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have they found anything?

edteach

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This is another expen. of money that could be used else where. like looking for alturnitive sources of energy, ways to run our autos with out oil.
 
edteach said:
This is another expen. of money that could be used else where. like looking for alturnitive sources of energy, ways to run our autos with out oil.
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I'm trying to think of a polite reply to this without including the words "drop" and "ocean". I'll get back to you.
 
edteach said:
This is another expen. of money that could be used else where. like looking for alturnitive sources of energy, ways to run our autos with out oil.
Click to expand...

SETI receives no government support. It is entirely privately funded. If you don't like it, don't donate.
 
edteach said:
This is another expen. of money that could be used else where. like looking for alturnitive sources of energy, ways to run our autos with out oil.
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This thread is a waste of bandwidth that could be used elsewhere. Like in an on-line course that teaches correct spelling, proper grammar, and appropriate punctuation.

It's a waste of time and I won't reply.

;)
 
edteach said:
This is another expen. of money that could be used else where. like looking for alturnitive sources of energy, ways to run our autos with out oil.
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You're going to look pretty foolish when we finally do make contact and the aliens end up telling us the secret to running our "autos with out oil."
 
I think that SETI is a decent idea, but I just don't think I actually know what it is doing. I dunno if its a waste of money or not, if it was the only thing searching for aliens then maybe it would be worth it but otherwise I dunno.
 
NorfolkAtheist said:
the aliens end up telling us the secret to running our "autos with out oil."
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"Simple," they'll say, "just use the sap of the common elibo tree which grows in most pod-stalk forests."

"uh, we don't have those" we'll say.

(75 years later)

"LOL! you guys are screwed then!" they'll say.
 
Wouldn't contact with Aliens be somewhat futile, based on the fact that the difference in time between us and the other life be so vast? (like, based on the time it would take for the signal to travel?)
 
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"contact" in this context, mostly means just knowing that someone else is out there. Back and forth communication isn't going to happen. I think there are three different categories of signals that we might find:

1. those that are incidental to the operation of a civilization - basically, radars and such. These are easy to find because of their power, but give us no information at all.

2. messages that they send to themselves - like their version of TV. This sounds like it'd be great, but in reality, we would have almost no hope of understanding them, or putting them into any kind of context. I'd love to be proven wrong though. Note that it's also quite likely that an advanced society compresses or encrypts all of its communications, and by definition those would be indistinguishable from random noise (though still possibly detectable). A really advanced civilization might even communicate between colonies or ship-to-colony via optical wavelengths, which would be so highly directional that we have little chance of seeing them. I think this category of signal is the least likely for us to find.

3. a message that an advanced civilization sends out specifically to alert the rest of the galaxy that it exists - as in the movie Contact. This would be the holy grail for SETI, because this kind of message would be designed to be decoded, and designed to be interesting.

At any rate, none of those situations involves communication with the aliens. Sure, if we find one, we'd start sending transmissions back. But then, in hundreds of years, when our signal gets to them, they would have to get lucky to hear us.

The most important thing about SETI would be knowing we're not alone - and that is certainly important enough to justify the effort.
 
JAStewart said:
Wouldn't contact with Aliens be somewhat futile, based on the fact that the difference in time between us and the other life be so vast? (like, based on the time it would take for the signal to travel?)
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In the film CONTACT the aliens provided a means to get around the signal time delay problem.
 
Ah right. Well I watched Contact, the movie, and thought that it was pretty boring. This was like, 8 years ago or something though.
 
These folks who say it's a waste of time and mone make me think of a fellow I went Elk hunting with, once.
After 2 hours of climbing and bushwaking, we got to a saddle about a half hour before dawn. He looked around, procalimed "There's no elk here - let's go!"
I let him, and less than an hour later was filling my Deer tag at that location.
(Since I had to muscle it down the hill by myself, I didn't share, either!)
Never went hunting with that guy again, nor did anybody else in the party..
 
What are SETI's accomplishments so far? What are their 'deliverables'? Do we know more about 'ET' now than when they started?
 
rwguinn said:
These folks who say it's a waste of time and mone make me think of a fellow I went Elk hunting with, once.
After 2 hours of climbing and bushwaking, we got to a saddle about a half hour before dawn. He looked around, procalimed "There's no elk here - let's go!"
I let him, and less than an hour later was filling my Deer tag at that location.
(Since I had to muscle it down the hill by myself, I didn't share, either!)
Never went hunting with that guy again, nor did anybody else in the party..
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Yikes. I hope the ETs don't read this and think that we're going to hunt them down.

I see what you're saying, but

a) we know elk exist, it isn't an extraordinary claim
b) elk hunting doesn't cost millions of dollars
c) one can use your analogy to argue that we should continue believing in gods, and just about every other topic
 
T'ai Chi said:
Yikes. I hope the ETs don't read this and think that we're going to hunt them down.

I see what you're saying, but

a) we know elk exist, it isn't an extraordinary claim
b) elk hunting doesn't cost millions of dollars
c) one can use your analogy to argue that we should continue believing in gods, and just about every other topic
Click to expand...

What you are suggesting is that we stop funding science.
 
T'ai Chi said:
Yikes. I hope the ETs don't read this and think that we're going to hunt them down.

I see what you're saying, but

a) we know elk exist, it isn't an extraordinary claim
b) elk hunting doesn't cost millions of dollars
c) one can use your analogy to argue that we should continue believing in gods, and just about every other topic
Click to expand...

Might I suggest that you use the space between the ears for something other than a hatrack?
1.It's a BIG da*n universe. The odds are that something exists out there. Just because we know elk exist does not mean that we can find them at first glance.
2. You've never gone hunting, have you:D. A hunt is a substantially larger piece of my budget than SETI is of the Federal budget (Especially since it is mostly private funding)
3. No--it means we should never stop searching for answers. Patience is required
And you missed the more impartant part of my analogy--I filled a DEER tag. Sometimes the answers we get are not the ones we sought--but are useful in their own way. It is called "serendipity"
 
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