I think the assumption that advanced civilisations emit radio waves has been pretty much falsified at this point. We have all but stopped emitting anything detectable less than 100 years after we started.
SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station
61–70 of 123 posts
Re: SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station
#62While I do share a certain romantic admiration for the grandeur of SETI's goals, I have to agree with those who call this a waste of money and brainpower in our times. The most ludicrous AGI apocalypse scenarios seem orders of magnitude more likely than finding conclusive evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. A second terrestrial intelligence is about to emerge, and the consequences of that might conceivably be…
> I have to agree with those who call this a waste of money and brainpower in our times.
They're looking at a cost of $200 Million, funded out of pocket by one billionaire philanthropist. That's his pocket money. The cost is negligible on a global scale. 0.00019% of GDP.
Re: SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station
#63While I do share a certain romantic admiration for the grandeur of SETI's goals, I have to agree with those who call this a waste of money and brainpower in our times. The most ludicrous AGI apocalypse scenarios seem orders of magnitude more likely than finding conclusive evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. A second terrestrial intelligence is about to emerge, and the consequences of that might conceivably be…
The thing with humanity progress, is that you have to start a lot of completely different efforts in parallel, because history has proven that there is no way to know what will play the biggest role in the future.
"No one has yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of numbers or relativity, and it seems unlikely that anyone will do so for many years." — G. H. Hardy (1941)
Re: SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> starting to question the gain of a project in the scientific space is never really an argument It most certainly is, at least in the real world. The ISS has cost more than $150 billion so far. That's not "a joke", it's the GDP of a mid-size country. I very much do hope that everyone involved is asking themselves hard questions about whether this expense is justified by whatever has been gained in return. Science is…
> The ISS has cost more than $150 billion so far. The UK's "High Speed 2" project is currently budgeted to cost about $125 billion for its ~300mi extent. I very much do hope that everyone involved is asking themselves hard questions about whether this expense is justified by whatever has been gained in return. The UK is not a magical la-la-land where people have the right to piss away truckloads of public money on pr…
And people only looking at the ISS as a "science experiment" are seriously misunderstanding the social impacts as well, especially when it comes to operations that span multiple countries and the relations between them. It's a public spot of cooperation that helps us not only when it comes to science, but when it comes to agree with each other.
Re: SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we cannot use effects related to quantum entanglement to communicate ELI5 to a non-physicist why not? I thought this was possible, if Alice and Bob share an entangled pair of a set of particles (i.e. each has a clique of particles entangled with the other), and they pre-arrange an algorithm for determining the meaning of different states of their particles. IIRC wasn't this the gist of the "wormhole" paper that wen…
Quantum entanglement means that pairs of particles can have correlated states regardless of the distance between them. It does not mean that if you push on one particle, the other one lights up. Imagine that two people are each given a coin with the property that whenever they flip those two coins simultaneously, they will either both come up heads, or both come up tails. How can you use that to communicate , that is…
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Re: SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station
#66While I do share a certain romantic admiration for the grandeur of SETI's goals, I have to agree with those who call this a waste of money and brainpower in our times. The most ludicrous AGI apocalypse scenarios seem orders of magnitude more likely than finding conclusive evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. A second terrestrial intelligence is about to emerge, and the consequences of that might conceivably be…
In the late 80s many people were of a similar opinion about attempts to find extrasolar planets.
Re: SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s science. It’s not in preparation for some kind of imminent encounter whose likelihood is weighed against some other event, but simply trying to understand our universe. Maybe AI can do much better at interpreting signals than humans do, and we should build this lunar station so that the post-human AGI can listen to calls from other distant AGIs. It would certainly have more patience for interstellar communicatio…
Science is a human endeavor, and like all human endeavors, it is subject to human limitations and resource constraints. Humanity surviving is a prerequisite for doing SETI, and that means preferentially allocating resources to projects that work on mitigating existential threats, everything else being equal. Now, I'm not asking that carpenters be reassigned to work on AI extinction scenarios. That wouldn't make sense…
By that logic we should only work on what eradicates threat to humanity’s survival. Ok, let’s axe half of the sciences.
Re: SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station
#68While I do share a certain romantic admiration for the grandeur of SETI's goals, I have to agree with those who call this a waste of money and brainpower in our times. The most ludicrous AGI apocalypse scenarios seem orders of magnitude more likely than finding conclusive evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. A second terrestrial intelligence is about to emerge, and the consequences of that might conceivably be…
Mankind puts immense amounts of its metal capacity into firing ways to better advertise things. Your argument doesn’t really stand when Adtech takes orders of magnitude more resource
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Re: SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station
#69I doubt SETI could detect even our own signals, when it’s encrypted digital data. I mean it’s just noise like any background signal.. Then, we people are very soon capable of communicating using quantum entanglement, which means it’s beyond wireless and you simply couldn’t tap into it with some antenna. For these reasons I suspect that SETI is waste of money.
> I doubt SETI could detect even our own signals, when it’s encrypted digital data.
I guess you haven’t heard of the military monitoring the activity even of encrypted enemy channels. You don’t even need to know how to decrypt it, you can detect peaks in communication.
Re: SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a very strong argument to be made that making first contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial species would be the most significant single event in human history. I can't say I have high hopes given the odds of making first contact, but it'd still be a huge milestone for our civilization if we can survive it.
Even just knowing they are there/coming or might arrive in 1000y would have huge effects on human society. Not being alone as a species has fundamental existential meaning and religion. Would the effects be good? The truth can have bad effects, but so does not confronting reality.
After one week, the headlines will be about Trump again.