Huygens probe

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I'm only a slight supporter of Bush as a leader (because he's better than that prick Kerry in my opinion) but Bush has a double-digit IQ - I don't think he has ever heard of SETI and if he did he would invite you to sit on it (English people only will get the pun).

That said, there is definitely a fundamentalist religious anti-experience toward finding even a single damned microbe anywhere else in the Universe, and that goes for Judaism and Islam as well as Christianity. Hinduism is far more tolerant of life on other planets. They are terrified because when that microbe is found it will totally subvert the biblical certainty that MAN was made in the image of GOD. No Alien from the Arcturus or Spica system will be in the IMAGE OF GOD!

Here's what I don't get ... SETI fully funded with bells and whistles costs about 20 million a year tops ... where the hell is Bill Gates, its like a day's pay for him, or Paul Allen or Balmer?

 

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ROFLMAO!

 

Meh, I'm not a fan of either the ISS or manned missions to Mars. Both seem to me to be a waste of money. What possible scientific benefit could be gained to justify the enormous cost of going to Mars? Robots are much more cost-efficient than humans, and easier to keep alive. NASA could better use the money it is wasting on the ISS on more probes like Cassini or Voyager.

Well obviously the military wastes a lot more money on stupid things than NASA does, just because it has a lot more money to waste. I'm just saying that NASA could probably improve its public image by spending its money on things more likely to actually produce new information about our solar system.

True...but it hasn't accomplished anything at all, and in my opinion never will. Even if intelligent aliens do reside in our stellar neighborhood, we'd probably have a tough time detecting them unless they wanted to be detected...which I think is very very unlikely.

 

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True...but it hasn't accomplished anything at all, and in my opinion never will. Even if intelligent aliens do reside in our stellar neighborhood, we'd probably have a tough time detecting them unless they wanted to be detected...which I think is very very unlikely.


I believe there was a huge "spike " in 1997 or thereabouts that has not yet been explained. I don't follow this closely but I do think SETI, regardless of whether in it's short existence so far has “produced” anything should not only be continued but expanded. They need 50 times the funding I say!

When we contact that next civilization publicly, or they contact us, (if it has not already happened privately) massive realignments in the religious, political, banking and commercial markets will have to take place very suddenly.

It will be a disaster in the currency markets as governments try to rapidly decide what to do. The entire world will go topsy turvy and I will watch frickin’ Baywatch reruns

Its a good topic for a new thread though ...

 

A huge spike is meaningless unless the results can be replicated. There are huge spikes all the time, but they quickly fade away. Most of them are probably due to interference from nearby satellites.

Then they'd just waste 50 times as much money. There are much better ways to spend the government's money than searching for radio signals in the hopes of discovering a civilization at exactly the same point in technological development as us (+/- 100 years)...an astronomically small probability.

You say it as though it's a certainty if we fund SETI. I don't see any indication that SETI will *ever* be successful, regardless of how much money is dumped into it. We could discover extraterrestrial intelligence tomorrow, or we could still be searching a thousand years from now.

 

You may understand that some phenomena may not be able to be replicated since huge spikes from a long way away may not be under the control of the Fermi lab?

 

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I would posit that any intelligent civ capable of exploration would immediately send out whatever it could to hail others, even naive things like we did in 1976 when we sent out our exact position to all and sundry, and the Beatles White Album.

It is POSSIBLE there are civs a BILLION years in advance of us since the Universe is about 14 to 20 billion years old and our SS is only four. Where will we be a billion years from now in terms of scientific advancement. Hell I would just like to hang around a hundred years to see what we will be capable of!

Immense and huge things will happen as we learn to move planets and mine star systems, as we learn to create galaxies as we do farms, maybe not for a million years or so.

Along the way those more advanced may not be able to encounter us yet, in the same way a basketball champion may not be able to teach a three-month old what he does. Open your mind man!

 

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ROFLMAO!

Hadn't heard that one.

It may not be a really great idea to send out a probe with your return address, but we did it, and I suppose you have to take a chance or two in this life. Also, it seems to me that any civ capable of understanding our messages would have evolved in a moral sense as well, and I believe that the essence of life is to move toward the positive, and that translates into a positive moral consciousness. It is why Hitlers and Napoleons always eventually fail and why we won't get a visit from the Klingons. Of course if I'm wrong sue me.

So we sent Pioneer 10 to Aldebaran (1972 not 1976 as I first said) and it should arrive in a couple hundred thousand years. Of course who knows who will have a look along the way?

What a great time to be alive!

Merry Christmas by the way …