Tag: seti

Democrats finally kill off SETI’s Allen Telescope Array.

A long-delayed scalp for ’em; Sen. Dick Bryan of Nevada (following in the dubious footsteps of fellow-Democrat Sen. William Proxmire) came close to killing off the Allen Telescope Array back in ’94, but private contributions saved it.  That can happen, when the government’s not sucking up too much of the wealth… which is, alas, not an accurate way of describing either the Federal or California state government, these days.

But, hey!  Don’t worry: that 2.5 million dollars a year is going to be spent right here on Earth!  Admittedly, it’ll be spent on government subsidies to reliably Democratic donors, but that’s what happens when you try to pretend that basic scientific research is more important than important things, like keeping public sector unions sweet.

Moe Lane

PS: Hey, I’m not the one who gutted the funding.  Blame the NSF and blame the state of California.  Which is to say, blame the Democratic party.  When we were running the country the budget could stretch to sums of money like this…

I’d have to disagree with this xkcd comic.

The argument – that an alien species would interact with the universe in ways that we would not think to look for – kind of falls down on its face with the hypothetical. A sentient ant colony would notice right away that large sections of their observed universe would contain a near-infinite number of objects and activities that were not explainable as natural phenomena but could be explained as the result of conscious, artificial action: the buildings alone would give the game away. It’d be like us working on SETI and not noticing that Alpha Centauri happened to have a Dyson sphere.

At least, that’s my first take. No doubt people will pop by to tell me why I’m wrong.