence. What reason do you have to think Folding@Home has such extraordinary potential? It has been operating for nearly 11 years. 11! And nothing that has saved a single life. (You are free to provide a counter-example.) At what point do we stop talking about its potential to save millions of lives and about the possibility of teapots in orbit around Mercury?