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SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

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Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#11

Post by barisme »

sliverstorm wrote: post #8
barisme wrote: post #6

A better use of funds would be grants or investments in non-government space exploration / cargo / communications / research. That could be nonprofits or companies like Elon Musk's SpaceX. The latter is actually producing something we need. SETI will detect radio signals from an intelligent source, sure. "We have detected extraterrestrial intelligence, and it is us." It's better for US interests if the source is spea…

Of course, realistically speaking the money will probably just be appropriated by some Senator to build roads in Montana going nowhere.

Maybe. At least some though are working on a bill to mandate a permanent base on the moon. That's a decent piece of high ground. And if it has a core of iron as has recently been suggested, could lead to some interesting research. Might even shed light on some phenomena down here on the blue ball.

Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#12

Post by d4nt »

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 wouldn't be surprised if SETI did this to promote their cause and raise more private donations, but the journalist is spinning it into a "Government cuts science spending" story to suit their agenda. The story will still serve its purpose though. I just donated $10, only another 499,999 more and they're home and dry.

Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#13

Post by wladimir »

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.

Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#14

Post by iwwr »

barisme wrote: post #9
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…

Agree with your 1st paragraph. As for whether there's anything out there, I don't know. But if there is, it's optimistic to assume their technology would be related to ours in such a way that we could detect it with a few dishes plunked down in a valley. Besides that, the news would be at least 2.5 million year old. ;)

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 whom they're not intended. Even now, as communication bandwidth is increasing, it's mostly as ground-based fiber optics.

Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#15

Post by rhizome »

huhtenberg wrote: post #5
stevenj wrote: post #3

This needs to be crowd-sourced. Surely there are 5 million people who'd be willing to donate a dollar each for this.

Surely there's at least one Bill Gates who could spare 5 mil :)

Seems like more of a Paul Allen thing to me.

Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#16

Post by barisme »

iwwr wrote: post #14
barisme wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with your 1st paragraph. As for whether there's anything out there, I don't know. But if there is, it's optimistic to assume their technology would be related to ours in such a way that we could detect it with a few dishes plunked down in a valley. Besides that, the news would be at least 2.5 million year old. ;)

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.

Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#17

Post by barisme »

huhtenberg wrote: post #5
stevenj wrote: post #3

This needs to be crowd-sourced. Surely there are 5 million people who'd be willing to donate a dollar each for this.

Surely there's at least one Bill Gates who could spare 5 mil :)

Bill Gates might rather cure river blindness, malaria and cholera. He's at that stage when a billionaire thinks about humanitarian legacy. Similar to Andrew Carnegie and the moguls of that generation.

Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#18

Post by thangalin »

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/

Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#19

Post by jackowayed »

russell_h wrote: post #10

Searching for aliens seems like the ultimate high risk/high reward investment opportunity. If someone secretly made contact with an advanced extraterrestrial civilization the potential for profit would be huge. On the other hand, good luck executing on that.

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 receive would probably be worthless. Even if you manage to understand them despite the fact that they likely use some totally different language and encode information in radio waves in a different way, it's not like we frequently broadcast "this is everything you need to know to build a computer" or anything super-useful. There might be some useful mentions of science they've developed (the equivalent of our NPR science programs), but it probably wouldn't be in enough detail (especially since their lay people would presumably have a much more advanced scientific base if they're so far beyond us) for us to really get anything out of it.

In the meantime, people have probably heard that you got alien signals, and they'd eventually figure out how to receive and decode the signals too. Maybe you could patent it or something, but again, if they're far enough away, your patent might run out before you do much with it. You'd get somewhat of a head start, I guess.

And since this whole thing would take so long to cash in, and your investors took an absurd risk, they'd expect at least 1000x on their money.

Re: SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

#20

Post by danenania »

jackowayed wrote: post #19
russell_h wrote: post #10

Searching for aliens seems like the ultimate high risk/high reward investment opportunity. If someone secretly made contact with an advanced extraterrestrial civilization the potential for profit would be huge. On the other hand, good luck executing on that.

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.
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