[HN Gopher] $200M gift propels scientific research in the search...
___________________________________________________________________
$200M gift propels scientific research in the search for life
beyond earth
Author : webmaven
Score : 107 points
Date : 2023-11-08 19:32 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.seti.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.seti.org)
| m3kw9 wrote:
| I really hope they don't just continue to use the same methods by
| crunching data, they need to create different little startups and
| come up with something creative to find these things
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Seems like they should collect more data and provide it to
| competing groups for analysis of the data lake.
| reactordev wrote:
| Assuming ET's output the same technological garbage like
| radio waves as we do is such a short sighted view of the
| universe. Assuming alien life is talking on Walkie-talkies or
| sending radio transmissions between ships like it's 1944 is
| simply dumb science. We should invest the money into better
| methods of observation and discovery rather than AWS data
| lakes.
| macksd wrote:
| If you were given $200M and SETI's goal, what would you be
| investing in?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Short laser pulse detection.
|
| So-called "close" SETI looking for emitters in our outer
| solar system.
| harveywi wrote:
| The real problem with previous efforts for finding
| extraterrestrial life wasn't the technology, it was the
| lack of competition plus the open ended and uncertain
| goal. A seed rounds of $50M should be given out to two
| groups of competing researchers: One group tries to find
| evidence of extraterrestrial life, and the other group
| tries to find evidence of the abominable snowman in the
| Tibetan mountain ranges. The first group to make a
| discovery takes home the remaining $100M and settles the
| SETI vs. Yeti debate once and for all.
| rvba wrote:
| I would invest it in projects that kill ACTIVE SETI,
| because active is incredibly dangerous from rational
| standpoint.
| thegabriele wrote:
| Neutrinos detection
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > AWS data lakes
|
| No cloud! Too expensive! (my opinion comes being a brief
| stint as a contributor in data taking for the CMS detector
| at the LHC. Accelerator ran, threw off data, which went
| into storage for ad hoc analysis by project collaborators;
| all data released into the public domain and freely
| available)
|
| https://home.cern/news/news/knowledge-sharing/cms-
| completes-...
|
| https://opendata.cern.ch/docs/about-cms
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Assuming ET's output the same technological garbage like
| radio waves as we do
|
| That's a very tiny window in time, and after that the bulk
| of the comms goes optical or to satellites using far lower
| power levels than your typical radio or TV station.
| Ironically the first thing ET might be able to hear and
| what we might be able to hear from ET's is "CQ CQ ... ".
| pixelpoet wrote:
| Or just fund education, much needed besides, that new
| generations can more easily study astronomy.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Guaranteed mechanism to get no outcome.
| elashri wrote:
| Guaranteed seems very strong claim to aay about education
| of future generation and what could they do about
| particular field. The only thing that might warrant usage
| of this word is if you have a time machine, but obviously
| you don't.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I think the point is that "education" as a field is so
| heavily infested with parasites and grifters that it can
| easily eat extra $200M and then have nothing to show for
| it.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| As opposed to Seti, who will have something to show for
| it?
|
| I really find it difficult to believe that 200m into
| science education funding will make less of an impact on
| the chances of finding alien life than directing it at
| Seti.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| $200M, even narrowed to "science education", will turn
| into couple bullshit grants, and/or a deal with a
| commercial vendor to upgrade computers at some facility,
| and/or (most likely) a new sports stadium, because US
| universities for some reason _love_ to spend ridiculous
| amounts of money on _sports facilities_.
|
| Point being, education is a very large field, with a very
| large capability to burn money in operational expenses,
| spending it all on doing a little bit more of the same
| thing it's already doing.
|
| SETI, in contrast, is a small, underfunded corner of STEM
| R&D, at the bleeding edge of astrophysics, signals
| processing and a bunch of other fields. Pouring $200M
| there has a much greater chance of pushing some actual
| research or technology development, with gains flowing
| back to society and economy (including to science
| education). SETI has much less space for grifters, and
| it's much easier to spot money going the wrong way.
|
| Or, in short, a cup filled with water will make more
| visible impact when poured into a portable bottle, than
| when poured into a lake.
| User23 wrote:
| California has some of the best funded public schools in
| the country. California has some of the smartest
| technologists and inventors in the world. California has
| mostly crappy public schools. Clearly adding money has
| very low marginal utility in the current educational
| marketplace.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Generative AI is a good candidate for that.
| macksd wrote:
| How would you propose using generative AI to detect ETI,
| exactly?
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| Probably by using fleets of diverse AI agents as startups
| to organize, research, simulate/prototype, refine, and
| propose novel ETI detection systems. This approach is
| already used in other domains, after all.
|
| Whether it's a _good_ angle, I don 't know. But it's a
| perfectly reasonable one, methinks.
| macksd wrote:
| Where else is this approach being used?
| cryptoz wrote:
| I've been idly wondering if it's worth it to apply to YC next
| batch with the idea of launching dozens of 550AU missions for
| solar-gravitational-lens HD photographs of nearby exoplanets.
| I've been wondering a lot recently about our visibility to
| potential life out there; they may well be watching Earth in HD
| since we can imagine how we might do that too. So I think a
| great step would be launching a bunch of long missions that
| will eventually return us HD video of exoplanets within like
| 200 ly or more distant maybe. That will reveal a lot of info
| about close-by worlds and may produce copious evidence for life
| on other planets.
|
| Would be very expensive, take a few decades at least, and the
| profit comes from...governments? Haha not sure about that yet.
| Might have to pitch it as a planetary defense company and also
| build tech to zap asteroids etc.
|
| Basically, NASA is doing the great hard science obviously, but
| is outdone in pacing and tech by SpaceX and other startups;
| NASA plans to send 1-5? 550 AU missions eventually. But they're
| in no rush. I want to rush it.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Stuff like that usually in billions
| cryptoz wrote:
| Yeah it'll take a lot of money for sure. Needs new
| propulsion like nuclear thermal or something to get to
| target distance in our lifetimes.
|
| Would be very expensive but I think cheaper per mission, if
| you start off with a plan to send a lot of them.
|
| Might take in full some tens or hundreds of billions. YC I
| am aware will not fund on that level haha, but maybe they
| would have an eye for wanting to start it off.
| floxy wrote:
| >Needs new propulsion like nuclear thermal or something
| to get to target distance in our lifetimes.
|
| Here's a cool video describing solar sails that are
| supposed to be able to accelerate up to a final velocity
| of 22 AU/year, which get things to 550AU in 25 years.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQFqDKRAROI&t=883s
|
| This video was based on the paper:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08421
| onethought wrote:
| Am I missing something. Wouldn't it take 200 years to
| transmit the HD signal back from a 200 ly distant exoplanet?
| cryptoz wrote:
| The probe only goes 550 AU out in the opposite direction
| from the planet so we can use gravitational lensing to see
| up close!
| flatline wrote:
| Where is the financial incentive beyond the seed funding here?
| Big scientific efforts like this have always been well-suited
| to government funding, or in some cases industrial R&D by a big
| established group with a separate profit center. When you have
| a project with a 20+ year time horizon for any meaningful
| progress, I just don't think the capitalist model is going to
| yield fruit.
|
| I agree with your other point that data crunching is not
| necessarily going to help. Low-power RF emission from
| lightyears away will be well below the noise floor. Some more
| innovative, speculative approaches would be a better use of
| that money, even if they all lead to dead ends.
| msie wrote:
| Imagine if 200M was committed to novel ways of imaging the human
| body.
| erulabs wrote:
| Por que no los dos?
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| Imagine...our current reality? If you insist! ;)
| alluro2 wrote:
| Why not instead imagine spending small 10% of world's annual
| miltary budget, $150B every year, on any worthy scientific
| endeavor.
| golergka wrote:
| Imagine game theory implications of all countries agreeing to
| something like this, monitoring to make sure they actually do
| this and eventual fraud that will take place. No thank you.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That's yes thank you from me - the game-theoretic
| implications of such scenario being successfully pulled
| off, would allow us to solve climate change and poverty and
| peace next.
| golergka wrote:
| Define "successfully". UN also started with great
| promises and now it has Iran representatives heading
| human right councils.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Mutual consensus among multiple - say, at least 5 -
| nations chosen for maximum mutual hostility, that leads
| to proportional reduction of military spending by sum of
| 10% of world's total military spending, done honestly and
| in a way that doesn't alter the balance of power.
|
| I.e. the kind of coordination game theory decrees as
| effectively impossible. Were such event to happen,
| whatever mechanism drove it could be used to reduce
| emissions and implement effective climate change
| mitigations pretty much on the spot. And if it
| generalizes as solution to coordination problems, it
| would literally solve _all_ major issues plaguing
| humanity to date.
| methodical wrote:
| Keyword: imagine
|
| What if we could all just teleport anywhere we wanted at any
| time, instantly!? Like most things of this sort,
| unfortunately, we exist in the real world where such a naive
| fantasy will stay as just that; a naive fantasy.
| Shacklz wrote:
| > a naive fantasy.
|
| Is it so naive to believe that eventually, we as humans can
| eventually overcome our stone age instincts and stop
| slaughtering each other on a big enough scale to
| necessitate some amount of militarism?
|
| I for one would be greatly disappointed if we could not
| achieve that eventually. In today's age, I agree that it's
| hardly possible, there are simply too many parts of the
| world without sufficient education or still in the grip of
| authoritarianism or religious fanatics, but once we've
| overcome that, it should surely be possible eventually?
|
| ... eh, maybe I'm just naive. But as MLK so nicely put it,
| the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards
| justice, and I'd really like to believe that.
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| Imagine if it was spent on a superyacht instead of going to
| SETI. Oh, no need to imagine, it has happened many times..
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Imagine all the novel ways of _probing_ the human body that we
| 'd experience if SETI alerted something out there to our
| presence...
| dakr wrote:
| The world is interconnected, especially science. Just sticking
| with medical imaging, a lot of work done in astronomy has
| crossed over and had direct impact on medicine. CT scans are
| one example (algorithms and code from astronomy), and if you've
| had lasik or been to an optometrist with one of those machines
| that automatically spits out a prescription (adaptive optics),
| you've benefited from technology developed for astronomy.
|
| Money spent on one area doesn't mean the resulting innovations
| or knowledge stay there, they cross over and enrich other
| areas.
| Racing0461 wrote:
| If mankind didn't do great things because they are poor people,
| well, we wouldn't do much of anything at all.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| The scientific journey of our place in the cosmos is a humbling
| one.
|
| - Many thought Earth was at the center of the universe. First we
| found it circled the Sun.
|
| - Next, we found our solar system was nothing special in the Milk
| Way Galaxy, and the Milky Way was nothing special in the
| universe.
|
| - Many thought humans were distinct from other animals. Then we
| discovered that all animals just evolutionary descendants of some
| primordial cells.
|
| The journey cannot stop. The search for extraterrestrial life
| might succeed or it might not. But what it does is that it
| humbles us. It reminds us that we must not be the only life in
| the Universe. Only by searching for that life can we truly
| acknowledge our humble position in the cosmos. And counter the
| arrogance of the Homo Sapiens.
| chpatrick wrote:
| It could well be that life as we know it is not that likely,
| and space is really big.
| carabiner wrote:
| I will give them $1b soon.
| dang wrote:
| Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and
| flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it a lot and we've
| had to ask you this multiple times before.
|
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the
| intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
| YossarianFrPrez wrote:
| Funding for the sciences is always welcome; it's going to be
| interesting to see what SETI does with this money.
|
| Seeing this news makes me wish more donors donated to science at
| the department level, or to every lab in a given department.
| Money is so incredibly tight in Academia that the entry level job
| (being a graduate student) typically gives people around minimum
| wage or less _for five years_ to make a life with. This is an
| absolutely terrible incentive for attracting some of the best and
| the brightest to enter the funnel of knowledge production workers
| (e.g. grad students, post-docs, researchers, and professors.)
|
| I don't know how this can be fixed systemically, but donors could
| help change the incentives and improve the quality of science for
| all.
| falcor84 wrote:
| As an adversarial opinion on this, I don't think that good
| science is bottlenecked in any way by a dearth of grad
| students. Conversely, society probably already has enough of
| the "best and brightest" in academia, and it should do more to
| funnel them to other, more directly practical, endeavors.
| chubot wrote:
| Not knowing much about non-profits, I wonder if donations this
| large ever create political problems for the recipient?
|
| Like I imagine tons of people will be hitting them up for pet
| projects of varying quality after this announcement.
|
| Though looking at Wikipedia, they have been around since 1984,
| with many high profile donors, so maybe they are institutionally
| able to deal with huge variations in budget?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI_Institute
|
| My (uninformed) guess is that $200 M must to be the biggest gift
| by an order of magnitude, or maybe 2.
|
| Or are these kind of estate gifts split up over multiple years,
| with strings attached? Either that or you just get one huge check
| :)
| spindle wrote:
| I've worked for a few medium-sized non-profits that fund
| research. Getting lots of money once you're already established
| has no downsides. You probably already have a contingency plan
| for how to spend it, and if not you and your board establish a
| new process for calling for and approving projects. It's not
| rocket science (sorry - I don't want to appear dismissive of
| your post - I just couldn't resist that joke).
| samdcbu wrote:
| SETI received ~$28m in donations and contributions in 2022,
| according to their tax filings [1]
|
| As mentioned in the press release, contribution will be used at
| least in part as an endowment, providing perpetual funding for
| ongoing programs.
|
| Also, it is my understanding that large philanthropic gifts,
| particularly from estates, often come in the form of non-cash
| assets such as stocks or other financial instruments. So
| probably not a $200m check, but a very nice nest egg to fund
| SETI projects for decades to come.
|
| [1] https://www.seti.org/about-us/financials
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I think past a certain size it doesn't matter, but my small
| church let me know that it would be ideal if a gift could be
| split across two tax years to avoid them hitting some kind of
| threshold that would trigger an audit they'd have to then pay
| an accountant a bunch of money to deal with. I offered since my
| bank had already pitched me on establishing a charitable gift
| fund.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| I've never met Franklin Antonio, but for the ones that don't
| know, he co-founded Qualcomm, and I assume he made most of his
| money that way. He died last year, casue of death was uncertain.
| [0]
|
| Wikipedia somehow separates him from the "original" seven
| founders, though: [1]
|
| > Qualcomm was created in July 1985by seven former Linkabit
| employees led by Irwin Jacobs. Other co-founders included Andrew
| Viterbi, Franklin Antonio, Adelia Coffman, Andrew Cohen, Klein
| Gilhousen, and Harvey White.
|
| It seems that he's been a long-time supporter of SETI.
|
| Glad that this money will go towards scientific research.
|
| EDIT: the source cited by Wikipedia [2] actually includes
| Franklin Antonio among the original seven founders:
|
| > The company was founded in 1985 by seven communications
| industry veterans -- Franklin Antonio, Adelia Coffman, Andrew
| Cohen, Klein Gilhousen, Irwin Jacobs, Andrew Viterbi and Harvey
| White.
|
| [0]: https://www.seti.org/longtime-seti-champion-franklin-
| antonio...
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm
|
| [2]: http://edition.cnn.com/2007/BUSINESS/08/10/qualcomm.facts/
| imustachyou wrote:
| He also left $200M for the Summer Science Program.
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/marybethgasman/2023/10/12/200-m...
| mcshicks wrote:
| I worked with Franklin for a short while in the late 90s. He
| was an intimidating, if fair person. Very little tolerance for
| bs or people who wanted to look good. But if he asked you
| something and you didn't know the answer he was fair if you
| just said so (which I had to do on at least one occasion). Did
| not know he passed, or that he was involved with SETI. I
| remember reading in a local SD paper a few years ago that he
| gave quite a bit to a local charity for the homeless. He was a
| very independent thinker, so not so surprised that he might
| make some unconventional choices in how he gave away his money.
| wesleychen wrote:
| I think the "other" in the Wikipedia articles refers to that
| the six listed (Andrew Viterbi, Franklin Antonio, Adelia
| Coffman, Andrew Cohen, Klein Gilhousen, and Harvey White) are
| in addition to the "leader" Irwin Jacobs, not that they are in
| addition to seven unlisted founders.
| kosolam wrote:
| Interesting. They have been operating since 1984 - thats almost
| 40 years. It would be interesting to read what achievements they
| made so far. Especially, did they find any sign?
| gfodor wrote:
| If SETI wants to make an impact, they should first do more work
| to disprove the hypothesis that there are small voids within the
| Earth's crust housing small grey hominids in a breakaway
| civilization who primarily live in simulated environments,
| sending UFOs to the surface out of the ocean. It's far more
| likely we'll find them down there hiding from us than we'll find
| intelligent life walking around on the surface of planets
| orbiting natural stars. The former comports with a variety of
| reports of "extraterrestrials" while the latter contradicts most
| reasonable assumptions of the game theory around
| extraterrestrials, if they exist at all.
| theyinwhy wrote:
| Perhaps it would be better not to attract too much
| extraterrestrial attention.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Their financials show a budget of about $25M a year last three
| years, with $17M in assets in 2022. So this will be an enormous
| one-time increase but presumably spending will be spread out.
| Nice chunk for an endowment.
| qntmfred wrote:
| I happened to watch Contact the other night. God bless the S. R.
| Haddens of the world.
| nomdep wrote:
| I suppose the "dark forest" hypothesis is not very popular
| amongst them
| Zigurd wrote:
| Whatever happened to Yuri Milner?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-11-08 23:00 UTC)