Congress Is Quietly Nudging NASA To Look for Aliens (theatlantic.com) 113
An anonymous reader shares a report: The search for extraterrestrial life, in general, has continued over the past decades, of course, carried out by academic institutions around the world, by people like Tarter, one of the field's best-known seti researchers (and the inspiration for Ellie Arroway, the protagonist in Contact, Carl Sagan's 1985 classic science-fiction novel). But they wouldn't get any help from the feds. "[Senator Bryan] made it clear to the administration that if they came back with seti in their budget again, it wouldn't be good for the NASA budget," Tarter says now. "So we instantly became the four-letter S-word that you couldn't say at headquarters anymore, and that has stuck for quite a while."
That could soon change. Lawmakers in the House of Representatives recently proposed legislation for NASA's future that includes some intriguing language. The space agency, the bill recommends, should spend $10 million on the "search for technosignatures, such as radio transmissions" per year, for the next two fiscal years. The House bill -- should it survive a vote in the House and passage in the Senate -- can only make recommendations for how agencies should use federal funding. But for seti researchers like Tarter, the fact that it even exists is thrilling. It's the first time congressional lawmakers have proposed using federal cash to fund seti in 25 years.
That could soon change. Lawmakers in the House of Representatives recently proposed legislation for NASA's future that includes some intriguing language. The space agency, the bill recommends, should spend $10 million on the "search for technosignatures, such as radio transmissions" per year, for the next two fiscal years. The House bill -- should it survive a vote in the House and passage in the Senate -- can only make recommendations for how agencies should use federal funding. But for seti researchers like Tarter, the fact that it even exists is thrilling. It's the first time congressional lawmakers have proposed using federal cash to fund seti in 25 years.
Administration going overboard with immigration (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Administration going overboard with immigration (Score:5, Funny)
More like they've finally given up on finding intelligence terrestrially.
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And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space...
I wonder... (Score:2)
...have there been any credible studies that actually took a hard look at the implications of learning there is in fact intelligent life out there?
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It could bring our entire species together, realizing we're not All There Is Out There, and we'd stop acting like idiots.
On the other hand it could start the War To End All Wars, and we'd snuff ourselves out.
Any way you look at it there would likely be massive socio-political upheavals over it -- as well as plenty of deniers, refusing to believe 'scientists' and their 'lies', especially I imagine religious types.
Hell, some people, if presented with an actual living br
Re: I wonder... (Score:2)
Presenly the USA is nowhere near the "we bring all people together". At the moment it is more a " How to alienate your friends and foes, and accidentally trigger some wars" show.
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In another thread some jackass is crying about how stupid 'superhero' movies are and how they're dumbing down everyone. Fact of the matter is people need their heroes and we don't have any to speak of right now so they turn to movies. Same goes for the opioid crisis: the world sucks, it hurts to live for some, so they turn to whatever they can to make the pain stop -- even if it's killing them when they use it to escape.
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I doubt it, people are more interested in what's on their cell phones than alien life. Anyhow, they can't get here from there very quickly. That fact alone will cause people to harumph and move on.
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Don't worry. That "interstellar travel" thing? Not gonna happen.
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...have there been any credible studies that actually took a hard look at the implications of learning there is in fact intelligent life out there?
Who knows? Let's find out - it's a great opportunity to employ more scientists. In fact, let's milk this for all its worth. Give biologists and zoologists 50 million to look for aliens amongst us. Another 50 million and geologists might discover if they've been here before. Maybe if we convince those religious types that we might find Adam's tomb on Mars, where Jesus ascended to, and maybe even that portal to the 3rd sphere of heaven, science could be properly funded for generations to come. H
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Yeah, anything to distract them from studying evolution. They should just have it banned like Kansas, no creature is now allowed to evolve in that state lest they generate humans from monkeys. See, one doesn't have to understand science to screw it up.
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More like they've finally given up on finding intelligence terrestrially.
They're just trying to figure out what planet Trump supporters are from, and what color the sky is there.
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Jesus, don't give them any ideas, are you crazy?
Re:Administration going overboard with immigration (Score:5, Insightful)
Now they're worried about illegal aliens from other worlds.
More likely someone in the supply chain made a campaign contribution.
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Why the change? (Score:2)
I'm not saying it's aliens, but...
Re:Why the change? (Score:4, Informative)
FTA:
'So, why now, after 25 years, do lawmakers appear willing to lift SETI’s taboo status? The short answer is that someone in Congress is into it. The provision comes from Lamar Smith, a Republican congressman from Texas, who worked with the SETI Institute to craft the language, according to SETI researchers. '
Only the kind that are ... (Score:2)
... illegal.
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Was this influenced by recent Navy aviation video? (Score:4, Interesting)
There were a couple of recent FLIR videos taken by F/A-18s off the coast of San Diego that were interesting. I'm not saying they were aliens, but they had the kind of aura of respectability, or at least more than your usual MUFON chapter can muster, that might interest a congressman.
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I'm not believing in them unless I see hot green alien women wearing what is usually considered too few clothes....mmmm, the forbidden pleasure!!
Is this the best time? (Score:2)
Yes, I want to find alien civilisations, but wouldn't it make more sense to invest in better instruments first? We've still barely begun with exoplanet studies. How about better ways to get data on those. Once we have a good map of where the potential earth-like planet are, we'll know where to point the radio telescopes. Maybe we'll even get a spectrum showing a planet with a high level of free oxygen - it may not be intelligence, but evidence of any alien life at all would be welcome. Even single-celled.
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SuricouRaven:
Once we have a good map of where the potential earth-like planet are, we'll know where to point the radio telescopes.
Let's not limit ourselves quite this early. We don't know if there is any correlation between earth-like planets and high level civilization.
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Every civilization, including high level technical ones, that we have knowledge off has been on an Earth type planet. Seems like a reasonable starting place.
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And what, exactly, do you think they'll be actually spending money on in their search for aliens?
Assuming this gets past the talking and into the budgeting part of government, they'll be spending pretty much their entire budgets on better devices for detecting aliens.
Well, except for the parts they spend on schmoozing Congress for more budget, and the "going to international conventions" in place
SETI is a waste of money (Score:3)
OK, the idea is great, we can't find intelligence on Earth, let's search in space. And I am the first to tell you that the chance of us being alone in the universe is minuscule ("would seem like an awful waste of space" to quote one of the greats). But we say we are certain that we are not alone, because of the vastness of the universe and then we seem to forget that reasoning when it comes to SETI. The fact is, we can't pick up a "technosignature" across significant distances and yet, even for a universe "densely packed" with life, we would still expect distances to be at least in the order of thousands of light years. With our current technology, we can detect "earth like chatter" over just a couple of light years. There is hope that if the Square Kilometer Array project is completed we could perhaps detect over 100 light years. Which is nothing in the cosmic scale. So, to detect someone you need them to send you a targeted powerful emission. If you look up the literature, we haven't really been doing it ourselves - now and then we select a target and send a signal. Well, when I talked about the vastness of the universe, that includes time as well (which explains the "thousands of light years" being optimistic - it still has to be simultaneous civilizations). So you target a few star systems and you broadcast to them, you have to remember someone has to be "listening our way" at the exact time they arrive - given the cosmic time scales measured in billions of years, the minutes, hours or even days you might broadcast for, are nothing.
You can thing of it simply: if other civs are like us, they are mainly listening, so no-one will hear anyone. And it makes sense, listening is easy, transmitting is hard, why put effort on it when you won't really hear back (at least anytime soon)?
Obviously $10 million is peanuts for the US government (perhaps one set of wheels for an F35?), so pursuing such activities in this case is not damaging (and if used right it could help with radio-astronomy's popularity - although I think Contact has done that as well as it can be done already), but the little money that goes into space science could be spent better.
PS. Yes, I still think crypto-currency mining is more wasteful than SET@home...
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Maybe we should just build a gigantic transmitter and start sending. Not because we want a reply, but for all the other civilisations who are desperately searching for a signature. Do it for them.
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SuricouRaven:
Maybe we should just build a gigantic transmitter and start sending.
We have no idea what is the local threat level or what is considered proper behavior. Let's lurk a while before we dox anybody...
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Maybe we should just build a gigantic transmitter and start sending. Not because we want a reply, but for all the other civilizations who are desperately searching for a signature. Do it for them.
Don't worry, we already are. The combined total of all our aeronautical radars is such that it could be detected with our own tech up to 150 light years or so away. Do so was one of the more reasonable suggestions by Stephan Hawking for looking for aliens before he died.
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Would that actually look intelligent though, or just like a star was emitting particularly strange radio signals?
Something simple would do. -- --- ----- -------, repeat.
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Would that actually look intelligent though, or just like a star was emitting particularly strange radio signals?
Something simple would do. -- --- ----- -------, repeat.
It wouldn't be a star, it would be a planet as the signal would change and disappear when behind the star. Not an expert myself, but I assume that such EM radiation on such wavelengths would not be that natural. It would be high energy on narrow bands for which I assume there are no known natural causes for it to resemble. These narrow bands have obvious unnatural uses as radar and would thus be used by any civilization for similar purposes. This would be even greater when speaking of astonautical radar due
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Yeah sure because we're at the penultimate height of our technological development and won't be able to develop newer and better sensing and signal processing capabilities.
The reason no other civilizations are bothering with us is because we have people who still can't use the word "penultimate" correctly.
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Yeah, well, for sure they understand English.
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I don't have any point to make here, I just wanted to admire that sentence.
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Wrong metric. What should be used is the difficulty of picking up a technosignature in vastness of time. It turns out the Universe is really, really big....so big you won't believe it....amazingly amazing big.
Then we form a committee, maybe call it Majestic12 (Score:2)
no wait, sorry, it's been done already
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
what if Extraterrestrials landed (Score:2)
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This is truth. Alien contact wouldn't obsolete religions or nation states. Those are to ingrained in our society. Religions would just find some other way to interpreter their sacred scripture to work in aliens. I believe the Catholic Church has made some noise along those lines.
As for it being a game changer for our species. I think you over estimate our species. It would be a game changer for you and I, but the rest of the species probably not so much. I'm never disappointed in humanities abili
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If we found aliens they would likely be too far away to make much difference. Messages might take centuries, millennia even to get to them.
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Rick Schumann :
Unless some advanced... alien civilization either has faster-than-light ships, or is willing to commit hundreds of thousands of individuals on thousands of ships to invading the Earth, I don't think you need to worry too much about the latter of your two scenarios.
Or they could send a handful of Von Neumann replicators and let whichever one makes it do the job.
The best outcome so far as I'm concerned is if we made contact with an alien civilization, even if it took decades for the signals t
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"To Serve Man" (The Twilight Zone, 1962):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De4u1Zz7Yt4 [youtube.com]
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There's other dangers besides physical invasion. I don't know what the aliens would be able to transmit to us, but I'm not confident humanity as a whole would take it well.
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I'm not sure how ETs would make either governments or religions obsolete. Military I can understand (doomsday machine) and police as well (oracle like crime solving). But utopias have rules, which require governments to set them.
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or on the other hand a planet with human slaves mining resources so they can take them to their home planet
It seems unlikely there's any raw material valuable enough to send out of the Sun's gravity well to another star. Or that anyone who could invade Earth from space would need human slaves. I think the good case is they'll talk. The bad case is they'll wipe us out with a bio-bomb and send a seed probe to turn Earth into their colony. I don't see a whole lot of middle ground...
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Will never happen, regardless of aliens.
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They don't have to. Religion doesn't do well in a modern country. Even in the heavily religious US, "none" as a religious affiliation is growing quite fast. It may take a while, but religion as a force in the world is fading. (Which is fine with me; religion as a force in this world has a pretty bad track record, far worse than religion with no political power.)
However, assume that they have a religion that's reasonably compatible with one or more human religions. I'
SETI is a bargain compared to other stupidity (Score:2)
Now, the real question is: Why all of the sudden would they want to fund it? Even though the language is extremely vague, if they suddenly want to fund it again they must have an ulterior motive (being politicians and all
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Here you go [slashdot.org], just in time.
natural progression (Score:2)
https://www.theguardian.com/in... [theguardian.com]
Creative redirection (Score:2)
$10E6 would be useful for improvements to detect and identify radio signatures in various ways. It could be used for satellite dishes and algorithm research; I'd personally like to see it put towards improving BOINC [berkeley.edu], which helps a lot of projects, including SETI.
I have a better idea... (Score:2)
They should point one of those honking great telescopes at Congress and look for assholes. You can bet they'd be happily counting away for weeks afterward.
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You raise an excellent point.
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Just for the record. I now have to clean my monitor, thank you.
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Well, it's one of those little jobs most of us keep putting off, so it's probably for the best. I will accept your thanks solemnly, in the spirit in which you intended to offer it.
Administration just cut $10M from NASA (Score:1)
The WH just cut the NASA program responsible for validating greenhouse gas emissions: https://smmry.com/http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/trump-white-house-quietly-cancels-nasa-research-verifying-greenhouse-gas-cuts
I think I'd rather spend the money bringing this program back rather than feeding ICE more information on potential immigrants.
Where To Start Looking (Score:1)
Thanks, Republicans !! (Score:1)
Btw, why do you think you got elected ??
The only upside here is extraterrestrials are only SLIGHTLY more relevant US interests with NASA than Muslim outreach.