Aha : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo says they’re a species of their own.

For Cheela see : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheela turns out it was indeed by Robert L. Forward although Larry Niven has a written on nuetron stars too :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_Star_(short_story)

Hence the confusion.

Anyone know who wrote the slow-timespan sentience aliens novel I vaguely recall reading?

And – we already have non human, intelligent life on this planet. Whales, dolphins. And look how we treat them.

I think you can add Chimps-bonobos, Orang-utans, Gorillas, Elephants and Octopi (Octopuses?) to that list as well. Actually dogs, cats and pigs have intelligence too – although perhaps to a lesser degree as do parrots and lots of other creatures. Intelligence is a realtive quality rather than a zero-sum one.

Just because they don’t have opposable thumbs so they can change their environment doesn’t make them any less smart. I bet they communicate way better with their own kind then we do with ours. So would we know intelligent life somewhere else? Would we?

Hmm .. not sure, good point.

I guess the point of SETI is not just finding an sentient intelligence but one that’s close enough to our level of technology and communication methodology to be able and willing to communicate with us. It might possibly explain part of the Fermi paradox if many sentient species do NOT use the methods we expect to communicate or are at such an advanced level we wouldn’t recognise them as intelligent. Another factor mentioned in some SF novels* I’ve read is how they experience time – if they are living their lives at a much faster or slower pace than us we may miss their signals perhaps?

——–

* Eg. the fast-paced Cheela on neutron star surface in a Robert L. Forward or Larry Niven authored series & some slow rock-like type creatures by ..??? I forget who now. Maybe Anne McCaffrey, think ’twas a female author?

This is a major problem I have with SETI. A null result is useless because there are virtually limitless possible reasons for it. So, not only is the probability of success low, but continued failure provides nothing useful scientifically (other than that aliens are not bombarding us with messages in the frequencies we’re looking at).

The point is, cumulatively cutting back on all projects (not just science projects) can save a lot of money. When times are tough you triage your projects and cut the weakest ones.

Look, I was a big SETI fan, but it’s been running for 10+ years and really, it hasn’t found anything. If there were an easy target out there to identify, we’d have seen it by now. Argue if you wish but the potentially “easy” win days are gone in SETI.

Now what happens if we suspend this program for oh, say 5 years? Does this mean we can never restart a successor project? Of course not. Does this mean we lost our alien signal in that 5 year dark period? Highly unlikely. Does computing power continue to scale exponentially as per Moore’s Law? Yes it does.

If the economy was fine I’d say keep SETI running. However the economy in the U.S. is not fine and SETI has not been terribly productive. And yes, I’m well aware that a negative result in science is considered useful.

OK, Bill Gates is worth about $50 billion. We confiscate all of it (assuming it’s even possible as a small fraction it is probably actually liquid). That closes the budgets for a couple states. You hit the other billionaires… oops, you run out of billionaires real fast.

And the what do you do next year? Because by just throwing more money at the sociopaths in office, you’re just going to encourage them, all the while they laugh at the innumerate ignoramuses like you.

It especially hurts that the whole “budget crisis” is a giant scam.

Well, it’s scam to the extent that the budgets could be fixed if the politicians stopped spending like drunken sailors, and stopped being corrupt . Fat chance of that, especially when they have citizen apologists like you.

Our new fossil of a governor here in California ran on a responsibility and belt tightening platform. His first major act? Lucrative, expensive and eventually unsustainable contracts for the prison employees union the likes of which are never seen anywhere else- the union that gave millions of dollars to Gov. Brown’s campaign. Payoff, pure and simple.

But, no, we’ll just go and confiscate money from the sector of the economy that actually generates jobs and growth so we can allow these slimeball politicians to keep playing their games. Yeah, keep pretending there’s nothing rotten at the heart of government. Keep enabling the filth in power. that’s working *so* well at the moment.

There are plutocratic douchebags who spend that much on birthday parties.

Why do you care? Those parties are business and income for a lot of people.

But, oh noes, they don’t fit into *your* precious world view of what is proper. Feh… I long for the day when the “useful idiots” finally drop out of society and the rest of us can start to hold the political classes accountable and take some of the power back.