Seti And Particularly Seti@home, The only SETI thread Options

[deglr6328]

What is going on with SETI@home? I have in the past, (like many of the other users of this board I suspect!) run the SETI@home screensaver on my computer. I ran it for about 4 years and then uninstalled it. Not because I was fed up with not having an ET directly send to me personally a big "HELLO THERE" message, but rather because I saw little in the way of actual science being done with the SETI results we volunteers were all producing and because there seemed to be no plan for any kind of endpoint of the project in the future.

I recall seeing in a 2000 edition of Scientific American a plot of the already searched parameter space by SETI@home and it looked like most of our galaxy was searched and found empty obviously, of "type I civilizations" and higher. (ah. found it) Now, its been 6 years since then and we've since viewed ~97% of the observable sky from Arecibo at least once since the start of the project (~86% at least twice). Why are there no papers published on this result? It IS a significant result even if its negative one. Were there SETI papers published that I've just not seen? The SETI and SETI@home web sites are of very little help when looking for actual peer reviewed published papers that the projects have produced.

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

I think this is an interesting topic, and that it fully deserves its place here as a science/technology concern, if we left besides any childish a priori in the style "life on other planets must/cannot exist" and any mockery about "little green men" or fear about "aliens".

Like many others I ran the SETI@home screensaver, but I abandonned because I have only an old slow computer which took too long to analyse one block.

The diagram deglr6328 found here summarizes the actual result of SETI searches:

-SETI cannot detect the equivalent of Earth at any distance, even very close (Barnard, Sirius)
-there is nobody at least than 100 light-years aiming at us powerfull radio beams. We know for long that the Arecibo radio telescope can communicate with its equivalent at about 5000 light-years. But nothing such was found.
-there are no type I civilization in our part of the galaxy.
-there is no type II civilization in our galaxy and local cluster.


But these results are still very incomplete, and just reflect a lesser blindness that previous studies. There are still plenty of place for many discreete civilizations and some larger ones. We can only rule out a powerful starwars-like galactic civilization sending a tremendous amount of energy in space. But we have still many possible scenarios:

-many civilization using "environmental friendy" radio communication
-they use laser communication instead, which are believed to be more efficient (thanks to a better focusing, or larger transmission rate).
-they use some quatum non-local technology, which cannot be detected. (I evoke this possibility in my fiction novels "The missing planets" and "Dumria")
-the civilizations evolve in a different way that just increasing technology power (I also evoke this possibility in a third novel to come, and many other possibilities can be imagined)


So, I think, we cannot yet say "there is nobody". We just tested a possibility. We are not with SETI as we are now with Mars, grasping to the last hope of finding life in very special places.


The fact that astrophysics predicts that there can be perhaps millions (or billions) of planets suitable for life in our galaxy, and the fact that we did not received any past visit or did not detected any radio communication, this is a riddle that nobody yet can answer.
It is the equivalent of the astronomy paradox of the black sky. The black sky paradox was solved with an element we could not predict (the universe has a finite past time) so I think some elements are missing to fully understand what we know today about SETI. Some possible hints:

-something we do not know makes civilisation much more rare than expected from astrophysics results
-we were very fast compared to others, and thus appeared among the firsts
-the assumptions describing type I or II civilisations are false
-they use other communication means
-they developed other type of behaviours than just colonialism/predation, and left planets evolve in their own way, so far as avoiding any interference, just like we are doing now with the last unspoiled tribes in Amazonia/Papua.
-they evolve in a different way than just increasing technology achievements in an exponential way.

Examining how life can emerge on a given star system is a matter of astrophysics and biology, but examining how civilisations (like ours) can last and evolve in the future is much more speculative and rather a matter of philosophy.

[helvick]

I'm also a lapsed SETI@home participant. I had a bunch of systems running under the name Dennis D. Gnome for the Ars Technica Team Lamb Chop group. I think I pulled the plug on the last one in 2002 after I'd clocked in 4331 work units (about 5 years of total CPU time). I had a chunk of systems in a test environment that weren't doing anything most of the time so SETI seemed like a good use for them.

Richard,

You left out out overt aggression as a possible reason for the silence. Even if intelligent life and space faring civilisations are common then even a tiny percentage that tended towards aggression\predation would create very strong evolutionary pressure that encourages "silent" civilisations that tend not to broadcast their presence. Greg Bear's "The Forge of God" and "Anvil of the Stars" set explores some of the possibilities that might result. This is a very pessimistic idea but one that I think is plausible.

There is also the "Intelligence Singularity" concept that Vernor Vinge explores in "Across Realtime". As the overall intelligence\information density of a civilisation rises the rate at which it increases also expands leading to a singularity effect. Since all bets are off at that point it is quite plausible that the resulting civilisation\intelligence might be unrecognizable and undetectable to us. Charlie Stross deals with similar ideas in Singularity Sky, one of the better Sci Fi books of the last year IMO. I'm not 100% sold on the singularity idea but I certainly think that it has merit as an idea beyond being a useful literary conceit.

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

Richard,

You left out out overt aggression as a possible reason for the silence. Even if intelligent life and space faring civilisations are common then even a tiny percentage that tended towards aggression\predation would create very strong evolutionary pressure that encourages "silent" civilisations that tend not to broadcast their presence. Greg Bear's "The Forge of God" and "Anvil of the Stars" set explores some of the possibilities that might result. This is a very pessimistic idea but one that I think is plausible.

Of course yes, it is enough of only one civilization practicizing predation/agression to create a strong evolutionary pressure... too strong perhaps, it would likely eliminate every other lifestyle (how could a low tech civilization withstand an attack with spacefaring technology?) or the existence of one agressive civ would make that the other civs need to have allies, and in this case they would actively contact us. This hypothesis leads to a starwars-like situation where war falls on innocent unsuspecting worlds, and both camps contact/exploit all the planets they find. But we were never attacked or contacted by a coalition, and this makes the possibility of an agressive civilisation weaker (Thanks God) without however completelly ruling it out. We are still in the black sky paradox.

Richard,
There is also the "Intelligence Singularity" concept that Vernor Vinge explores in "Across Realtime". As the overall intelligence\information density of a civilisation rises the rate at which it increases also expands leading to a singularity effect. Since all bets are off at that point it is quite plausible that the resulting civilisation\intelligence might be unrecognizable and undetectable to us. Charlie Stross deals with similar ideas in Singularity Sky, one of the better Sci Fi books of the last year IMO. I'm not 100% sold on the singularity idea but I certainly think that it has merit as an idea beyond being a useful literary conceit.

I also explore this possibility in my novels "The missing planets" (where empty planetary orbits are found where accurate models of planet formation predict Earth-like planets) and "Dumria" and another one to come. But my stance is a bit different: at a certain moment of their evolution (we are close to it) the worlds master paraphychology, and thus need no more technology, and they become "invisible" in nanother state. More mainstream-science explanations of this style are possible, such as a change of quantum state, leading to the same result: civilisations disappear from the physical world, or emit no signals.


Another interesting point is that we do not need sci-fi technologies to colonize the whole galaxy. We are near to discover techs such as fusion, or biotechs, will would allow to send seed ships to close stars. Once this process started, only some tens of million years are required to colonize the whole galaxy, a blinkeye in he history of Earth and of the galaxy. Did this happened in the past? It is likely, say physics and astrophysics. But if this happened, we would have received past visits, or found some control system near Earth. (such speculations are usually made by hoaglandites, but we would gain to make them seriously). Until now we found nothing. Still the dark sky.

Are we searching in the right way?

[David]

I'm going to add and consolidate some comments on this topic that I made in another section of unmannedspaceflight, where they were out of place (so I can remove them from there).

Nov 14 2005, 05:02 PM
Space is very, very big, and there is a lot of small stuff floating in it. Unless that stuff calls attention to itself in some way, there is no particular reason to investigate it. Even if there were "Vulcans", or some other alien intelligences quite close by, they would have no reason to investigate every tiny asteroid exiting the solar system. Nor would we, in the distant future have any reason to investigate every odd scrap of space debris coming from other systems. I think that any probe leaving our system -- Pioneers, Voyagers, New Horizons -- is permanently lost, to anybody, except in the unlikely event that some future humans decide to track it down and retrieve it.

Any records that we place on these probes therefore have a merely symbolic value. They are the human race's way of saying hello to itself, of patting itself on the shoulder and wishing that it were not so alone. As messages, they are the equivalent of a letter in a bottle, except that bottles set adrift in the sea do occasionally wash ashore. The sea of space is much bigger, and the shorelines are far rarer.

If we intend to communicate to any beings beyond Earth, we need not a message in a bottle but a lighthouse, some sort of beacon that can continuously broadcast the presence of Earth as something extraordinary in the night sky.

Not that, in my opinion, that would do much good. I think the complete failure of SETI to turn up anything thus far tells us one of two things, and probably both: one, that intelligent species, assuming there to be others than humans, are scattered thinly across the universe; there might be no more than one per galaxy. Two, that carrying living beings across interstellar space is very, very difficult, and that optimistic scenarios about colonizing the entire galaxy in a matter of a millennia are untenable.

One thing we can be pretty sure about is that when humans emerge from the solar system, they are not going to find great Star Empires and Space Trading Federations full of busy aliens waiting for them -- or we would have learned of them already. Instead there will be a vast, desolate, and wild sky.

Nov 14 2005, 08:23 PM
I have no problem with putting anything on a probe that doesn't hinder its primary mission, but my understanding is that the odds are not merely slim, they are infinitesimal. That is, we could send out a million such bottle-messages, and the probability that all of them would simply disappear would not be significantly reduced. I think it is truer to say that these messages are poetic expression of human hopes and aspirations, than that they are really meant as messages to alien adventurers. No offense is intended to anyone who has worked on these things and truly believes in them.

I think that any effort to put ourselves in the shoes of a putative extra-terrestrial intelligence, and imagining what they might or might not do to communicate (or willfully fail to communicate with us), before we know that such creatures exist, is absolutely futile. We barely know what intelligence is with respect to Earth animals other than humans. We have no idea what intelligence would look like in non-terrestrial beings. There are no grounds for extrapolating from humans to other intelligent beings that might exist.

The negative results of SETI searches, and our other exploration of nearer space thus far, do not merely provide an "absence of evidence"; they do put definite constraints on what may be out there. One thing we now know is that near space is not packed with beings tending high-powered radio beacons. There could be lots of explanations for that, but the simplest hypothesis is that no intelligent and technologically advanced civiilization exists to do it in this region of space. That may be a disappointing thought; on the other hand, if one simply operates on an unfalsifiable assumption that such beings do exist, and have a bottomless bag of excuses for why they might not be detectable by any any increase in our technological powers, then the hypothesis is no longer strictly scientific.

[Rakhir]

What is going on with SETI@home?

You may find some articles on The Planetary Society website (http://www.planetary.org/home/).
Just browse in the project list :
- SETI Optical Searches
- SETI Radio Searches
- SETI@Home

There was also a recent update at spacedaily.com :
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/seti-05f.html

I have in the past, (...) run the SETI@home screensaver on my computer. I ran it for about 4 years and then uninstalled it. (...) because I saw little in the way of actual science being done with the SETI results we volunteers were all producing and because there seemed to be no plan for any kind of endpoint of the project in the future.

If you are not interested in processing SETI data anymore, you could switch to another project (the new processing engine allows also to share the processing capacity among several projects), like climate study or developing cures for human diseases...
- Climateprediction.net: study climate change
- Einstein@home: search for gravitational signals emitted by pulsars
- LHC@home: improve the design of the CERN LHC particle accelerator
- Predictor@home: investigate protein-related diseases
- Rosetta@home: help researchers develop cures for human diseases
- SETI@home: Look for radio evidence of extraterrestrial life
- Cell Computing biomedical research (Japanese; requires nonstandard client software)
- World Community Grid: advance our knowledge of human disease.

More info at : http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

Rakhir

[helvick]

Good comments David.

There are a couple of additional thoughts that I have in relation to the black sky problem.

We assume that Intelligent civilisations will be detectable remotely because they should leak quite a lot of RF signals. Our current communications technology is still relatively crude, we have only been refining it for a little over a century after all. I think it's reasonable to assume that ever increasing communications efficiency will lead to systems that are substantially less wasteful, much more precisely targeted and in general far more power efficient. Improvements in coding\modulation\signalling techniques are very likely to result in RF signals that are indistinguishable from noise for any but the intended recipient.

It seems very likely to me that the current "lighthouse" mode that we operate in will be a relatively short term thing. It wouldn't surprise me at all if changes in telecomm's over the next century led to a "dark earth" from an RF point of view.

If the above is true as a general rule then there could be hundreds of thousands of advanced civilisations in the galaxy. Some could be very close to us and we still wouldn't be able to detect them from their accidental leakage of RF energy.

The question remains as to why they would also choose not to attempt to communicate deliberately. Cosmic Zoos and Galactic Wildlife Parks that are intended to nurture primitive intelligense seem like a whole load of hokum to me. For starters such things would need galactic scale civilisations and unless our current laws of physics are totally rewritten such concepts just cannot happen, at least not over timescales that have any meaning for civilisation as we know it.

[deglr6328]

.....The negative results of SETI searches, and our other exploration of nearer space thus far, do not merely provide an "absence of evidence"; they do put definite constraints on what may be out there. One thing we now know is that near space is not packed with beings tending high-powered radio beacons. There could be lots of explanations for that......

YES. That was the main gist of my post. We are now getting the first really scientifically interesting significant constraints on these things and I want to see more coming from the various SETIs than simply "nope not yet"....."nope not yet"....."nope not yet". I want to see these negative results presented rigorously in peer reviewed journals.

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

It is false to say that the SETI results are negative!! They simply found that scifi-like or starwar-like scenarios are not true: there are no giant technologies and galactic dictature, no Independance Day to fear. That is reassuring in a way.

SETI operating from Proxima centauri (the closest star) would not have detected Earth!!!!! Even if Earth-like civilizations are common, SETI still needs an increase in 1000 in sensitivity to have some chance to find a close one.


This result weakens only very little the odds to find intelligent life. But not very much yet, it is not like finding 460°C at the surface of Venus, a simple figure which definitively and dramatically ousted all the dreams of finding luxurient jungles on Venus.


The SETI result still lefts many possibilities open. It just tells us that what we imagined was wrong. If there is life out there, it is just not like we imagined. And it is very interesting to guess what could be their motives, their purposes, their values, even if, of course, this is still untestable in a scientific meaning. This is the process of thinking, and perhaps one day one of these speculations will prove useful or even true.

I do not understand the pessimism of many science-minded people about finding life out there. In the beginning of the 19th century, it was understandable, as the mainstream hypothesis was that the planets formed at time of a close encounter of the Sun with another star, a much rare event which condemned the planet sytems to be only some in a galaxy. But today astrophysics and biology all show that the odds are hight to find life on many planets. So there is many reasons to be optimistic and few to be pessimistic.


I think this pessimism has philosophical reasons more than science reasons. Life elsewhere is felt as threatening, its attitude and even its very existence are felt like a threat to our values, our ego or something of this kind. Or are we so afraid of being considered hoaglandites that we do not consider the possibility of another life form? Be reassured, the SETI institute does not deal with UFOs and abduction...

[ElkGroveDan]

It's an interesting topic, but it doesn't belong here.

[ElkGroveDan]

Do you guys realize the search terms that have been added in just the first 8 posts here?

little green men
UFO's
aliens
galactic civilizations
star wars
Vulcans
missing planets
attack with spacefaring technology
Independence Day
unsuspecting worlds
colonize the whole galaxy
Cosmic Zoos
Galactic Wildlife Parks
galactic scale civilisations
Earth-like civilizations

[David]

I do not understand the pessimism of many science-minded people about finding life out there. [...] But today astrophysics and biology all show that the odds are high to find life on many planets. So there is many reasons to be optimistic and few to be pessimistic.
I think this pessimism has philosophical reasons more than science reasons. Life elsewhere is felt as threatening, its attitude and even its very existence are felt like a threat to our values, our ego or something of this kind.

I'm not (relatively) pessimistic because I want to be; I'd be thrilled if we made contact with other intelligent life forms. My dream job would be working on deciphering extraterrestrial languages. I just have no confidence that I'll ever have that data to work on.

The root of the problem, is, of course, having a data set of one for life, intelligence, and high technology. We therefore have no basis for evaluating probabilities.

We are lucky now to know that a very large number of stars develop planetary systems. That means that there are going to be a lot of platforms on which life could develop. Which is great. Unfortunately, we don't know what the chances of life spontaneously developing on any one of those platforms is. We can't conduct experiments over the requisite timescales in the lab; hence, the search to see if non-terrestrial life has developed on other worlds of the Solar System, Mars or Europa or Titan or maybe Enceladus. If we find them, we have some basis for suggesting that when the conditions are right, life will develop; if we don't, we might suppose that the development of life occurs only under very favorable circumstances, and we still wouldn't know how favorable they need to be.

And then there's a long, long gap between "life" and "multicellular life" and "intelligent life". We can make some guesses at this based on how long it took to develop multicellular life on this planet (over 3 billion years), but that's still a data set of one. And the development of intelligent life a billion years after that seems to have been a completely freak occurrence; there's no special reason for it to have happened when it did, rather than earlier or later or in a different branch of animal life. Indeed, small differences in the history of the planet could have led to a present-day Earth entirely devoid of intelligent animal life. So we have a good idea that intelligence is freakish and improbable. We just have no idea how improbable it is -- because, once again, we have a data set of one.

So if we were able to start testing planets with some unobtainable "tricorder" technology, the odds seem to be that most of them would be heaps of rock, ice, or gas. And those that have life are most likely going to have seas fermenting with invisible monocellular organisms, but nothing else. And the others -- interesting ones, that humans might actually be able to live on -- will be dominated by various kinds of macroscopic, mobile and sessile life -- but nothing intelligent. When you consider these layers of improbabilities, and the possibility that some of them might be very improbable, then the possibility that humans might be the only intelligent species in the Milky Way does not seem so far-fetched, even if life is relatively common. And even if there is intelligent life, we don't know how long it takes to develop a technological civilization. Humans were around for over 90,000 years before they even learned to write. Maybe other intelligent life forms could go for a million years without feeling the need to attain more than very rudimentary technology. But here we have a paradox; the data we need to answer these questions is the very data we're trying to guess at. Our ignorance is that profound.

[deglr6328]

EG-Dan, while I share your apprehension about using terms which are sometimes associated with kooks and "ufologists" as they may attract those unsavoury characters to the boards here through google searches, I must differ with you on the notion that we should not discuss these things (SETI) here because of that fact. I think we should never have to censor ourselves here merely because of the existence of hoaxers and paranormalists "out there". I think that there is definitely very interesting and worthwhile discussion on the topic of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which can be had here in a rational and skeptically scientific manner. This place is exceptional in that respect. We should never feel forced to shy away from legitimate levelheaded inquiry on these boards and it looks to me like Doug keeps it safe for that here.


Richard, with respect to suspicions of pessimism on ETI among the scientific community, I personally don't see it that way. I fully endorse the view outlined by David above. I'm not a pessimist, just a realist. I would love it so very much if we were to discover ETI in my lifetime and I am hopeful that it is within the realm of (albeit extreme) possibility. But at the same time, I'm not holding my breath. See, the question is of such extremely grave importance and consequence that I want to be 1000% certain that its real when or if we do actually discover it and I think that this kind of stern reservation and insistence on evidence would make such a discovery just that much more wonderful.

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

EG-Dan, while I share your apprehension about using terms which are sometimes associated with kooks and "ufologists" as they may attract those unsavoury characters to the boards here through google searches, I must differ with you on the notion that we should not discuss these things (SETI) here because of that fact. I think we should never have to censor ourselves here merely because of the existence of hoaxers and paranormalists "out there". I think that there is definitely very interesting and worthwhile discussion on the topic of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which can be had here in a rational and skeptically scientific manner. This place is exceptional in that respect. We should never feel forced to shy away from legitimate levelheaded inquiry on these boards and it looks to me like Doug keeps it safe for that here. 

I can only agree with this. My only remark is that, I think, we can study UFOs and parapsychology in a rational non-belief way (interested people see my site for link pages). But I shall not try to start any discutions on these topics here, unless of course Doug asks me to do so.

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

deglr6328 and David, thank you for your replies. I must confess I was a bit angry, but I better understand your arguments.

But I still maintain that there are very large uncertainties about the number of intelligent civilizations, between one per galaxy to millions per galaxy. So we have no reason to choose one of these numbers rather than another. Simply we do not know, and no more than you deglr6328 I expect to meet other beings in my lifetime, and I would be as much cautious than you (especially it happens that I have been deceived by so-called "contactees")


What I should say, in summary, is that the Drake equation is too simplistic, as we must keep with time. The appearance of a civilization is an evolution process, with advances by sudden breakthroughs, and which can be stopped by astrophysical conditions (the star dies, a super-nova close by, etc).


To explain my idea, I would make a simple comparizon with something we have at hand, and even, alas, we have too much of it: the growth of a tumour, a cancer. These mechanisms were unveiled recently, and it is a pity we do not speak much of them. A tumour starts at random, when a cell mutates somewhere and begins to escape its growth control mechanisms. But, as such, this baby tumour is harmless, just mechanical. To become a real deadly cancer, it has to undergo several other mutations. But mutations happen at random, anywhere in the cell mass. So how things take place? simply, if we have, for instance, a probability of one billionth to have a mutation, we think it is very unlikely. But when the cell mass reaches ten or hundred billions, thus the mutation becames MANDATORY. So the tumour gets all the "necessary" mutation, in a deterministic-like way, by steps according to is growth. 1 million cell, step one. 1 billion cells, step two. Ten billion cells, step three, etc. So the tumour evolves in a deteministic-like way, with only probabilistic causes. And this process is so constraining, that only a little number of recognizable types of tumours can form (less than 50), and the same precise types of tumours appear on million of different individuals, without any causal relation between them!!


This simplistic model would be useful, I think, to model the evolution of life on a planet. Like tumours, life evolves by breakthroughs: -drops with a membrane -autocatalytic reactions -DNA like mechanism -multicellular -neurones -brain -emotions, intelligence -civilization -after we cannot foresee, perhaps wisdom. So the model applies, except that the life mass on a planet does not grow exponentially like a tumour, so breakthroughs do not happen at a given moment, there are rather steps, with a probability, linear function of time, to pass to the next step at a given moment. (but if this probability if one half every ten million years, we can expect this step will not last one billion years). On Earth, the longest step was multicellular organisms, three billion years. So we can expect similar times on other planets.

Of course, there are environment factors which constrain the evolution of life. First, the life can modify the chemistry of the planet. (if Earth was sterilized today, life could not reappear). This is even a mandadory step, for instance only an oxygen-rich atmosphere could allow the appearance of movement (muscles) and brain. This kind of considerations could be very constraining: intelligence could appear only in animals on a planet with plants and photosynthesis. Like with tumours, only a small number of types of life would be possible. On the other hand a place like Jupiter's moon Europa could be full of worms and bugs, intelligence will never appear here, by lack of a powerfull energy source like oxygen to feed a large brain.

So the modeling of the evolution of a planet is more complex, with interactions between geologic/chemical/climatic conditions and biology.

The second set of environment factors are rather astrophysical, linked to the evolution of stars and planets. Some hints: Venus could have experienced Earth-like conditions in the beginning. So life could have appeared. But the catastrophic climate change which occured here (greenhouse divergence) stopped it. When? two billion years after formation? So we can guess that only monocellular life could exist at this time, and look for microscopic fossils in venusian mountains, but not for large animal fossils. The same is true with stars a bit larger than the Sun: their life time is too short, an Earth around them would have been destroyed at the stage of bacteria or worms. So it is useless, I think, to search radio signals around large stars. Too small stars like the Barnard star are also too red to give an efficient photosynthesis (although we do not know where is the limit)

At last we must account with catastrophic events: orbit changes, impacts, other star encounters, close supernovas, etc. What is the probability of having a supernova destroying life on a planet? At rough guess it varies widely. The diffuse halo of a galaxy and the bulb are good places. The arms are not very good. Center of globular clusters may be uninhabitable infernos. If we have a probability of a half every 100 million years to be destroyed by a supernova close by, so, with our 4500 million years, we are very unlikely survivors, and in this case civilizations would be indeed very rare, less than one per galaxy, even if life starts at once on every new planet system. But I think that probabilities are much better than half every 100 million years: in the halo there are never supernovas.

So I think the best estimate we can do today about the probability to have civs around there should account with all these probabiliies in a time-dependent scenario more complex that the time-independent Drake model. But, despites this, I think this calculus would still left very wide uncertainties, of many orders of magnittude, about the number of civilization in the Galaxy. That still justifies the SETI program. And anyway SETI is supported by who wants, these people have the right to spent their money in this. And the results already acquired are beginning to bite into the error box about the number and size of civilizations: we now know that there are no galactic dictature and starwars-like galactic network. Great.