It's not that they're afraid of things they don't understand. It's that there is a certain type of person they generally don't like. In this case it might have been a man that had some sort of intellectual curiosity, maybe a bit eccentric. And they will use their ignorance as a weapon against those people.
The police department knows full well they can determine whether this was a bomb or not. It's within their ability to interview every person he interacted with to find if he claimed it was a bomb at any point. Instead of doing that they will use their lack of knowledge to allow falsehoods to move the investigation.
It was within the ability of the staff to determine the monetary cost of this man's actions. In the very least they could compare the electricity bill during a month he was running SETI versus the next month when he was not. They could calculate the power consumption of the machines.
It's not that they are afraid of knowing. But that knowing or admitting the truthfulness of the facts makes them less powerful as people.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistic...
Ignorance is a source of power only within a like-minded group, and only as long as that group is powerful.
Now get out of there and see where ignorance gets you.
Or wait until that group washes out into the irrelevance of history.
That's all fine and good on a geological scale, but we've been waiting 200+ years for the irrelevance of this particular group, and there's not a hope in sight of it happening any time soon.
PS: Money wasting from their point of view, not making any judgement about SETI here
I did this when I worked as a network administrator for a new school campus. It was folding@home vs. SETI but same concept. Once the administration realized all the computers were running folding@home they compared the bills after turning it off and it was tens of thousands of dollars difference (granted this was 2001 and full-size desktops).
Now, one could say they overreacted, sure, in my case I just got reprimanded and told to uninstall it off all the computers. But firing for costing the district significant amounts of money isn't some testament to the ignorance of the South, unlike the "bomb" clock.
I still don't believe that - unless this was 10k computers+. I'll bet that if you used watts up on an idle computer, then used it on a computer running seti@home I'll bet the difference would only be 100 watt difference at the max (probably more like 50 depending on what is running on the computer).
1) if 1 KWh costs 10 cents, which is reasonable to expect, and the load increases just 50 W.
And for this guy here it's even much more:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=54609&pos...
His single computer uses 490 Watts when turned on and calculating Seti, and he's keeping it on for 18 hour more per day just for Seti. Only 500 of such computers and such usage patterns make 14000 dollars more per month.
Sure, he didn't make profit from the seti@home instances, but he did it without approval, did ultimately cost the district money, and likely caused other issues along the way (like additional wear-n-tear on the machines)
I wish we could fire teachers for using their computers for Facebook and Amazon shopping during the day.
The internet was also heavily monitored, with a proxy server that required a login to get to forbidden sites. Our IT guy had a pretty good idea of when teachers were getting on facebook etc.
And then you'll hire them?
Gets complicated fast, dunnit?
Also, hard not to feel a little snark in the emphasis and "dunnit", really...
Perhaps they are like farmers we paid to not grow corn in the past.
But that's just for the time-servers, not the dedicated professionals, who are probably the majority.
My wife was on the advisory committee for a local middle school that's struggling. One winner is that they bought SmartBoards for a bunch of classrooms but didn't get stands for them, so they just mothballed them for a year until they could buy stands with the next year's budget.
I wouldnt call someone externalizing costs for whatever noble endeavor responsible or forward thinking.
Most people, be they in the deep south or the northeast have no fucking clue what SETI is and may even have very specific metaphysical opinions on how we should deal with the possibility of alien life that doing this violates. Most people don't care enough about paper to do more than write it off as a normal expense.
I personally think that alien life is everywhere and I can't wait until we discover more evidence of it. But I think SETI is a huge waste of resources that could be spent better elsewhere. Even though I'm pro science, discovery, and utilizing wasted cpu cycles, I still think searching for life this way is a huge waste of time and resources and I'd be pissed if some teacher decided he was going to use the resources I take a part in paying for to do this.
The benefits of this are external while the cost is internal. If you're going to use resources, at least use them to benefits the kids who are in your budge.