Huygens probe

They might not be under its control...but that doesn't lead to the conclusion "aliens did it" if the results can't be replicated. Pulsars and quasars can cause huge spikes.

 

Those are some warped financial views, but anyway...

Spending more money on one thing means spending less on something else (or creating a huge deficit). SETI is just not cost-effective. I like your analogy of the lottery...but you drew the wrong conclusion from it: SETI is like the lottery in that your chances of success are so small compared to your cost that you're basically just throwing your money away.

The government can do much more good with our tax dollars through hunger relief, AIDS research, or a wide array of other things, than it can by spending money on millions of lottery tickets (SETI).

 

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Yeah, they could do much more good, but they likely aren't going to anyway, so it might as well be spent on something at least interesting...

 

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Even using the most liberal estimates for the Drake equation, any extraterrestrial life in our vicinity will most likely either be millions or billions of years more advanced than us, or millions or billions of years behind us. Either way, we don't have any good method of detecting these kinds of life...nor do I think we will in the next hundred years (and my views on 21st century technology are very optimistic).

But if the payout is less than 10,000 times your investment (as it is with a lottery...that's how they make money), it's still not a good bet. I think SETI will almost certainly fail (I'd give its chances of success 1 in one million), but even if it succeeded would it return an appropriate amount on the investment? The discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence would obviously be a major bombshell and I'd be the first to acknowledge it as a crowning achievement of human civilization, but unless they sent us blueprints a la "Contact," or a detailed history of their planet, how much knowledge have we actually gained? Probably less than one million times the cost of SETI.

If individuals in the private sector feel that it's worth the gamble, I wish them the best of luck.

True...all investments are gambles, but Cassini was a much better investment than SETI simply because it had a better probability of success (even compared to its cost) than SETI.

I suppose that case could be made...but I wonder if NASA's other programs wouldn't develop similar technology anyway.

 

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This is really exciting ... what its taken 7 years to get there I think?

Hopefully NASA will begin publishing pictures as soon as they come in. I bought a case of beer especially for this - better than any ball-game, though on reflection I suppose it is a ball game ... whatever ... )

 

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I can't wait to see the pictures, how interesting.

 

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With the possible exception of Spirit/Opportunity, this is without a doubt the greatest achievement of NASA in the past 35 years.

 

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As usually, one has to question the varacity of NASA's claims; these pictures could have been derived from sources much closer to home.

 

You're right ... they look like my backyard!

Whats with the paranoia about NASA? Can't you accept that NASA and the ESA can actually do this kind of thing without there being some kind of conspiracy? I'm all for conspiracy theories but there is a limit ...

 

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