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Random Thread: SETI is a waste of money...

Awesomeness!!

By Awesomeness!!,
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Awesomeness!! Newbie

Awesomeness!!

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Popular thought is that any species capable of such technology is also advanced enough to appreciate life and be peaceful. Only the lesser intelligent beings actually go out of their way to start trouble, like the ancient mongrels and current republicans.

Really? Humans would go to another planet, see that the other spieces were dumber, and enslave them?? Really??

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Skew Newbie

Skew

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fire isn't light. IT projects light, and just because your were going at the speed of light wouldn't mean you couldn't say...shine a flash light...and since a man made machine can't..under the laws of phyics travel the speed of light (it could only get about 99.9%) you would be ok.

trust me...smoke your weed.

Just so you know, I just got back from traveling at light speed into the future when I kicked your ass at a Huddle tailgate later this year.

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Samuel L. Jackson Newbie

Samuel L. Jackson

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Popular thought is that any species capable of such technology is also advanced enough to appreciate life and be peaceful. Only the lesser intelligent beings actually go out of their way to start trouble, like the ancient mongrels and current republicans.

The Human species is doomed anyways... All you have to look at (as evidenced by your point above) is how soon we developed the technology to destroy all life on the planet in comparison to the rates at which we do things like cure disease

Any alien civilization that is out there has:

A. already destroyed their own planet and are moving system to system devouring resources

B. survived without the basic human emotions we all have

Neither option (or a combination of both of them) would be a good scenario for us, should they decide they need something we have...

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blackcatgrowl Newbie

blackcatgrowl

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Anti MAtter probes ftw

Is SETI a waste of time? Perhaps.

But considering the vastness of space and the magnitude of possible potential life, we owe it to ourselves to investigate. And if it is being done privately, your entire point is meaningless.

Imagine if Tesla or Alexander Graham Bell thought research in electricity was a waste of time... there are possibilities we don't know of until we investigate things, and deep space is the next step for our natural curiosity.

As far as an Anti-matter probe goes... there are some major problems with this idea.

1. Anti-matter is incredibly expensive and time consuming to produce.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-matter#Artificial_production

Because it instantly annihilates normal matter, physically containing it is extremely difficult to do and very, very dangerous.

And as far as cost goes...

Scientists claim antimatter is the costliest material to make. In 2006, Gerald Smith estimated 250 million dollars could produce 10 milligrams of positrons (equivalent to $25 billion per gram)

One gram might be enough to power a space flight, but now you've just spent 25 billion dollars to send one probe to one point in space. Which brings up the next point...

2. Where would the probe be sent? To a star would be the logical conclusion.

http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/50lys.html

Within 50 light years of our sun there are about 1400 stars. So we would need tens of thousands of probes to cover a tiny portion of our galaxy.

So multiply 25 billion by 1400 just to get started... That's $35,000,000,000,000... that's 35 trillion dollars for just the fuel to explore a 50 light year radius around our home star. That doesn't include the cost of the vehicle itself.

FYI - our galaxy is estimated to be about 100,000 light years across and contains an estimated 400 billion stars.

3. Then you'd have to wait hundreds if not thousands of years to get the data from the probe... if it even survives the journey.... because the fastest we can get data is the speed of light.

So no... we don't want to send anything anywhere until we have technology to shorten the trips, or know for a fact there is something there to find.... which we might find if we look... using... radio... telescopes...

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Epistaxis Newbie

Epistaxis

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Popular thought is that any species capable of such technology is also advanced enough to appreciate life and be peaceful. Only the lesser intelligent beings actually go out of their way to start trouble, like the ancient mongrels and current republicans.

I wouldn't bet on that assumption.

I'd also like to add that first contact would most likely come from our proxy or a proxy from other sentient organics.

Sillycone seems to keep much longer than carbon.

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Razzy Newbie

Razzy

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I guess enough people think it's relevant for it to continue to get funding, but like others have said, it's a lot of money spent on a lot of assumption. Even if there is intelligent life broadcasting and receiving radio signals, by the time we/they get those signals they will have been traveling through space for so long that there would probably be no one left on the planet who remembers sending the signals in the first place. Not to mention that it would take the same amount of time for their reply to reach us.

Also, the biggest obstacle to space travel would be the isolation, so if any intelligent race out there has developed advance space travel then they have also probably developed some sort of instantaneous communication and probably are no longer using radio broadcasting for anything.

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