SETI Institute to shut down alien-seeking radio dishes
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Good Lord. Let me put this in English. If you use the dishes for one thing, even if five minutes a day, you can't use them for another at the same time. If you spend the money on SETI, that's money and effort you can't spend on something else. It's basic economics.
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Poxy website! :mad: When I clicked on the picture of the dishes, it resized my browser down to fit the picture (which was no bigger than what I clicked on to get a closer look). I just assumed this was a popup and closed down my browser, loosing my other open tabs! :mad:
Pete
Why is that a problem? IE 8 remmebers your tabs :-D
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Some very rough arithmetics: 3 cent / income tax payer (article), plus "63 millions is 44% of all tax payers (here[^]) takes me to roughly 4 million dollars / year. That's miniscule compared to e.g. a $13 billion tax writeoff for BP[^] for bringing oil to american shores - literally. Which is completely unrelated, and still miniscule compared to the big fishes in the US pond[^]: wars, social security and health care, which add up to a whopping 2 quadrillion dollars. The yearly cost of the seti project is 0.0025% of theinterest payments for national debt. Sorry for getting all political on you, but even cutting one thousand of these programs will fix nothing. Of course, spending that money directly on e.g. education would fund about 300 pupils[^]. But with the allocation as is, that's... rather unlikely.
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| FoldWithUs! | sighist | WhoIncludes - Analyzing C++ include file hierarchypeterchen wrote:
but even cutting one thousand of these programs will fix nothing.
Doesn't make it any less of a waste of money and effort. (Do note that I'm not the original poster; I didn't advocate spending the money on education, I just said it was like flushing money down the toilet. For the record, I'm all for getting rid of all corporate subsidies and bailing on the wars. That said, I despise the attitude that an expenditure is so small that it doesn't matter. In my personal life, I've found that reducing all those small expenditures soon adds up to real money. In addition, many of these seemingly small government expenditures have quite a bit of hidden costs. Even the smallest department has space requirements, payroll, benefits processing and so forth. Worse, they are the source of funding mischief by politicians. Besides the obvious of sending funding to friends, there is the quid pro quo deal making which causes a cascading effect.)
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Isn't that just the Allen Array, rather that SETI as a whole? They only (IIRC) managed to get a few of the planned 450ish up and running - as I read that, they're saying only that they can't do any more, and that they can't keep the few they've already got up and running.... Doesn't most of their data come from Arecibo anyway?
C# has already designed away most of the tedium of C++.
RichardGrimmer wrote:
Doesn't most of their data come from Arecibo anyway?
Nope. Most of their data comes from vibrating hydrogen molecules. ;) Had a sergeant named Donnie (Donald?) Grimmer.... Relative?
The enemy of my enemy of my enemy of my enemy is Kevin Bacon. My Mu[sic] My Films My Windows Programs, etc.
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No, there isn't. Besides, flushing money down the toilet isn't a wise use of it. And SETI is the epitome of flushing money down the toilet.
Of course there is. In the UK the government wrote off more tax that was owed by Vodafone than SETI spends. It's not the amount of money that is lacking, it's the distribution which is wrong.
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Of course there is. In the UK the government wrote off more tax that was owed by Vodafone than SETI spends. It's not the amount of money that is lacking, it's the distribution which is wrong.
viaducting wrote:
It's not the amount of money that is lacking, it's the distribution which is wrong
Do you honestly belief that or do the words debt and deficit mean anything to you? Yes, the distribution is wrong, but so is spending so much money in the first place. (See my above note that even the smallest expenditures cost a lot more than their budgetary amounts. There are hidden costs, overhead and quid pro quo costs. Believe it or not there are politicians who will vote for huge expenditures as long as their tiny pet project is funded [sarcasm smile] )
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RichardGrimmer wrote:
Doesn't most of their data come from Arecibo anyway?
That was my impression... I think this is just the Alien Array losing their funding.
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in?
Author of the Guardians Saga (Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels) -
peterchen wrote:
but even cutting one thousand of these programs will fix nothing.
Doesn't make it any less of a waste of money and effort. (Do note that I'm not the original poster; I didn't advocate spending the money on education, I just said it was like flushing money down the toilet. For the record, I'm all for getting rid of all corporate subsidies and bailing on the wars. That said, I despise the attitude that an expenditure is so small that it doesn't matter. In my personal life, I've found that reducing all those small expenditures soon adds up to real money. In addition, many of these seemingly small government expenditures have quite a bit of hidden costs. Even the smallest department has space requirements, payroll, benefits processing and so forth. Worse, they are the source of funding mischief by politicians. Besides the obvious of sending funding to friends, there is the quid pro quo deal making which causes a cascading effect.)
Agree: It's most likely money down the drain, and there are added costs, and this stuff sums up. There are better uses for that money. Disagreee: "We don't have that money" - "We" might not have money, but it's not that money that is missing. Corruption being a major problem - you have that with large and small, every war you (or we) fight is funding of private companies with public money. Scales with total cost, roughly, so *shrug*. In addition: I believe if we have the money, why not put a little bit into "crazy ideas"? It's just money, after all.
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It was a waste of time anyway.
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viaducting wrote:
It's not the amount of money that is lacking, it's the distribution which is wrong
Do you honestly belief that or do the words debt and deficit mean anything to you? Yes, the distribution is wrong, but so is spending so much money in the first place. (See my above note that even the smallest expenditures cost a lot more than their budgetary amounts. There are hidden costs, overhead and quid pro quo costs. Believe it or not there are politicians who will vote for huge expenditures as long as their tiny pet project is funded [sarcasm smile] )
So you would rather allow corporations to get away with massive tax evasion but cut a small and harmless expenditure on SETI, which, if it showed that there was other intelligent life in the universe, would produce the most mind-blowing scientific discovery in human history?
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ChrisElston wrote:
Hello darkness my old friend.
Gah! Song stuck in head... Now I want to put on Watchmen again... (Yes, I know the song is much older, but that's where I know it from)
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in?
Author of the Guardians Saga (Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels) -
So you would rather allow corporations to get away with massive tax evasion but cut a small and harmless expenditure on SETI, which, if it showed that there was other intelligent life in the universe, would produce the most mind-blowing scientific discovery in human history?
You are making a falacious argument. Apparently you would rather do SETI than feed and clothe children. See how dumb that argument is?
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There is no death! the stars go down To rise upon some other shore, And bright in Heaven's jeweled crown, They shine for ever more. John McCreery (1835-1906) American Journalist
Sincerely Yours, Brian Hart
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There is no death! the stars go down To rise upon some other shore, And bright in Heaven's jeweled crown, They shine for ever more. John McCreery (1835-1906) American Journalist
Sincerely Yours, Brian Hart
Brian C. Hart, Ph.D. wrote:
There is no death! the stars go down
To rise upon some other shore,
And bright in Heaven's jeweled crown,
They shine for ever more.I thought more of this -
The eyes are not here There are no eyes here In this valley of dying stars In this hollow valley This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms In this last of meeting places We grope together And avoid speech Gathered on this beach of the tumid river Sightless, unless The eyes reappear As the perpetual star Multifoliate rose Of death's twilight kingdom The hope only Of empty men.T.S. Eliot - "The Hollow Men" -
If you think its such a shame, go donate $5-10.. I just did. For the first time in history, they're searching star systems that are known to have planets, and will be focusing on those that are known to have planets that could support liquid water. Couple that with the recent research on how easy it is to synthesize at least some of the RNA building blocks under pre-life terrestial conditions, and those extraterrestrial planets with liquid water become increasingly likely places for life to have started. It'd be a shame not to at least look at them. Leaving the decision of whether SETI should go do that search to politicians seems unwise. After all, why should some politician care if we find a bunch of aliens, its not like we'll have discovered new reelection campaign donors or anything. :)
patbob
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So without SETI, the only way we'll find out there are advanced aliens out there is when they land here on Earth to enslave all of mankind? :~ Bummer.
My other signature is witty and insightful.
