
SETI Institute suspends search for aliens - sage_joch
http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_17926565
======
worldvoyageur
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 year to run it?

If nothing else, something is seriously wrong if donors that ponied up $50
million to build the Ferrari no longer want to shell out $2.5 million run it.

The quote: "if everybody contributed just 3 extra cents on their 1040 tax
forms, we could find out if we have cosmic company." suggests that the
organization is focused on government funding, rather than individual donors -
and continues this focus even after an evident failure of that model to keep
things running. Meeting the needs of government funders and meeting the needs
of donors are entirely different things. In my experience, you can have one or
the other, but not both.

They should step back and rethink how they can make their non-profit work
primarily based on voluntary donations. The world is full of non-profits that
manage it with budgets much larger than the $2.5 million/year SETI appears to
need.

Link to send SETI money: <http://www.seti.org/page.aspx?pid=1468>

~~~
xnerdr
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.

~~~
arethuza
Actually quite a lot of research has no apparent practical payoff - it's still
worth doing though.

Edit: Or the results of the research can be completely serendipitous products
that are only tenuously related to the original research - my favorite example
of this being the best known product of high energy physics research.

------
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.

~~~
T-hawk
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 large organization, self-preservation and
expansion inevitably crowd out the organization's ostensible purpose. SETI's
primary purpose is not to find extraterrestrial intelligence. SETI's primary
purpose is to ensure the continued existence of and wages paid to SETI.
Actually finding the aliens is a secondary goal.

(I am not ragging on SETI in particular here, that happens for every
bureaucracy. The primary purpose of NASA is to get NASA and its contractors
hired and paid, not to explore space. The primary purpose of TSA is to get TSA
workers hired and paid, not to secure airways. The primary purpose of unions
in education is to get themselves hired and paid, not to educate. These
organizations do accomplish their stated goals to some and varying degrees of
success, but never at any cost of imperiling their own demesne.)

~~~
mrleinad
_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.

~~~
hackerblues
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.

~~~
mrleinad
There's a _huge_ difference between saying "ensure financial survival" and
"their primary purpose is to get paid".

One puts money above everything. The other considers it a mean for a higher
purpose.

Can you tell the difference?

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bfe
The beginning of the article is incorrect in identifying the Allen Array as
the array in the film "Contact". That was the Very Large Array.

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MichaelApproved
_"There is a huge irony," said SETI Director Jill Tartar, "that a time when we
discover so many planets to look at, we don't have the operating funds to
listen."_

That sounds more unfortunate than ironic. It would be ironic if funding went
directly from SETI to the satellite which found the planets.

------
barisme
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 speaking English, not Russian (only program capable
now of delivering astronauts to ISS) or Chinese. So don't mourn the loss of
SETI funding. Celebrate when you find out that it's going to something more
productive.

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

~~~
barisme
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.

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kordless
This seems like massive mis-management of money. Paul Allen contributed $50M
to build the array. Whoever was managing that project should have thought
about sticking back 30% or so for running it after it got built. Didn't have
enough to build all the scopes? Build a few at a time.

Presumably this is what happens when you don't have clear goals and objectives
laid out - and oversight to make sure you don't screw it up.

Pretty sad. They should be asking for new leadership and $20M to run it for 10
years.

~~~
adestefan
With donations you don't always get to allocate money in the most appropriate
manner. The $50M could have been directed for construction only or it might
have had a fixed split attached (e.g. 75% construction, 25% maintenance).

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stevenj
This needs to be crowd-sourced.

Surely there are 5 million people who'd be willing to donate a dollar each for
this.

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

~~~
barisme
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.

~~~
demallien
Discovering another instance of intelligent life would be one of the most
profound transformational experiences that we could have as a species. I would
think that there would be more than one billionaire out there that would like
their name to be associated with such a discovery.

~~~
thaumaturgy
I'm rather bullish on matters of space exploration, but I'm pretty skeptical
about just how profoundly transformational a SETI discovery would be. If there
were such a discovery, it would be beset by difficult-to-imagine communication
challenges, not the least of which is a years- or decades-long delay between
sending a signal and receiving any response.

There have also been some cogent arguments that it might be in the best
interests of our own self-preservation to not broadcast our presence, for now,
just because we are still technologically primitive. Being loud represents a
big wager that anything else within hearing distance is friendly.

I'm mostly disappointed at this announcement because it is part of a trend in
dwindling government support for exploration.

~~~
metageek
We're _already_ being loud. We've been leaking radio transmissions into space
for the past century.

~~~
steve19
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.

~~~
khafra
The mind-blowingly relevant picture: [http://proto-
knowledge.blogspot.com/2011/02/human-radio-bubb...](http://proto-
knowledge.blogspot.com/2011/02/human-radio-bubble-in-milky-way.html)

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 than the lifetime of our species.

~~~
barisme
Yes. Why do people assume you can just make a phone call to Andromeda? 'Ya, hi
ET, what's new?' If Andromeda disappeared into a black hole 1 million years
ago, we wouldn't even know yet. We have to wait 2.5 million years for news
from Andromeda, assuming the news can't transcend the speed of light.

------
russell_h
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.

~~~
jackowayed
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.

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

~~~
sliverstorm
Yes, this is possible. I'd argue though that if 2 instances of life exist
(them and us), n instances must exist, (and thus some must use radio waves)
because it clearly demonstrates humanity wasn't a freak septillion-to-one
occurrence that shouldn't have happened.

~~~
danenania
Interesting point, but given the amount of randomness involved in evolution,
the physical complexity of cognition, and the timescales involved, is it
possible that even given massive numbers of cognitively advanced species in
the universe, each could have such a fundamentally distinct ontological
relationship to reality and model of the physical universe that even a concept
as seemingly scientifically basic as a 'radio wave' would be unique to us?

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erik_p
this sounds like it has the potential for the largest kickstarter funded
project to date!

------
ck2
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?

~~~
prawn
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?

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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.

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mcorrientes
I feel really sorry about it and I hope they'll make it.

Maybe they should consider writing more appreciated applications.

They could write more applications which involve people for the AI search.

I don't know what could reduce time to find AI, but I would bet SETI could get
many volunteers if they just would provide a social network application (e.g.
facebook).

There must be more than just calculation distribution.

------
arecibodrake
Does anyone have any insight as to how they justify 2.5 million dollars per
year in operating expenses?

------
growt
Some TV-Channel on alpha centauri just lost a viewer. Or maybe not, since we
didn't find the channel yet.

------
suprafly
They should 'open-source' this project.

------
urbanjunkie
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
there - because for any civilisation that's even slightly more advanced than
us (for galactic values of slightly), the effort to make a noticeable impact
on galaxy is reasonably trivial.

~~~
thangalin
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/>

~~~
gwern
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.

~~~
thangalin
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
-- 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.

~~~
gwern
> 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.

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?

------
ignifero
My worst fear comes alive, people; they walk among us, suspending our search
projects.

~~~
tsycho
The second foundation is here!

------
HelloBeautiful
Seth Shostak's podcast - <http://radio.seti.org/> . Highly recommended ;-)

