
Astronomers want public funds for intelligent life search - aluket
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-51223704
======
valgor
I think some commenters are forgetting how science is done. Just because you
are researching X does not mean your only output is X. An investment into SETI
is an investment in science and technology. All the arguments on this forum
about why we should not allocate funds to SETI can be used in the same manner
for why we should not investment in pure mathematics or any other potentially
"useless" human endeavor. SETI researchers will come up with novel ways to
solve their problems and invent new technologies along the way, the same as
every other branch of science and engineering. It's how we got SETI@home and
now boinc is used for lots of problems like protein folding (1).

Plus, for those of us that have read Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu (2), we
understand that SETI research is the biggest gamble in scientific research.
High risk with the highest reward. What could fundamentally change humanity
more than definitively finding intelligent life out there?

Lastly, some commenters need to go read Carl Sagan's Contact. He goes over all
of this nay-saying!

[1] [https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/](https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/)
[2] [https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-
Liu/dp/07653...](https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-
Liu/dp/0765382032/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3CG8PHFJR8N2Q&keywords=three+body+problem&qid=1581770260&sprefix=three+body+%2Caps%2C156&sr=8-1)

~~~
abdullahkhalids
Fundamental physics or esoteric math are funded for several reasons, one of
which is that they engender humbleness in society. These fields are among the
most intellectually demanding of all, and by trying to do these difficult
things, what we should learn as a society is that we are not done and we don't
know it all, and can't do it all.

SETI particularly has this extra humbleness benefit, because it reminds us as
a society that the journey that began from earth at the center of the
universe, and is currently halted at, humans are unique in this universe, is
not over. If we stop doing SETI, as a society, our egos will flare. If don't
stop, we will forever be in the shadows of possible alien intelligences who
could be far more intellectually advanced than us.

By doing SETI, we also are reminded that our science, and our viewpoint of the
world is from a very human point of view, a very limited view, that could bear
expanding.

~~~
mattkrause
> Fundamental physics or esoteric math are ... most intellectually demanding
> of all

Trying to rank the sciences by "hardness" is silly and counterproductive.

Biology gets blown off as "stamp collecting", but it turns out to be
frightfully hard in its own way. Look at this "map" of biochemical pathways
from Roche: [http://biochemical-pathways.com/#/map/1](http://biochemical-
pathways.com/#/map/1) It's a stupendously complicated dynamical system! This
is just part of it, and measuring each arrow requires clever ideas and a
heroic amount of work. Imagine how tricky psychology, which deals with the
aggregate result of _billions_ of these systems in the body and brain, must be
--and the poor sociologists!

~~~
Nasrudith
Hardness is useful bur in English is a misleading synonym. Hard science is
more quantitative and has more rigor in terms of hard proof and mathematical
models and less room for fuzziness.

"Soft" science is fuzzier with more qualitative elements. It doesn't
necessarily mean less difficult.

Another distinction is that the level of tools limits things. Say studying
color before and after the ability to analyze wavelengths.

~~~
mattkrause
Can you explain the usefulness?

From my perspective, it's a term, coined by a 19th century philosopher, that
gets dragged out by people with physics envy.

Modern biology, for example, is incredibly quantitative: molecular biologists
collect massive genomics datasets, neuroscientists record from hundreds of
sites in the brain, and ecologists, whom everyone thinks of as flannel-clad
outdoorsmen, fit sophisticated statistical models. Psychology is getting there
too, especially if you're willing to lump in related industries like
advertising: Google and Facebook have _massive_ datasets on people's
activities and preferences.

It's true that these fields have had less success with mathematical modeling,
but you also have to look at the sheer number of interacting variables vs the
~10 terms in Maxwell's equations. It's possible that the underlying phenomena
might often just be irreducibly complex, as this perspective argues:
(preprint:
[https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/764258v3](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/764258v3)
and was just published in Neuron).

------
cletus
I used to be a big fan of SETI but I've come around to thinking it's probably
a complete waste of time.

This will probably get dismissed as "optimistic futurism" but I find the
argument compelling that the future of any civilization is a Dyson Swarm for
many reasons such as:

\- Planets are inefficient uses of mass to create living area. IIRC 1% of the
mass of Mercury could make enough living area from habitats to house at least
a million times as many people as we have now.

\- Gravity is a tyrant. Spinning a habitat achieves much the same thing
without the negatives (as in the cost of launch).

\- This is entirely feasible on solar power alone. The importance of this is
that practical fusion power is not a prerequisite.

\- This requires no new science. It's largely an engineering problem (albeit a
significant one).

I deliberately use the term "Swarm" here not "Sphere", which is true to the
original concept. "Sphere" suggests this is a solid shell. That was never the
intent. No known or theorized material could support a solid shell around the
Sun.

If you accept this premise then it's about the most un-subtle thing you could
do and should be easily detectable millions of light years away in the IR
spectrum. Why? Simple:

\- Stars generate heat

\- If the habitats hit by the energy from the star will heat up

\- In space you can only radiate heat away

\- If you don't remove that heat you'll ultimately fry

\- The wavelength from radiating heat is determined by the temperature of that
object

The standard counter to this is:

Q: What if you recycle the heat instead?

A: You can improve the efficiency but you can never perfectly consume all that
heat. To do so would be to violate thermodynamics. If that's possible, well
then all bets are off.

A thousand years ago we were stabbing each others with swords. In a thousand
years the above scenario is far from overly optimistic (IMHO). So in a cosmic
blink of an eye we go from undetectable (from a SETI perspective) to being
detectable from tens or hundreds of millions of light years away.

So that's why I think SETI is pointless.

Some say "you never know what fruit science will bear". While true, taken
further this means it doesn't matter what science you invest in so why is SETI
special?

~~~
mhh__
What do you actually think the IR spectrum would look like given that it would
still be very close to a star that could potentially already saturate the
measurement?

~~~
cletus
So the telltale sign is a significant IR source with little to no visible
light. Assuming the star is sufficiently encompassed by the swarm then it's
still outputting energy, the swarm heats up and it needs to radiate that heat
away. So a stellar level IR source that isn't visible is pretty weird.

And if you wonder if the Swarm uses all the light such that little escapes,
that's the whole point. Think of it like a fog. A fog can block light with a
sufficiently large number of tiny water droplets but it isn't strictly
"solid".

------
DrNuke
As usual, public resources are limited, so any lobby really needs to step up
their game or participate in politics actively, win elections and divert some
funds from elsewhere... another way is asking a patron, you have Musk, Gates,
Bezos, Zuck & Cook for a cap in hand chat... the third way is to make military
believe they would have some sort of unassailable advantage, which in this
case may be pitched in the form of Mr Octopus from deeeeep space
telepathically sending them the secret of the ultimate weapon, a bit like The
Mezga Family animated series from Hungary, fifty years ago.

------
badrabbit
How does this benefit the public in the foreseeable future? Why should the
public fund it? Why not stick to private funding? Look at SpaceX, there are
plenty of rich people and them aside, people interested in this subject should
contribute.

I know this is an unpopular view here but I just don't get why the public has
to fund this using tax dollars. We all have views on what tax money should be
spent on but can we not agree that the public should benefit from it with some
guarantee of success.even if they succeed there is no guarantee it will
benefit anyone. scifi aside, known physics does not permit anything to travel
to our solar system faster than a few million years. Maybe aliens left some
useful information in a format humans can somehow decode, is this very very
small chance of succeess worth considering the pursuit beneficial to the
public?

There are many very urgent things that need funding. Even wild ideals like
universal basic income or a CO2 cleaning factory can be useful to the public
in the foreseeable future. I get that this will not neccesarily take away from
other projects,but heck, I would rather see it go to pay off 0.0001% of
national debt than this. People can donate,billionaires exist.

------
tgflynn
There's one simple metric for SETI progress that I would like to see and have
always had trouble finding.

What is the radius within which SETI can exclude the existence of a
civilization currently using Earth-like electromagnetic communications
technology and how many star systems are believed to lie within that radius ?
How will proposed SETI efforts expand that radius ?

I think this is kind of a key metric that could tell us a lot about how
widespread technological civilizations might be in the galaxy.

~~~
Dominisi
The issue with using general "Earth-like electromagnetic communications
technology" is the inverse square law.

Our own communications aren't distinguishable from the cosmic background
radiation even at our closest neighbor.

The only way we would find something is if they pointed a VERY powerful noise
source directly at us, or us at them. And even then, we are looking at maybe a
100 lightyear bubble (~600 main sequence stars).

~~~
tgflynn
> The only way we would find something is if they pointed a VERY powerful
> noise source directly at us, or us at them.

Do you mean we could detect ordinary technological EM radiation if we pointed
a sufficiently high-gain antenna at the transmitting planet ?

Otherwise if SETI assumes someone is sending an interstellar signal on
purpose, I would question its value, because there's no strong reason to think
anyone is doing that. I realize we did it once, but an argument can be made
(and has been) that it was a fairly stupid thing to do.

------
timwaagh
It really sounds like a good hobby project for a very rich person.

~~~
mongol
Indeed. Tax payer money should be used carefully.

------
kilroy123
I often imagine there is something like "subspace" or faster-than-light
communication, and species across our galaxy are a bunch of chatterboxes
chatting away.

The only problem is we don't know how to tune in to join the conversation.

I still think we should keep trying to find them, though.

~~~
Razengan
> _I often imagine there is something like "subspace" or faster-than-light
> communication, and species across our galaxy are a bunch of chatterboxes
> chatting away._

I like to imagine, for the science fiction that I might write, a hypothetical
phenomenon that allows instantaneous communication between two points
(objects/particles/portals) _but only after_ they have been "synced" or
"bound" with each other, which must be done during physical contact.

So, you might construct two such "hyperspace modems", bind them with each
other, then incur the initial cost of physically transporting one of them to
another star system however many light years away, which may take years or
decades but once it's there, communication between the two points would be
instantaneous.

~~~
lovemenot
That's interesting. You could call your story Spooky Action. The Spooky
channel need not be used exclusively by so-called advanced civilisations. In
fact there are species on Earth now that are known to interact in
evolutionarily useful ways with quantum effects. Of course, if Spooky is just
entanglement the modem would be destroyed upon a single use. However, there
could be an effectively unlimited supply of them occurring naturally.

This feels more feasible than SETI's hypothesis. Space was much smaller and
was probably at just the right temperature to support life at a very early
stage of the Universe.

------
aSplash0fDerp
I crunched for years on seti@home at the turn of the century and have always
been a fan of the project.

It makes sense to increased research funding now that they have a long list of
newly discovered planets to target, but what other scientific endeavors do
they retire to open up any meaningful government funding?

With trillion dollar deficits in the forecast, earmarking new money does not
sound like an easy task to achieve.

~~~
ianai
Ok so I’m calling bluff on the trillion dollar deficits hyperbole. This is a
cudgel argument used without any deep exposition against $subjectiveBadIdea.

We live in a financial world where banks magic up funds all the time and
nobody bats an eye, but governments can’t do it for projects?

Further, imagine trying to calculate the added GDP for all of a nations
infrastructure over the years its existed and been in use for free or near
free. Yes, there are taxes levied in fuel transactions, but clearly that’s not
the entire value added.

Edit-Deficit hawks are really arguing against deficits in the secret search
for forcing the economy to be zero-sum and punitive. Governments job is to
create and reinforce property rights, amongst other things. They do that by
creating a resource allocation system - thankfully capitalistic for the most
part. Capitalism only exists at this scale with currency - that only the
government authenticates. Etc etc. The governments debt is a reflection and
indicator of the value its left in the market. Back to nap time.

~~~
aSplash0fDerp
Well, sans magic wand, I guess they could try to sell Alien Scout Cookies to
try to fund the SETI field.

You could probably sum up much of your statement as self-sabotage, since that
seems like all the rage nowadays (politically and monetarily speaking).

------
Nasrudith
Reminds me of the one theory that SETI was largely cover for signals
intelligence spying in the cold war.

Personally I suspect that while we may discover interesting details of radio-
astronomy but I highly doubt we will discover anything of worth related to
alien life through it.

------
Razengan
We have _already_ found alien species.

 _Right here_ on this very same planet:

Dinosaurs.

We would have never even known about their existence if we had not chanced
upon their remains.

So it's not just the vast distances of space that separates species from each
other, it's also incomprehensible stretches of _time._

Just from the amount of variables involved and their ranges (the number of
planets, the extreme environments in which we have already observed life),
it's obvious that we are not alone.

BUT we may never meet anyone.

Just like how there's billions of people on Earth but millions die alone, to
use a topical metaphor given Valentine's Day. :)

~~~
gus_massa
Dinosaurs are just beakless ducks. If you want to blow your mind, take a look
at
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ediacaran_biota](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ediacaran_biota)

~~~
Razengan
Those are really interesting!

The point was that even if we could physically visit planets or reach them
with communications, we would have to do it in the right time bracket. Any
life (of interest) on them may have long since passed on, or not capable of
interaction yet.

Mars may have once had life, and we may never know of it.

------
LatteLazy
As long as no one tries to contact anyone, why not.

~~~
koheripbal
SETI has demonstrated that no one is beaming a signal right at us.

There might be a reason for that, other than them simple not existing.

~~~
LatteLazy
Exactly. Welcome to the dark forest.

------
imvetri
Appreciate lives on Earth.

------
onetimemanytime
I'm all for it. Poverty and inequality will "never" be solved and a tiny
fraction of our GDP going to this, will not be be felt. On the other hand, it
may change our life, maybe even short term...money on research can bring
results.

~~~
chr1
While i agree that shooting down any research with "think about poverty" is a
bad argument, I think there are still much more important ways to spend money
than this: anti-aging drugs developed by sens.org, gene drive to kill
mosquitos, any technologies to build colony on mars etc . This is why it is
important to have many people deciding for themselves on what to spend their
money. If there are enough people who are interested in finding aliens they
can redirect their part of GDP, but there should be a way for others to not be
forced to spend their tax money on it.

~~~
drjesusphd
The government has been in the business of basic research since science was a
thing. Funding from taxes is a more fundamental component of the scientific
process than peer review (a more recent development).

------
hhas01
Eh, before we go looking for intelligent life up there, how about finding some
down here first?

------
Revolutionisto
Apparently what seems to be alien life was already observed on Earth a few
years back. We just needed sufficiently good radar to see through their
cloaking veils in the visible light spectrum. Cool hint as to what’s possible
with technology and the laws of physics! As documented in the NY Times:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-
flying-object-navy.amp.html)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-
sightings...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings-
navy-pilots.amp.html)

~~~
BiteCode_dev
While I'm excited by such news, let's not jump from "things we don't
understand" to "god/magic/aliens".

For now, it's "cool event we don't know how to explain". Good enough. Life is
full of that and if we try to force label on it, we miss the fun of figuring
out what's going on seriously.

~~~
Revolutionisto
I certainly can’t explain exactly what it is. However, a few facts stand out:

1\. Detected object moves erratically at high speeds, with exceptionally high
acceleration. Controlled translational and angular acceleration of the object
occur in the footage.

2\. Navy pilots in both encounters reported that the object was not visible at
close range but only showed up on radar, in particular only on radar that was
recently updated from a version released in the 1980s.

3\. Testimonies were confirmed by multiple independent pilots, cleared by the
U.S. Navy, and pilots were deemed to be mentally fit as they were later
deployed to active duty in the Middle East.

Those are just facts from the case. Feel free to draw your own hypotheses or
conclusions. I certainly had fun doing so. :)

~~~
BiteCode_dev
Such a line of thoughs lead to people attributing thunder to zeus thousands a
year ago.

It's not bad to say "we don't know".

------
lovemenot
It always feels to me like so much hubris. Humans are unique on this planet,
(we humans have determined it so), by virtue of our so-called intelligence.
Not only does this intelligence make us unique on this planet, but the nature
of that uniqueness is itself unique across the galaxy and beyond. Intelligence
is the thing worthy of discovery.

So we go actively looking for other living species which exhibit that precise
characteristic which we admire so much in ourselves. Using catch-phrases like
"are we alone?" \- Guys, take a look around you. Just observing the millions
of bacteria on your hand should suffice to answer that question in the
negative.

But apparently, we knew that as a species we are not actually alone. Yet we
felt lonely because nobody else here matches up to our self-serving criteria
of significance; intelligence.

So within a few decades of having as a species learned how to control radio
waves ourselves, Frank Drake comes up with the idea that of course any species
worthy of our interest would be controlling radio waves too.

Perhaps this characterisation is too harsh. But the alternative is surely that
we are just looking under the lamp-post for our keys, because that's where the
light is. We want to find extraterrestrial life. Very good, fully approve. But
there's no realistic way to do this outside of the solar system. So we make
some preposterous assumptions and hope to get funding based solely on human
vanity.

~~~
majos
I’m confused. Seems natural for us to look for intelligent signals from space,
since unintelligent life is not going to put together the machinery to send
interstellar messages.

How do you think we should be searching? It’s fine to say we’re not looking
for the right thing, but do you have an alternative?

------
rs23296008n1
The US hasn't even stabilised its environment, healthcare and any number of
other important areas of basic human needs. Money for finding extra-
terrestrial life would be better spent on earth fixing the mess.

Or use it to get us to mars. At least that fits with a "plan B" since humans
existing "only on earth" is still a bad idea. Same goes for moon exploration /
asteroid mining. Good ideas. Raw resources shouldn't be so rare as they
currently are.

But sending a message to aliens? We've already done this. For decades. More
than a century. Ever since we started transmitting Tv/radio.

They either know we're here or they will. Or we're off limits. Or we're too
far away. Or we're too scary. "They live in _what kind of atmosphere_?"

~~~
koheripbal
If this were the bar for doing pure research, we'd never do any pure research
ever.

The average quality of life in the US has never been higher.

~~~
rs23296008n1
I'm not convinced looking for aliens is basic research. Its more like applied
science.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_research](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_research)

Life expectancy for the US is dropping. Multiple modern issues of
maladjustment are likely causes. Spending searching-for-aliens money on
schools, education etc instead would be actually beneficial. Schools have
active shooter drills now. That is NOT an indicator of increasing quality of
life. [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/09/us-life-expectancy-has-
been-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/09/us-life-expectancy-has-been-
declining-heres-why.html)

Plenty of cracks in society. Pure research might actually help. We actually
know far less about nutrition than we could - thats just one example.

We're much better off going to the moon, mining asteroids and living in space
rather than searching for aliens. Plenty of the tech, knowledge and experience
from even attempting to live in space has already had tangible benefits for
those on earth.

------
rosybox
I don't know why taxpayers should have to pay for the search for E.T.. That's
a hard sell. Probably not what the founders had in mind when they gave the
government the power to take money out of the pockets of the country's
citizenry. I'm all for the social contract, investing in infrastructure, and
making sure everyone has affordable housing and medicine, but this is a tough
fucking sell. Get some rich scifi enthusiast to fund a grant. Some people just
see the country's coffers as a free for all for any crazy idea. That money
belongs to the public it came from and should be used to the benefit of its
people with utmost seriousness it deserves. What the government can spend its
money on is a zero-sum gane and any dollars we can invest into kids getting
better meals or finding a biomarker for detecting ALS would be better spent
than figuring out if UFOs are real.

~~~
pmoriarty
You know what's a tragic waste for me? Most of the US military budget, its
spending on the War on Drugs, its tax cuts to billionaires and corporate
welfare.

Let's cut those in half and talk again about SETI, which I would be happy to
fund a hundred times over if it meant less killing, fewer unjust
incarcerations for victimless crimes, more economic equality, and less
concentration of money and power in the hands of the elites.

~~~
Mirioron
I think it isn't so easy to say that what the US military does is a waste of
your money. A lot of US foreign policy is about "free trade" that's beneficial
to the US. If you were to cut off the US military then you'd likely have
consequences for global trade. Perhaps you're right that it's a waste of your
money, but I think that this is not at all a straightforward conclusion.

Eg imagine if Iran just decided to stop oil shipments through the Strait of
Hormuz with their military. How would you deal with this without a sizable
military yourself?

Edit: or imagine that some country decides that they don't like goods related
to the US going through Panama so they decide to occupy it. It's not US
territory, but the loss of that will harm the US economy.

~~~
timwaagh
The Iranian navy is mostly famous for its usage of rubber dinghies. That's not
a serious threat that needs 10 supercarriers to counter. If they decided to
change that, then no problem, nobody wants the strait blocked so it will be
easy to find allies to pressure the iranians into a deal. The panama canal
doesn't need that either. It should be in range of US based aircraft. Current
US spending can only be justified by pursuing multiyear wars, occupation of
territory halfway around the world, complete domination of the seas, the
ability to fight a war on two fronts (and win), the ability to obliterate
earth ten times over and guarding others borders (thanks, by the way). I'd say
a military the size of spain's would be sufficient given a more basic
definition of security needs.

~~~
anewhope
It’s not clear the force size you suggest would result in a stable
equilibrium. You’re missing one key justification: the ability to dissuade
future military competition. A defense force the size of Spain’s would face
substantially more threats given the value of US targets and interests, so
we’d then need to increase spending. It’s hard to predict what that world
would look like. In the past it wasn’t great. Outspending everybody else from
the get-go works.

