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!
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.
> 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 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!
Physicists study relatively simple fundamental particles. Biologists study the most complex structures in the known universe. Instead of understanding one particle, you're trying to understand structures of quadrillions of particles in an arrangements of mind boggling complexity. Yes you're right. In some ways biology is much harder than physics.
I specifically said "_among_ the most intellectually demanding". Also, I was just listing too commonly known fields that are both difficult and economically useless.
There are many other fields with problems as difficult as math/physics, but those like biology are economically useful. Which is why public+private funding for biology is, rightfully, many times that of fundamental (not applied) physics/math.
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.
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 and was just published in Neuron).
I actually believe that fundamental physic research is a more effective SETI programm, as with a better understanding of the universe we can also eventually understand potential technologies, that might enable interstellar travel and communication.
And than actually communicate and meet with aliens.
Because we have so far not seen a trace of traditional radio or light communication in space, so I guess the odds of finding one are very small.
Or we get more and more disappointed that the bounds are indeed the speed of light. And if that is the case, establishing a contact with an alien race will be very hard, if merely pinging them takes several years.
Additionally, of all the pure science research we do with public money, the discovery of alien intelligence would have probably the greatest impact on human day-to-day life.
Many of the other commenters seem to believe the research would fail. .... something we obviously cannot possibly know without doing the research.
The only thing prior SETI research has demonstrated is that no one is purposely beaming a signal right at us. ...which is actually pretty informative. ...after all, being totally alone in the universe seems somewhat less plausible than the opposite.
We don't have to be totally alone, we just have to be rare enough that there's no detectable civilization in range at this time. If you multiply the probabilities of complex, intelligent life evolving that happened to be broadcasting signals into space a few decades to centuries ago (depending on how many light years away they are), then it's a reasonable conclusion that what we're looking for is rare.
If the closest ETs are 20,000 light years away, would we ever find out about them? Space is vast and time is deep. We could have missed the most recent civilization in range of detection by a million years.
They're not going to be 1, so you're multiplying fractions. Start with us being the only radio broadcasting life out of 3.5 billion years of species on this planet, or how long it took to get to multicellular life on a relatively stable world with only occasional mass extinction events that doesn't turn the planet into a Mars or Venus.
I would use “biggest” to remove the ambiguity. The impact wouldn’t necessarily be positive; we’ve had enough movies to remind us that. I can’t think of another area of research where there’s a significant chance that the eventual outcome is completely uncontrollable.
Btw, I’m a high energy physicist and I totally believe there are other intelligent beings in the universe, simply because I don’t think we’re special. We’re just dusts in the who happen to be able t peek a little into the laws of the universe, that’s all. (As a aside, despite all the particle accelerator generating black hole nonsense, my field is pretty safe for humanity.)
> High risk with the highest reward. What could fundamentally change humanity more than definitively finding intelligent life out there?
That's kind of ridiculous when you look at the odds. It's like saying playing the lottery every single day is a good investment because it's potentially high reward when in fact you are just basically fooling yourself.
There is probably close to zero chances that there is any kind of intelligent life living in our proximity (i.e. anything that could be reachable by human means), and even if there is any kind of life out there, what do we do with it if we can't travel there and directly observe it? Also, the reason the odds are against it is that galaxies are violent places and the Earth has been lucky to have been relatively stable climate for a very long time, enabling the development of life. I would bet that Earth-like planets may have the seeds for life elsewhere but get routinely massively disrupted in some fashion by external factors.
In any case, resources are limited, and there's sufficient abundance of projects with more tangible real-world applications that will be prioritized for good reasons.
> Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu
Science-Fiction is just that: Fiction. I hope we don't make investments or bets based on fantasy novels.
I don’t understand people who think this way. Let’s imagine there is definitely an alien and we find it. Assume it follows a similar tech trajectory as humans.
If we find it in the millions of years of pre-civilization we got nothing. Probably don’t even notice it. If we get it the thousands of years before communication tech, we also get squat. If we get it in the couple hundred years between comm tech and the present, we maybe can do something? If we go beyond the present either they have killed themselves, or they’re inconceivably more advanced than us and the idea that we found them before they found us is kind of laughable. The probability that we’re the first civilization to have “found” them is laughable.
By all means, space and communication tech is interesting. Go make it. If finding aliens would have some philosophical value to you, go look for them. But to think that they’re likely to change society seems weird.
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?
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?
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".
IR radiation is bound by the same laws as all other forms of radiation, most namely the inverse square law.
You would have to be radiating monumental amounts of energy, more than say a red dwarf, to be detectable from "millions of light years" away without fading into the cosmic background as noise.
Think about it this way. With the naked eye you can see a bunch of individual distinguishable stars around ~4000 light years away. These stars produce more energy in a second than mankind has ever produced.
But our closest neighbor, Proxima Centuari, you can't see with the naked eye. Its a red dwarf. And while it still produces unfathomable amounts of energy AND is the closest star to our own. You can't see it.
TLDR: No, a Dyson swarm would not be detectable from "Millions of lightyears away"
In what world do you conflate "detectable" with "visible with the naked eye", particularly when talking about IR which isn't in the visible spectrum anyway?
What's more, the ratio of visible light to IR would be... highly abnormal.
> You would have to be radiating monumental amounts of energy,
You mean like the energy output of, you know, a star?
> In what world do you conflate "detectable" with "visible with the naked eye"
They are literally synonymous and only vary in the instrument we are using to detect it. Your eye versus, say, an antenna.
Visible light is also on the electromagnetic spectrum, it also abides by the inverse square law.
> What's more, the ratio of visible light to IR would be... highly abnormal.
No, it wouldn't. The sun radiates across the entire EM spectrum including IR and Visible light.
It would take ~6200 structures that have the same area as the United States including Alaska (3.8 million square miles) to block out 1% of the EM radiation that the sun produces.
>You mean like the energy output of, you know, a star?
IF a sufficiently advanced civilization could magically conjure up enough materials in the solar system strip mining the solar system AND we had 100% efficiency in collecting then radiating 1% of the energy the sun gives off.....
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
My suspicion is that they are communicating at frequencies we can't modulate/demodulate yet. Look how short of a time it took us to get from KHz to GHz. Since there's a trade-off in that the higher the frequency- the more data can be transmitted in a given time, it makes sense that intelligent species would try to increase their transmission frequencies as a matter of course- like we did.
The downside trade-off is that transmissions become more and more strictly line-of-sight at higher frequencies.
We can detect microwaves, infrared rays, light rays, ultraviolet rays, X-rays, and gamma rays. We might not be able to transmit and receive FM radio in those frequencies, but we are able to detect the presence, polarization, and direction of such radiation.
But if you can't modulate or demodulate gamma rays (which is anything above a certain frequency), you can't even see if they are transmitting information or not. Even radio waves modulated with spread spectrum techniques look like noise. Who knows what we'll be using in the future.
When we find them there will be people that want to initiate contact. For centuries we were convinced the shark was the Apex predator of sea. I'm not really looking forward to the day we come across the orcas of the universe.
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.
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.
Has the discovery of these 17 primes been useful in any way for further mathematics analysis? Are there any hypotheses or theorems about Mersenne primes that have used the facts about these 17 particular numbers in any way?
There’s something fascinating about the previous comment. A knee-jerk rejection of the scale. I immediately suspected that commenter hails from somewhere in Europe. The scale is way different here, and in online communities that is often lost as people talk past each other. I think when solving problems there is benefit in thinking about what happens at several different scales.
It was certainly a knee-jerk reaction and totally my fault. I see the concepts of debt and deficit so frequently mixed that it's already in my muscle memory.
Your knee-jerk reaction was half right, by the way: I'm somewhere in Europe where billions and trillions have different meaning.
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.
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. :)
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.
No, Dinosaurs are not extra-terrestrial aliens, which is what SETI is looking for. And they are not "true" aliens (what's the correct term for this?)
Dinosaurs and Humans share a common ancestor. We evolved from the same origin. We both have DNA. We are literally cousins.
SETI is searching for life that originated from dead matter independently from earthlings. Those extra terrestrial beings may not necessarily have the same basic structure (DNA) as us.
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.
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.
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).
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:
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.
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. :)
There's no hard evidence that it was an actual physical (massive) object. There is evidence (mostly testimonial) that it was visible to radar, infrared and visible light sensors and the human eye.
Is there anything that has those characteristics and is not an object ? Yes, plasma phenomena are one example.
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.
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?
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?"
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-...
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.
Why not try all of the above? The mess you mention is unfixable. Mars is very very far away, but worthwhile. The SETI and other research is worthwhile as well. Even if it is a null result, you learn something. R&D itself makes us learn somethings.
If you won't do this stuff until other important problems X & Y are solved, you will never do the interesting things and progress will stall for the species.
Lack of nuance. Any criticism is seen as maximal opposition to everything. No. Wrong.
So weird. I've stated quite clearly in that post in favor of space travel. Yet that apparently means I'm against anything interesting and you assert that I suggest we must wait. Nonsense. I just think we should spend money on plenty of other things before searching for aliens. Eg space travel!
And the mess is fixable. Yes, the mess of healthcare, environment etc. Fixable.
I still suspect that the average dollar expended by the US government has way lower return in expected improvement of human utility than basic scientific research, even with all its imperfections. As long as that’s true, the case for funding that research seems strong to me.
>>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.
USA spends more on healthcare than (prob) anyone else. Basic needs will never be solved, as the yardstick will also move.
>>Money for finding extra-terrestrial life would be better spent on earth fixing the mess.
Let's say that USA decides to spend $100-$500 Million a year on extra-terrestrial stuff...that's a rounding error in a $4.746 trillion budget.
You missed the point entirely. if USA already spends a lot of money (albeit in the wrong direction...maybe) in healthcare, how will the healthcare problem be solved if it spends another, say $200M ? You can argue reform, not that it needs a few more hundred million to "solve the problem"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And the UK can do that because the UK is willing to rely on the US. Now that relations with the US are straining in the West other western countries are increasing their military spending/cooperation. (Eg EU army.)
Sorry, but according to news sources a coalition of non-US vessels are doing the bulk of patrols out there in the strait of Hormuz whilst the US is only seemingly wanting to lend 'command and control' style support.
Elsewhere the UK assists the US in Syria and Afghanistan. It's not the other way around.
But feel free to tell me how great the american way of doing things is. What with fantastic provision of basic healthcare for its citizens, and sensible gun control oh yes and affordable education.
It's not about who patrols the Strait of Hormuz. It's about who and what backs them up. If the Iranians decide to sink the frigates there (to do their blockade) then they can expect a visit from a US carrier group. If there is no force that can be projected there then it becomes about who can move more stuff there. Seeing as that's literally next to Iran, Iran is going to win.
Look at Crimea if you want an example of what can happen if there's no force that can back you up.
The Cold War was essentially about trade. And it's not that Iran would stop all oil shipments forever. They'd stop some shipments that are related to certain countries that they don't like as a political move.
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/ [2] https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-Liu/dp/07653...