Thursday, July 28, 2011

This one's for you, Carl

So, Nature just published a news story with the headline: The search for alien intelligence: SETI is dead - long live SETI.  For the uninitiated (read: undweeby), SETI stands for the Search for Extaterrestrial Intelligence, and they have been combing the sky for signs of intelligent life in the heavens for the last 60 years with their preferred methodology: radio astronomy.

Well, the headline was a little misleading.  SETI, it turns out, is not really dead.  Thanks for the little scare, though, Nature.  You got me to read the whole article.  Are you happy?  They just can't afford to keep their largest array of telescopes going anymore, but there are still plenty of active SETI projects that are collecting data from other sources.


The Allen Telescope Array: Where SETI used to eavesdrop on the cosmic dialog

SETI started in the 60s with a big push from big name astronomers- chiefly Frank Drake, who invented the eponymous equation laying out the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial life.

The Drake equation according to xkcd.com- note that I don't actually share this viewpoint!

Over the years there had been some federal support for SETI efforts through the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and NASA (though NASA funding was quickly cut by a senate bill for being "an utter waste of taxpayers' money").  Then dot-com backers filled the SETI coffers in the late 90s, providing the initial capital to build the Allen Telescope Array (named for Microsoft bigwig Paul Allen) in collaboration with UC Berkeley... until that bubble burst.  The Array remained unfinished at 46 telescopes out of a planned 350, and as a result Berkeley lost the NSF grant money that would have covered operational costs.  The Array hobbled along for a while, but this year it was powered down for good.

Now, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has got to be one of the most out-there branches of science that still has some semblance of mainstream credibility.  It's sort of at the logical limit of science, taking an established methodology (radio astronomy) and applying it to test the hypothesis that we are not alone in the universe.  The nature of the payoff is, admittedly, completely beyond our anticipation or comprehension.  We just don't know anything about when we could hope to find intelligent life, what the signal of intelligent life might look like, or how finding little green men might impact affairs on earth.

At the other end of the sprectrum, there is science that is eminently fundable.  Projects where there are few dots to connect between the research and a drug or a weapon are perennial favorites among the large federal funding agencies (though DARPA is surely known for funding some really "out-there" stuff- psychic spies, anyone?).

However, science is not always predictable.  Hugely important discoveries-penicillin! green fluorescent protein!- have come from unexpected and relatively impoverished corners.  And there are well-funded projects that promised great things for society that have not delivered as anticipated.  Take the human genome project, for instance, which has scarcely begun to fulfill its goal of revolutionizing medicine even now, over a decade after the first draft of the genome was published.

Ultimately, no matter how safe a bet a project might seem, science is, at it's heart, is all about characterizing the unknown.  You never know which pursuits will pay off big time as opposed to those that yield bubkes.  It's kind of a crap shoot.

So where should the taxpayer dollars be funneled?  Are the serendipitous discoveries just happening at a low level all the time, fueled by enthusiastic amateurs who wouldn't know what to do with a heap of grant money if it was laid in their laps?  Daniel Werthimer, a part-time SETI scientist, thinks that scaling back operations isn't necessarily a bad thing.  "It's naive to think that we know what ET, a billion years ahead of us, is going to be doing. So we want to be a small-scale science, trying lots of things."

The funding question is really difficult.  I've been trying to address it but everything I write comes out too philosophical, and being a bit of a romantic about science my inclination is to say FUND EVERYTHING NEAT!!!  So I'll leave you with this.  I wonder if Carl Sagan liked this song.