Random SETI Comments & Questions

[maurile]

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That's my point. It's not science.

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Neither is love-making. So what?


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Well - we dont divert scientific funding to love-making.

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We don't divert sceintific funding to SETI either. For the brief time that SETI was publicly funded, it was through NASA, wasn't it? Well, NASA isn't science, either. So the funding for SETI wasn't scientific funding. Like I said, so what?

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The point is not that SETI has no place, it's just not science. For what it's worth I dont think love-making is science either but that doesnt seem relevant to the original post.

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The point is that lots of worthwhile things aren't science.

I'm not saying that SETI is worthwhile. But the fact that it isn't science is not much of an argument that it isn't worthwhile.

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It's saying "Hey this would be cool if we found it, though we have no good reason to believe we will...let's go look"

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And?

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And - this is not a good reason to spend millions of dollars, anymore than a few homeopaths telling me they have noticed good results is a good reason to invest millions on producing "medicinal" water.

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Who said it was?

The obvious difference, though, is that homeopathy can be falsified for $10, so there's no need to spend millions.

Err I dont quite get where you're coming from. As I understood the original question it was regarding why is SETI deemed scientific whereas religion is deemed faith-based. My response to that was that SETI is not science (and still does receive support from public funding bodies who would otherwise spend the money on science). I didnt claim it was unimportant nor that science is all that should be funded.

By the way, the homeopathy comparison doesnt die so easily (being another example of pseudo-science). Of course scientific studies have been undertaken disproving homeopathy - being pseudo science the homeopath can follow the same path as the SETI enthusiast. "Oh we just havent found anything yet - we need more time to keep looking"

[maurile]

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As I understood the original question it was regarding why is SETI deemed scientific whereas religion is deemed faith-based.

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I don't get that from the original post.

In any event, here's a good article on SETI and Intelligent Design by someone from the SETI Institute. Maybe it will help answer whatever question the original poster was asking.

[chezlaw]

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Err I dont quite get where you're coming from. As I understood the original question it was regarding why is SETI deemed scientific whereas religion is deemed faith-based. My response to that was that SETI is not science (and still does receive support from public funding bodies who would otherwise spend the money on science). I didnt claim it was unimportant nor that science is all that should be funded.

By the way, the homeopathy comparison doesnt die so easily (being another example of pseudo-science). Of course scientific studies have been undertaken disproving homeopathy - being pseudo science the homeopath can follow the same path as the SETI enthusiast. "Oh we just havent found anything yet - we need more time to keep looking"

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Nothing wrong with scientific investigation into homeopathy if someone wants to fund it. However they should have scientific results that support it before they start claiming it works. The same with SETI.

It seems the only real question is should it be funded by public money. I'm not sure, it seems more like a hobbyiest thing to me but I don't know how much it costs or whether there are other tangible benefits such as improvements in technology, better data anlysis techniques, or other uses for the collected data.

chez