US Air Force Pays SETI To Check Kepler-22b For Alien Life

New submitter iComp writes with this quote from El Reg: "The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has announced that it is back in business checking out the new [potentially] habitable exoplanets recently discovered by NASA's Kepler space telescope to see if they might be home to alien civilizations. The cash needed to restart SETI's efforts has come in part from the U.S. Air Force Space Command, who are interested in using the organization's detection instruments for 'space situational awareness'."

Re:Military the first one, huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the military having foresight, produence, and due diligence. Their main job is to defend us, and one of the major part of that is accessing new threats wherever they are.

If we were to find life on this planet, would you rather us to in completely blind about them?

Re:Military the first one, huh?

[ZankerH]

The military's job is fighting wars. Securing peace is the people's and governments' job.

Re:Military the first one, huh?

[Electricity Likes Me]

This. Even though I don't want go to war with aliens (and it currently seems illogical to do so) I have no problem with funding dual-purpose research just in case.

Re:Military the first one, huh?

[dokc]

The military's job is fighting wars. Securing peace is the people's and governments' job.

And the military is the only who does it's job.

Re:Military the first one, huh?

[AdrianKemp]

Well as luck would have it monitoring *one* planet is very reasonable and not overly resource intensive.

SETI's problem was always that they tried to monitor a *lot* of planet/star/whateverthefucks

Re:Military the first one, huh?

[geekprime]

Do you have any idea how far away these "possible threats" actually are?

Really, it's a serious question.

HAnd how will they know that ?

[aepervius]

kepler 22 is ~600 LY away. At the best case even if we were sending a message today , they would not receive is at roughly christmas 2611 and even at average 20% c speed their ship would not be there before many millennium, to find either a highly advanced civilization, or barbarian from a fallen society. How would they *divine* that it was sent by our military ? Would they even *CARE* that some folk military 600 LY away has their panty in a knot ? And we are not even sending a message, as far as I can read we are only checking.

Anyway the article make it clear that space command seems to be more interested into mundane stuff.

Re:Explore, conquer, colonize.

[meerling]

Pacifism is great and all that, but it only works if the other guy does NOT want to kill you.
Now if you're dealing with a psychopath, hungry carnivore, mugger, hostile alien warriors, etc, pacifism will only get you the short end of the stick, often followed by a funeral - if they can find enough of you to bury.

Re:Military the first one, huh?

[Gordonjcp]

What's more likely is that the Americans will poke at them until they get annoyed, then start a fight. Then we'll have to send British and Swedish forces in to sort out the resulting mess when the Yanks can't handle it.

Re:Military the first one, huh?

[cryptoluddite]

The possible threat is from mass panic and/or social unrest. Take somebody's whole lifetime of religious belief and pull the carpet out from under it and they'll react irrationally. Do that to the majority of people on the planet and you potentially have big problems.

I mean our fundamentalists already go crazy over basic science like evolution or climate change or conception, just imagine what they'd do if we weren't the Chosen planet, let alone how people in some place like the Middle East would react. You know for a certainty people would at least try to blow up the radio telescopes and cover up the knowledge. What else? Who knows, but the government having some time to plan and prepare before word got out would be valuable preparation.

Re:Explore, conquer, colonize.

[migla]

>Blame natural evolution or god for creating us that way.

Nah. Obviously, any human action depends on god/evolution to allow it, but often "blame" should lie more directly on for example culture/ideas than on the underlying plumbing that facilitates them.

In this case of violent human exploration it is true that genes are probably pretty directly involved as the humans explore in states of fear and greed, but ideas and culture is still a bigger factor, and also the one we can do something about.

While we have the capacity for violence and feelings of fear, anger, revenge and greed, we are also capable to marvel and feel sympathy, to be righteous and to share. The higher plane of ideas and culture is where we can work, building on a foundation of the genetics of a social, loving animal and overcoming the scared greedy brute within.

So, no, don't blame god or evolution, even if they're visibly present in the state of things, because also the malleable ideas and culture of fear, greed and ruthlessness are there, shaping the order of things at least as much. Ideas and culture we can work on more readily.

Don't surrender to what is hardwired. Work around it in the software.

Re:Military the first one, huh?

[qbast]

You can't find any *human* motives for harming us. Alien lifeforms may have completely alien way of thinking and incomprehensible motivations. Even their definition of 'harm' may be different than ours.

Re:HAnd how will they know that ?

[L4t3r4lu5]

You have it backwards, yet correct. We're only looking at them, so what we will see is how they were 600 years ago.

If they looked our way today, they would have front-row seats to the rise of the Ottoman empire.

Re:Explore, conquer, colonize.

[meglon]

Of course, if they've figured out how to efficiently travel between stars, i'd lay money that no weapons we have are going to do a damn thing to them. These movies where the backwoods hicks with a hunting rifle take down the interplanetary killing machine is just about the biggest grasp at unbelievable as possible.

Re:Military the first one, huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn that's a hilarious post. The British provide the comic relief while the Swedes glumly watch.
Meanwhile, the Americans realize that once again, they've been screwed by the global elite and the useless UN.

Re:Military the first one, huh?

[thisnamestoolong]

I've got news for you; if the aliens have the technology to come here, and they wanted to kill us off, there is nothing that we could do. All of the movies you see are a total joke; we would be the proverbial fish in a barrel to them. Actually, we wouldn't; it's way harder to kill fish in a barrel than it would be for them to wipe us out instantly. Just imagine the United States military going to war with a tribe of hunter gatherers, and the hunter gatherers have nowhere to hide.

Re:Military the first one, huh?

[tehcyder]

Still a long way to go before we call it even for ending the two world wars.

The US wasn't really responsible for ending WW1 and even if it had been, the resulting "peace" was not something that anyone would be proud of, leading inevitably to WW2 as it did. If I was American, I'd let the UK and France have WW1.

As for WW2, the honours would have to be shared between the USSR and the US.