[benkahuna]

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I caught a program on The History Channel about SETI.

They said that litening, and looking power is 100 trillion times greater than when they began in the 60's. They also said computers measure and read patterns in sound, and light down to one billionth of a second in duration looking for signs of intelligence. And new technology that will see much larger areas in great detail-can't remember the stats here.

To date-nothing.

Regardless of religious beliefs-doesn't it take a tremendous amount of faith to keep looking? What basis is there to keep believing? Is the vastness of space reason enough to keep looking? Would I be out of line in saying that it's ok for these "scientists" to be taken seriously, but one that believes in God can't/shouldn't?

Jeff likes using -'s and to a lesser extent /'s and an even lesser extent third person vagueries. [img]/images/graemlins/cool.gif[/img]

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You're being too results oriented. If you look at the setiathome web site, there is an interesting interview with some of the PIs running the project. There are a number of points you miss with the implication of your post being that if we haven't found something, we probably are not going to do so.

1. Only some 35 percent of the sky gets searched.
2. Even at significantly higher resolutions, there is still plenty of data that we can miss.
3. You've installed some implicit faith regarding looking that doesn't need to be there. The whole point of SETI isn't to discover incontrivertable evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence that we know are there. It's an exploration to see if we can find something which, even given the analogies to earch, may or may not be there. As you pointed out, the terms in the Drake's equation have a great deal of uncertainty.

If you want to deal with the science of SETI, it's more about the search procedures, whether they work, and the ability to process the data. They can produce articles of a scientific and computer engineering nature that make original and useful contibutions to intellectual endeavor. It's much like how many DARPA projects have resulted, accidentally, in very useful contributions to society, one of the key example being ARPAnet that resulted in how we are now communicated, the internet. It is true that such work is not necessarily science.

It does back to the whole thing with going on a search or trying to discover or create new knowledge, part of the beauty and randomness is that you'll never know what you'll find.

I don't believe SETI is that expensive of a project, especially compared to the entire scientific budget of the US, NASA, or the research institutions that are deeply involved in the project (most notably UC Berkeley). It's a lot like drawing to a 2-outer in a gigantic 500 bet pot. You're odds of winning may be small, but making a small contribution could pay significant dividends.

If you don't consider SETI worthwhile once you've put it all in a fair perspective, it's understandable and I wouldn't hold it against you. Until you do (and I don't think you have), I'll probably consider you biased and misguided.