Baby seal tastes like...

baby seal. Really. Tastes like nothing else. And adult seal is too stringy to eat.

To put it simply, it's due to lack of knowledge and/or imagination.

I object, sir. The people planning these missions are the ones who read those books and devoted their very life's work to the scientific proof of these hypotheses.

I've sat in the room while these topics are debated, at a high aggregate hourly rate, and we have discussed looking at other sources, non-earth-like planets, non-carbon based lifeforms, telescopes on the moon, telescopes in Jupiter orbit, arrays of telescopes, life on planets around binary stars, etc.

There was no lack of imagination. But no lack of calculation either.

Thing is, when the public entrusts you with millions, perhaps billions, of their dollars, and the public can only afford one of these missions per decade (if that - shall I give you a litany of cancelled planet-finding missions from the last decade?), you have to look under the streetlight, because that's where the light is. And if you're looking for a set of keys that you don't not even know what they look like, or if they're there, with a magnifying glass that defines your field of view, and the lamp is very dim, looking under the lamp is more cost-effective than any other strategy.

We know that life arises under "earth-like" conditions, for lack of a better word, so if you only get to look once in your lifetime, that's what you look for.

The whole business of "look for non-carbon forms of life" gets put on the spreadsheet, with all the other crazy ideas, and is assigned a Reward of 5, Difficulty of 5, and Risk of 5, and by any logical method of decision making, gets discarded early.

As it should be. Resources are not infinite. But these concepts, and wackier ones, are entertained. Discussed. Debated. Proposed.

You may fault us for not wasting millions/billions of your dollars proposing missions that will not get funded, and likely not be successful, but it's not for lack of imagining it, or putting it on the board for discussion. It's just unlikely that 1) it would make it through the review process, 2) Congress would fund it (imagine the headlines at election time!), and 3) a scientist would spend half a career pursuing such a likely unprofitable path.

(I hate to give up my mod points to comment on this thread, but I resent the implication that those who do this for a living are somehow without imagination or knowledge or didn't read the canon. We did. We took it seriously).

2 sigma isn't worth a pre-print. In a big collaboration, a preprint takes a lot of time and effort and approvals. Which they'll save for the 5 sigma data, whether the signal is there or not. No one wants to go through the effort to write a pre-print for something that might go away with the next fb^{-1}. Nonetheless, the news was out there, so why not address it? An end-of-run press conference seems like the right venue to announce status, if not results.

I see what you're doing there. You're going for the anti-marketing dollar.[1]

[1] RIP Bill Hicks

I'd imagine it's done because it's difficult to keep these (preliminary) results quiet nowadays. This news has been buzzing about the internets for weeks. Why not have an announcement saying what's going on? It's not as though it is a big secret anymore, and it forestalls a lot of the speculation.

More fb^{-1} needed...

in 25 easy steps:

at The Online Photographer

I never said a postdoc cost 250k. I said "one person, decent salary, benefits, overhead" ~ 250k. I've said mid-career scientist several times. Where did I say a postdoc cost that much? In many scientific fields, maybe not yours, at many universities, and national labs, tenured faculty and staff scientists cost, not make, $250k. It is not ridiculous and it is not uncommon. Other posters have confirmed that estimate is reasonable. Shall I post up links to lists of salaries of faculty at public uni's? At national labs? What do you think a staff scientist at GSFC or LANL or Ball Aerospace makes, and costs in overhead? A typical tenured prof?

I've posted links with data that strongly suggest postdoc salaries across the country are higher than they are in your field. Those links show a range from a bit lower to a lot higher (did you look at the data?). You keep pointing to one number (which is a lot higher than you originally claimed) and now say it's no, really it's lower, without pointing out any evidence of that. Just ridicule. Post up some real data. Find better data than I did in a one-minute google search. That might be self-reported and low statistics, but it's better than anything you've put up.

$250k cost is an excellent estimate for one mid-career professional scientist FTE-year. I am not wrong about that. My original post compared that cost with the number in the original submission. It's a fair comparison. I never said postdoc. That was you. Everytime I've said anything about postdocs, I've posted reasonable postdoc numbers based on data, unlike you.

Really? The EPA budget jumped to 10B in 2010 (stimulus), and dropped back down to 8.6B in 2011. In 1988, it was $5B. In inflation-adjusted dollars, it's at best flat since 1988, and there were many more dip years than 2010 years.

Your reference is old. The newer one (at the top of the link you listed) says $38.5k for a newly minted postdoc. Close enough to the numbers I listed as to make no difference. So I'd guess that those averages, small sample though they are, are probably about right, and the NIH pays low, which squares with what I've heard from my life sciences buds, compared to physics and engineering.

You said A typical FTE for a grad student /postdoc is around 40k/yr. My numbers are closer to right than yours, and you're sending me documentation to prove it. Feel free to send me any documentation of overhead rates you find. I just know what they are here, and at the four other institutions, academic and otherwise, that I've worked. They're not 30%. Postdoc FTEs, even at the low end, are not 40k.

/.'er reason above also verified that $250k was a reasonable estimate for a scientist FTE, which you had originally put at "Hahahaaaahhahahahahaaaa."

I'm not writing off anything less than $1M as chump change, and I'm not writing off $40k as chump change. But I'm not kidding myself about how much it costs just to get people in the lab, and I think you are underestimating it significantly.

$40k seems like a good estimate, and googling for a minute seems to verify the numbers I've heard recently from my colleagues:

Caltech $45k

MIT $43.4k

UT-Austin $43.5

U of AZ $41.5k

I only know what the overhead is at places I've been, but 85-100% is what I hear from others. 100% is good enough for making an estimate. FWIW, 100% is what any freelancer charges for overhead. Maybe it's a bit less at some universities/labs, but the point is: those costs are significant.

$250k/FTE-year is a reasonable guess of what a mid-career Ph.D at a national research center costs when charging to a grant. Maybe it's 10% less, or maybe 20%. But it's not factors of two off. It's a reasonable number to work with.

And yeah, I understand how research gets done in an academic environment. Thanks.

My point, to make it explicit and at boring length, is that $40k ain't much. When it comes to crowdsourcing funding for science, if you're honest with yourself about real costs, $250k is not that much money. It's not nothing. But when someone says they're going to raise $250k for crowdsourcing of funding, the number that pops into my head, from having filled out innumerable budgeting spreadsheets, is "that's roughly one scientist full-time-equivalent-year." Adjust accordingly for who you plan to have do the work, equipment, purchases, etc. But it's a reasonable equivalent. If yours is that you can get four postdoc FTEs for that price, fine. I'm skeptical, especially since the salaries you're paying your postdocs don't square with what I can find on the web and with what I hear from the postdocs I work with, and I'm skeptical of 30% overhead numbers, but fine. You have your $250k equivalent, and I have mine.