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?

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* 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.

Given SETI’s probable scientific ROI, can we justify funding it verus other projects? Are there possibly more effective routes for finding an alien civilization that would also have a high ROI even in failure?

SETI is not some experiment that you can run once and get a conclusive answer for. If we have listened for 500 years without hearing anything, there is nothing that says that year 501 won’t be the year that another civilisation starts broadcasting. If you want to hear them calling, you have to keep listening.

$2.5million is such a ridiculously low figure that it is really hard to justify not spending it – especially when the money spent will in part be used for more traditional research (the Allen Telescope wasn’t just going to be running SETI jobs). And even the money spent on pure SETI research is collecting data that can be potentially used for other research in the future.

Still at the end of the day, I admit that my passion for SETI stems from a more emotional place. I just can’t believe that we are unique in the universe. The history of science is the history of removing humanity from a central place in the universe. It’s not unreasonable to expect SETI to continue this story by showing that we aren’t the only intelligent life out there…

And this is research that has direct consumer application, must be hard for pure science types.

Worth a contribution just for the podcast!

Cal. Chancellor’s gross over spending, inept decisions: recruits (using California tax $) out of state $50,000 tuition students that displace qualified Californians; spends $7,000,000 for consultants to do his & many vice chancellors jobs (prominent East Coast university accomplishing same at 0 cost); pays ex Michigan governor $300,000 for lectures; Latino enrollment drops while out of state jumps 2010; tuition to Return on Investment (ROI) drops below top 10; NCAA places basketball program on probation.

Chancellor Birgeneau’s ($500,000 salary) fiscal track record is dismal indeed. He would like to blame the politicians, since they stopped giving him every dollar asked for, & the state legislators do share some responsibility for the financial crisis. But not in the sense he means.

A competent chancellor would have been on top of identifying inefficiencies & then crafting a plan to fix them. Able oversight by the UC Board of Regents and the legislature would have required him to provide data on inefficiencies and on what steps he was taking to solve them during his 8 year reign. Instead, every year Birgeneau would request a budget increase, the timid regents would agree to it, and the legislature would provide. The hard questions were avoided by all concerned, & the problems just piled up to $150 million of inefficiencies….until there was no money left.

It’s not that Birgeneau was unaware that there were, in fact, waste & inefficiencies during his 8 year reign. Faculty & staff raised issues with Birgeneau & Breslauer ($400,000 salary), but when they failed to see relevant action taken, they stopped. Finally, Birgeneau engaged some expensive ($7,000,000) consultants to tell him & the Provost what they should have known as leaders or been able to find out from the bright, engaged people. (Prominent east-coast University accomplishing same at 0 costs)

Cal. and Californians have been badly damaged by Chancellor Birgeneau. Good people are loosing their jobs. Cal’s leadership is either incompetent or culpable. Merely cutting out inefficiencies does not have the effect desired. But you never want a crisis to go to waste.

Increasing Cal’s budget is not enough; we believe the best course of action for University of California is to honorably retire Cal Chancellor Birgeneau ($500,000 salary)

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