I really hope they don’t just continue to use the same methods by crunching data, they need to create different little startups and come up with something creative to find these things
Assuming ET’s output the same technological garbage like radio waves as we do is such a short sighted view of the universe. Assuming alien life is talking on Walkie-talkies or sending radio transmissions between ships like it’s 1944 is simply dumb science. We should invest the money into better methods of observation and discovery rather than AWS data lakes.
No cloud! Too expensive! (my opinion comes being a brief stint as a contributor in data taking for the CMS detector at the LHC. Accelerator ran, threw off data, which went into storage for ad hoc analysis by project collaborators; all data released into the public domain and freely available)
The real problem with previous efforts for finding extraterrestrial life wasn't the technology, it was the lack of competition plus the open ended and uncertain goal. A seed rounds of $50M should be given out to two groups of competing researchers: One group tries to find evidence of extraterrestrial life, and the other group tries to find evidence of the abominable snowman in the Tibetan mountain ranges. The first group to make a discovery takes home the remaining $100M and settles the SETI vs. Yeti debate once and for all.
A standardized robotic platform for automated solar system image collection- high resolution images of every single surface in the solar system. They would operate and report back any unexpected features over the next 100 years.
“The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.”
The much more likely expanation of the Fermi Paradox is that even if intelligent life is fairly common, the universe is so big (and expanding exponentially), that there simply is no way for these populations to notice each other much less visit each other.
From rational point of view (history of Indians, general history) and philosophical point of view (great filter) it is safer to keep quiet.
A lot of scientists got killed by their own inventions. And active Seti should be banned since very few can bring doom on others - without even asking them if they agree for that. Did anyone from the active seti community ask for consent? Nope. They know most people would be against it. UN and governments should be too. Although if they were some assholes would start doing it just in spite.
are they famous last words? are there specific examples of indigenous people that were decimated due to actively seeking out contact? (genuinely asking, not super familiar with the history here, though i'm under the vague impression that most contact has not been active in this sense)
> Assuming ET’s output the same technological garbage like radio waves as we do
That's a very tiny window in time, and after that the bulk of the comms goes optical or to satellites using far lower power levels than your typical radio or TV station. Ironically the first thing ET might be able to hear and what we might be able to hear from ET's is "CQ CQ ... ".
I've been idly wondering if it's worth it to apply to YC next batch with the idea of launching dozens of 550AU missions for solar-gravitational-lens HD photographs of nearby exoplanets. I've been wondering a lot recently about our visibility to potential life out there; they may well be watching Earth in HD since we can imagine how we might do that too. So I think a great step would be launching a bunch of long missions that will eventually return us HD video of exoplanets within like 200 ly or more distant maybe. That will reveal a lot of info about close-by worlds and may produce copious evidence for life on other planets.
Would be very expensive, take a few decades at least, and the profit comes from...governments? Haha not sure about that yet. Might have to pitch it as a planetary defense company and also build tech to zap asteroids etc.
Basically, NASA is doing the great hard science obviously, but is outdone in pacing and tech by SpaceX and other startups; NASA plans to send 1-5? 550 AU missions eventually. But they're in no rush. I want to rush it.
Yeah it’ll take a lot of money for sure. Needs new propulsion like nuclear thermal or something to get to target distance in our lifetimes.
Would be very expensive but I think cheaper per mission, if you start off with a plan to send a lot of them.
Might take in full some tens or hundreds of billions. YC I am aware will not fund on that level haha, but maybe they would have an eye for wanting to start it off.
>Needs new propulsion like nuclear thermal or something to get to target distance in our lifetimes.
Here's a cool video describing solar sails that are supposed to be able to accelerate up to a final velocity of 22 AU/year, which get things to 550AU in 25 years.
Guaranteed seems very strong claim to aay about education of future generation and what could they do about particular field. The only thing that might warrant usage of this word is if you have a time machine, but obviously you don't.
I think the point is that "education" as a field is so heavily infested with parasites and grifters that it can easily eat extra $200M and then have nothing to show for it.
As opposed to Seti, who will have something to show for it?
I really find it difficult to believe that 200m into science education funding will make less of an impact on the chances of finding alien life than directing it at Seti.
$200M, even narrowed to "science education", will turn into couple bullshit grants, and/or a deal with a commercial vendor to upgrade computers at some facility, and/or (most likely) a new sports stadium, because US universities for some reason love to spend ridiculous amounts of money on sports facilities.
Point being, education is a very large field, with a very large capability to burn money in operational expenses, spending it all on doing a little bit more of the same thing it's already doing.
SETI, in contrast, is a small, underfunded corner of STEM R&D, at the bleeding edge of astrophysics, signals processing and a bunch of other fields. Pouring $200M there has a much greater chance of pushing some actual research or technology development, with gains flowing back to society and economy (including to science education). SETI has much less space for grifters, and it's much easier to spot money going the wrong way.
Or, in short, a cup filled with water will make more visible impact when poured into a portable bottle, than when poured into a lake.
California has some of the best funded public schools in the country. California has some of the smartest technologists and inventors in the world. California has mostly crappy public schools. Clearly adding money has very low marginal utility in the current educational marketplace.
Where is the financial incentive beyond the seed funding here? Big scientific efforts like this have always been well-suited to government funding, or in some cases industrial R&D by a big established group with a separate profit center. When you have a project with a 20+ year time horizon for any meaningful progress, I just don’t think the capitalist model is going to yield fruit.
I agree with your other point that data crunching is not necessarily going to help. Low-power RF emission from lightyears away will be well below the noise floor. Some more innovative, speculative approaches would be a better use of that money, even if they all lead to dead ends.
Probably by using fleets of diverse AI agents as startups to organize, research, simulate/prototype, refine, and propose novel ETI detection systems. This approach is already used in other domains, after all.
Whether it's a good angle, I don't know. But it's a perfectly reasonable one, methinks.
