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A comment on SETI Needs Your Help to Resume Search for Extraterrestrial Life . Parent comment

Re:SETI Needs Your Help to Resume Search for Extraterrestria... by davidhollander on Wednesday August 03, 2011 @02:01PM (#2842201)
>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.

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Re:SETI Needs Your Help to Resume Search for Extraterrestria... by blhack on Wednesday August 03, 2011 @02:23PM (#2842303)
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.

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Re:SETI Needs Your Help to Resume Search for Extraterrestria... by davidhollander on Wednesday August 03, 2011 @03:26PM (#2842611)
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.

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