Wednesday, April 27, 2011
SETI quits
News item:
The Columbus analogy doesn’t work. Columbus and Magellan were not exploring purely for their own mental masturbation. They were looking for a route to reach natural resources more efficiently. Thus their exploration was worth a bet by government.
Paul Allen is exploring in a completely useless way, purely to satisfy his rich boy ego. We already know by the odds that life elsewhere is nearly certain. Even if we did catch a definite signal, we'd be receiving a broadcast that was made thousands of years ago. (Speed of light and all that.) We'd have no hope of knowing if the civilization still exists.
Allen has a remarkable ability to recruit government funding for his ego-projects like football stadiums. Luckily the recruitment ended on this one! ¶ 5:19 AM
Lacking the money to pay its operating expenses, the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., has pulled the plug on the renowned Allen Telescope Array, a field of radio dishes that scan the skies for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.
In a letter to donors, SETI Institute CEO Tom Pierson said that last week the array was put into hibernation, safe but nonfunctioning, because of inadequate government support.
...Private funding came from donors such as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, allowing SETI to raise $50 million to build the 42 dishes.
Plans called for construction of 350 individual radio antennas, all working in concert. But what’s lacking now is funding to support the day-to-day costs of running the dishes.
This is the responsibility of the University of California, Berkeley’s Radio Astronomy Laboratory, but one of the university’s major funders, the National Science Foundation, supplied only one-tenth its previous support. Meanwhile, the state of California has also cut funding.
SETI senior astronomer Seth Shostak compared the project’s suspension to “the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria being put into dry dock. … This is about exploration, and we want to keep the thing operational. It’s no good to have it sit idle.”
The Columbus analogy doesn’t work. Columbus and Magellan were not exploring purely for their own mental masturbation. They were looking for a route to reach natural resources more efficiently. Thus their exploration was worth a bet by government.
Paul Allen is exploring in a completely useless way, purely to satisfy his rich boy ego. We already know by the odds that life elsewhere is nearly certain. Even if we did catch a definite signal, we'd be receiving a broadcast that was made thousands of years ago. (Speed of light and all that.) We'd have no hope of knowing if the civilization still exists.
Allen has a remarkable ability to recruit government funding for his ego-projects like football stadiums. Luckily the recruitment ended on this one! ¶ 5:19 AM
