SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_17926565

by sage_joch • 15 years ago

240 100 15 years ago

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

d4nt• 15 years ago

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.

xnerdr2• 15 years ago

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.

robryan• 15 years ago

Sure with that kind of short term thinking we will never get anywhere. It is far to early to call the investment a failure, in relative timescales it would be like calling a new school a failure because it had a bad first day.

arethuza• 15 years ago

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.

DavidChouinard• 15 years ago

The lack of results is an important result in of itself.

nopassrecover• 15 years ago

Though this could be said for nearly all research until it is complete.

patio11• 15 years ago

SETI doesn't sell search for life, SETI sells "I have donated money to SETI." After you understand this, it is the Rosetta Stone for non-profit fundraising. (And the enduring support for the space program among geeks, which is non-profit spending using other people's money that actually funds military hardware R&D.)

There are many people who buy Ferraris to be the kind of person that buys Ferraris, rather than to drive. Seriously, there are like magazines you can buy so you can aspire to one day not driving a Ferrari.

noibl• 15 years ago

  > 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

It also suggests that the problem of finding intelligent life is basically a financial one.

s/we could/there is a very slim chance that &/

watchandwait• 15 years ago

Or, we could take the cost of one day of our Libyan Kinetic Military Action ($100 million) and fund this program for a generation.

stevenj• 15 years ago

This needs to be crowd-sourced.

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

huhtenberg• 15 years ago

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

rhizome• 15 years ago

Seems like more of a Paul Allen thing to me.

barisme6• 15 years ago

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.

nolite• 15 years ago

or maybe a Google

Bud3• 15 years ago

Given that so many have already helped with SETI@Home and used far more of their resources than $1, I'd say that's definitely true.

For instance, back in the 1990's, I had a NeXT, a couple Apollos, an SGI Challenge, and a few Macs cranking away on SETI@Home blocks, some of those machines running 24/7.

wmf• 15 years ago

Aha, clearly the solution is to release a new version of SETI@home that mines Bitcoins and donates them to SETI.

gammarator2• 15 years ago

That's what the SETI Institute thought: private fundraising was intended to support the telescope. But they had a massive shortfall relative to their expected donations.

Edit: just read the letter to donors; looks like the near-term problem was cuts by the state of California to the UC Berkeley budget.

urbanjunkie• 15 years ago

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.

barisme6• 15 years ago

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. ;)

iwwr2• 15 years ago

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.

wladimir• 15 years ago

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.

khafra2• 15 years ago

Assuming such beings work on the same physics we do, they need massive amounts of energy to run a galactic civilization; and they have the same sources available that we do: Stars; and for extra credit black holes.

Putting a dyson sphere around a star changes its energy output, shifting it far into the infrared. Putting a matrioshka brain around a star is even more dramatic a change--but it still has the same gravitational effect on other stars. But no, unfortunately that doesn't explain the effects of "dark matter."

thangalin2• 15 years ago

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/

dkersten2• 15 years ago

Exactly, using that computing power for folding@home would have been much more beneficial, IMHO.

michaelcampbell• 15 years ago

I have multi multi-core machines, so I run seti@home as well as a (much larger timeshare of) rosetta@home. I agree that disease research has a much more probable impact, but the implications of a successful SETI search are not trivial either.

I also run Einstein@home, and world community grid.

gwern2• 15 years ago

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.

cpeterso• 15 years ago

World Community Grid, sponsored by IBM, uses BOINC to distribute a variety of humanitarian number crunching projects, not just protein folding:

https://secure.worldcommunitygrid.org/

barisme6• 15 years ago

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.

sliverstorm3• 15 years ago

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

barisme6• 15 years ago

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.

ck2• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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?

russell_h• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

danenania3• 15 years ago

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

sliverstorm3• 15 years ago

your investors took an absurd risk

If there's life out there, we'll probably find it eventually.

Considering life is a binary condition (there or not there) and we haven't found anything to strongly indicate the odds of life existing elsewhere are very small, I certainly wouldn't call the odds of finding life absurdly bad.

palish• 15 years ago

I've been thinking about faster-than-light communication recently.

Consider gravity. Is its effect instantaneous? That is, gravity varies as the inverse of the square distance between two bodies. If, say, the Earth were to suddenly get much closer to the Moon, would that gravitational effect be "instant"? Or does it propagate at the speed of light?

If gravitation is somehow "instant", then one could imagine an apparatus which allows you to transmit information instantaneously. (You would need a way to measure the effect of gravity from the sending body; perhaps by measuring the height of waves formed in a planetary-sized sphere of water.)

JoeAltmaier• 15 years ago

Just knowing something is possible is invaluable. "Our space-scouts returned from 6 light-years away yesterday, validating govt funding of this 2-year-old program"

TheCondor• 15 years ago

This sounds pretty crappy but the more I think about it, what's the best case scenario here? Mind you, we're coming out of the worst recession of most of our lives, we've still not fundamentally fixed any of those problems and then with the general status of human life on most of the planet, global warming, etc..

I'm just trying to think this through, so we identify some sort of signal. I'll bet that there will be detractors, with legitimate arguments, why wouldn't there be? It's not going to be an English message encoded in a format we can't dispute. Maybe it's a bad assumption but assuming the aliens use radio technology, it seems at least somewhat reasonable to assume that they'd use it to communicate with themselves before attempting to communicate with others, for those aliens, we'd most likely intercept their communications signals rather than directed communication with us or others. Communications which happened years and years ago. The best case scenario would be one of the near by stars having alien life that happened to be listening too and in that case should we get a signal and send one back it would still be on the order of a decade long cycle. What's the average case? A century long communication cycle? Assuming both parties are listening and engaged? Likewise, if they're sufficently advanced, wouldn't they compress and encrypt their communications and it should appear to be entropy to us?

I think there are a lot of things you should do just to do. The best upside here seems like hope or an easing of the beliefs about the universe, it just seems like we'd have to get really really lucky to actually communicate with something else and it could take centuries to establish that. Which in a round about sort of way makes it seem like shutting down a telescope for a few years isn't so harmful after all. Then let's just toss in nuclear proliferation, Islam fundamentalism (as well as other religious zealotry over the centuries,) AIDS in Africa (imagine should it some how become more communicable...) hunger, and global warming as issues that might affect our ability to concentrate on a problem for a century or more, is stoppage that bad?

bfe• 15 years ago

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.

HelloBeautiful• 15 years ago

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

erik_p• 15 years ago

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

MichaelApproved• 15 years ago

"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.

mcorrientes• 15 years ago

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.

ignifero• 15 years ago

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

tsycho• 15 years ago

The second foundation is here!

AllenKids• 15 years ago

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.

javanix• 15 years ago

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.

kordless2• 15 years ago

I think they piggyback on top of the Arecibo scope, but don't get to choose where to point it.

T-hawk• 15 years ago

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.)

joeguilmette• 15 years ago

If they dont have any funding its going to be kind of hard to accomplish goal #1, right?

mrleinad3• 15 years ago

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.

brc• 15 years ago

You are extremely correct. It gets even worse for large NGOs without direct government funding - organisations like greenpeace are said to spend 40% of their funds advertising to get next years donations. I don't know if that is urban legend or plain false, but it seems quite plausible.

It's also very true for a lot of startups - too much of the founders time is spent ensuring the startup gets more access to funds. It's a terrible trap to get into, and circumvented only by bootstrapping to a revenue phase.

mhartl• 15 years ago

It's worth noting in this context that the SETI Institute is a private organization, not a government agency.

kordless2• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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).

seats• 15 years ago

It makes me wonder how much Paul Allen was involved with it besides the money grant. You'd think he'd actually enjoy geeking out on some of the details and be involved enough to either a) prevent mismanagement or b) have enough confidence in what they are doing to continue to commit funds to it.

gammarator2• 15 years ago

My understanding (via astronomer scuttlebutt) is that the SETI institute fell massively short of the private fundraising goals it set at the outset of the project. (In fairness, this was during the economic crisis.) Paul Allen's funds were intended to start the hardware off, and then the privately raised funds would yield the operational/expansion budget.

So, not so much mismanagement as overoptimistic budgeting.

(Building a few telescopes at a time is likely a false economy, given the costs of paying engineering/fabrication costs over a longer period.)

All that said, it's going to be harder to get private donors to contribute towards telescopes in the future...

growt• 15 years ago

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

suprafly• 15 years ago

They should 'open-source' this project.

arecibodrake• 15 years ago

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

SETI Institute suspends search for aliens

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