If you haven't yet seen the wonderful "Sagan Series" on youtube, start with this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHuve33yOVY

or this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxsJeND_D-k&feature=relat...

Honestly, watching this chokes me up a little bit. Watching the last shuttle flight, then seeing SETI have to realistically think about parking all of their listening equipment is just...sad.

Too many people get caught up in the "why" of this stuff. You're looking at it wrong. Look at space travel as an expression of humanity, and a really important one. Ancient people built Pyramids, or Stonehenge, or the Colosseum. I wonder how many Romans thought building the Colosseum was a waste of money.

The shuttle, or SETI are our Pyramids. It's disgusting that we can spend as many billions of dollars a year as we do on blowing each other up, but things like "Let's see what's on the other side of that proverbial mountain" get defunded because they're "pointless".

I think we've built/done plenty of cool things as a society and I don't think ending the space program negates that (or what was achieved with the space program in the first place).

I would really be more comfortable with a space program being funded directly by people like yourself in the form of donations to a gov-independent organization, because I for one don't really care all that much about continued space exploration and don't think the government should pay for it. Not that they don't spend tons of money on other stupid stuff, but hey, one step at a time...

Weren't the Pyramids an expression of ego, and the Colosseum a sports arena? That said, I love the Sagan Series and agree with the spirit of your post.

Wasn't the Apollo program just a show of force against the Russians? Wasn't the shuttle the same thing?

Wasn't SETI just a pointless project by a bunch of those pesky nerds?

Do you think that the Pyramids or the Colosseum were a waste of money?

The space program was a way to get photographic intel on Russia something America didn't have much of. By letting the Russians get into space first we were then allowed to have photographic satellites that went over them without having legal issues which was worth the trade off of letting them get up their first.

One of the features of the Shuttle was that it provided a way to carry large items to and from space while safe and hidden inside of the vehicle.

The Pyramids and the Colosseum were both build by slaves. With a tax rate of 100%, it's easy to believe that money was wasted.

HN is probably not the best arena in which to antagonize nerds.

>It's disgusting that we can spend as many billions of dollars a year as we do on blowing each other up, but things like "Let's see what's on the other side of that proverbial mountain" get defunded because they're "pointless".

?? The SETI institute is a California non-profit organization. The government cannot defund it, because it receives no government funding. It is financed entirely by private contributors.

Think bigger.

We as a species devote a tremendous amount of our resources to killing each other. Why don't we devote more to exploration?

Wars are justified by governments as an investment in the future. We want to "secure the middle east", etc.

Why isn't science looked at in the same light? It's an investment in the future.

My point was simply that SETI isn't related to the NASA funding debate, and the OP wanted to connect the two via an emotional space shuttle reference.

>Why don't we devote more to exploration?

Maybe because people are failing to communicate its benefits clearly? For instance, the OP:

war==bad + assertion of disgust --> X==good

X could be anything. ANYTHING. Why aren't we investing more in wooden shoes? Didn't you know war is bad? Even if X==good, I hope people are inoculated against these type of arguments.

Well said

Can I upvote more than once? Getting out beautiful soup and 1000 proxies

Has SETI actually found anything scientifically useful?

(This is an honest question.)

Looked it up on the SETI website. First thing I found that has a real, direct impact:

> The signal processing techniques used for Project Phoenix have already been applied to the detection of breast cancer.

Check it out (http://www.seti.org/) there are lots of thing SETI does, and not just searching for little green men.

SETI@Home did some meta-useful work pioneering crowdsourcing of scientific-computing resources (later used by Folding@Home and others). No idea about the actual results of the data collection/analysis, though. Obviously they haven't succeeded in the headline goal of finding extraterrestrial intelligence, but I would be surprised if they haven't found something interesting about analyzing vast quantities of signals (and anomalies in those signals) along the way.

Plus, I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt because they're asking for an amount of money ($200k) that, by the standards of scientific research grants, is extremely small, so it's not taking a huge risk.

Personally I wish the resources were put into folding@home and other similar projects. SETI did at least create the technology for this, which is great, but I personally don't find the project itself as anything useful.

> Has SETI actually found anything scientifically useful?

Would you also reject a research grant for a potential cancer cure based on the fact that the researcher hasn't cured cancer?

No, but if the hypothesis were "lemons cured cancer", and decades of evidence had failed to show any evidence of lemons curing cancer, and the researchers are still saying "Hmmm, maybe we need to cut the lemons up in a different way" then I'd be disinclined to continue funding it.

What if your researches had been looking at only 100 cells of the billions/trillions of cells in the lungs (for example), and they said they'd like to expand to 200 of the maybe 100,000,000,000 cells available.

Do you still want to discontinue the search? It seems a bit premature at this point.

No, but I'd want to see a better methodology than the one that can only check 1e-9 of the available search space every few decades.

Yes, it's found a wealth of evidence that there aren't currently alien radio signals being beamed at us. At least, in the directions we've looked, at the frequencies we've checked, within our feeble human understanding of what a signal should look like, we haven't seen any signals.

That's useful information. But the returns rapidly diminish. The first thirty seconds you use checking to see if your car keys are under the couch is time well spent. But if you're still looking under your couch two hours later... well, it's possible your car keys ain't there.

SETI has scanned the tiniest fraction of the nearby places to look. We're still in the first 30 seconds of couch-looking. It'll be centuries before we're at the 2 hour mark.

Also, as the exoplanet hunt gets better and better, SETI gets more and more data about which stars are the best ones to look at.

Okay now only $1,933 after my donation. :) The Sooner we can get of this planet the better.

This does virtually nothing to get us off the planet. Yes, I can construct a lengthy chain of events whereby a discovery that wouldn't have happened without this donation encourages us to further our space program, but just mailing money to Burt Rutan is more likely to have a direct result.

I am in awe of you ability to construct a lengthy chain of events whereby this is possible. You must know computers and stuff,

Thank you. Seriously thank you.

Behold! The power of hacker news!

Funding successful!

That didn't take too long :)

how much longer will they operate after this fundraising drive? for eg. are they just going to have to ask for donations every year from now?

Do they accept bitcoin?

Can you buy anything with bitcoins other than drugs right now?

edit: I know someone will roll their eyes at this comment and proceed to defend bitcoin, but seriously - what can SETI buy with bitcoins that's useful to them? And "anything people are willing to sell, man, it's just a currency!" is a trivial answer.

Beef jerky and nerdy T-shirts

Hardware. http://www.memorydealers.com/

Yes you can buy really bad porn

Shit, man, I'll give you that for free.

I just went through the donation checkout process, and they only accept Visa and Mastercard.

I suggest that SETI attempt to pitch the research grant divison of Hadden Industries. It is my understanding that S. R. Hadden is interested in this type of thing.