Is Distributed Computing Being Distributed Badly? 341
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Distributed computing could help researchers studying climate change or Alzheimer's, but SETI@home's search for extra-terrestrial intelligence continues to dominate. Wall Street Journal columnist Lee Gomes says that's a big waste, especially because SETI doesn't seem likely to yield results: 'This continued fascination with living-room SETI comes as professional setiologists concede that early assumptions about the search for intelligent life -- notably those popularized by astronomer Carl Sagan -- have proven naively optimistic. For instance, it's now conceded there is little chance of detecting the "leaking" transmissions of another planet -- its version of "I Love Lucy" broadcasts. Those signals are too weak to stand out from the universe's background noise.' Gomes also traces the origins of SETI@home to Berkeley computer scientist David P. Anderson, and explains that users stuck with the ET search rather than medical investigations in part because of nationalistic competition. Yet Anderson no longer runs SETI@home. 'Instead, he donates his spare computer power to a global warming project. But he doesn't presume to tell others what they ought to be doing with their CPU cycles.'"
Crunching for their profit (Score:4, Interesting)
of course the WSJ would much rather you where crunching numbers for their drugs companies under the guise of "fighting cancer" or "protein folding" so your results can be turned into their profit (you didnt think that cure/treatment would be free like your CPU did you?)
searching for ET is not profitable so it must be bad
Re:Crunching for their profit (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Crunching for their profit (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody is going to do the same for SETI.
I bet the pharmas could even write it off on their taxes.
Crunching for their lives (Score:5, Interesting)
I currently work for a pharmaceutical company, and in a visit to a research lab I learned just how much computing power they throw at these problems. They do have supercomputers, intranet clusters, etc. to try to solve these problems. They are so incredibly complex, however, that those are not enough.
Re:Crunching for their lives (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, maybe if the pharmaceutical companies threw a little more of their obscene profits at the problem, it would be enough. The Board of Directors and the stockholders might have to cut back on Cuban cigars, though...
Re:Crunching for their lives (Score:3, Insightful)
It puzzles me why people who complain about the profits of various industries do not invest their money in them. If they have these record profits, why not invest in those companies and use the growth and dividends to improve your life and be able to afford the product?
Re:Crunching for their lives (Score:4, Interesting)
1) A lot of the basic research is paid for with my tax dollars and tax breaks for researching. It's therefore ridiculous to be paying the most for these drugs (compared to say Canada). I also don't think that the money needs to be spent on advertising. If a drug is good and worth while, then tell the doctors and they will use it.
2) I'm one of those crazies who thinks that this kind of research should be done in spite of the costs. Because of this, I think that the majority (80-90%) of the profits should be put back into R&D. I don't buy into the argument that the only reason we have all this research is because people can get rich from it. I think if you gave most researchers a decent salary they would be more than happy to continue researching.
I wonder if we need to break medical research into 2 categories.... Life-saving medicine and cosmetic medicine. Let's find a good way to provide enough resources to get the 1st group done, and let the pharms do "whatever they want (tm)" with the 2nd group.
Re:Crunching for their lives (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Crunching for their lives (Score:3, Informative)
And do take a care to note that about 80% of the patent derived income of the pharmaceuticals is wasted i
Re:Crunching for their lives (Score:3, Funny)
Hey, somebody has to pay people to climb to the tops of mountains and scream the name of their drug.
Re:Crunching for their profit (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Crunching for their profit (Score:5, Insightful)
Modern computers enter a powersaving mode in the times their CPU is not busy. Enabling Folding@Home or SETI@HOME on your machine consumes these powersaving cycles and draws more power.
Leave these programs running for a month and check out the huge difference in your power bill.
Ironically, the distributed system to calculate climate change could actually contribute to it!!
Re:Crunching for their profit (Score:5, Informative)
From the Folding@Home FAQ [stanford.edu]:
"Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money off of it.
Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the results from Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after publication. Next, after publication of these scientific articles which analyze the data, the raw data of the folding runs will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on this web site."
Re:Crunching for their profit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Crunching for their profit (Score:2)
http://217.160.138.71/portal/index.php?page=10 [217.160.138.71]
As you can see, most projects are in mathematics, but there are enough categories to interest everyone.
Just some info: Pande's most recently published folding@home project concerns the folding of a helix in a nanotube [acs.org].
Re:Crunching for their profit (Score:4, Insightful)
This story reminds me to go download SETI@home again.
The assumptions of SETI (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, we look for patterns. But a radically different intelligence might communicate in a way that seems random to us. Hell, they might have discovered or evolved whole mathematical systems that would seem chaotic or meaningless to even our brightest minds.
-Eric
Re:Crunching for their profit (Score:4, Insightful)
And as for global warming, I'm no climatologist but I've got to think that turning your damn computer off is more valuable than anything you could run on it.
Re:Crunching for their profit (Score:3)
I work at a medical university (the Karolinska Institute in Sweden), but as a programmer. What a nice place you must work at
And yet, other researchers disagree (Score:5, Informative)
http://folding.stanford.edu/about.html [stanford.edu]
http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/rah_about.php [bakerlab.org]
http://boinc.bio.wzw.tum.de/boincsimap/project.ph
http://predictor.scripps.edu/about_team.php [scripps.edu]
http://www.grid.org/projects/cancer/index.htm [grid.org]
So... Who are you again? Yeah, you're a guy reading Slashdot... Getting much research done?
Re:And yet, other researchers disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, it always amazes me how some people are willing to spend so much time cutting and pasting and href'ing, and none on reading.
coming from a cancer survivor (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:coming from a cancer survivor (Score:4, Insightful)
I suspect that for the older drug companies, altruism was a major factor in their founding. Those people who cry that our society is becoming less civilized are right, but they neglect to mention that "the fish rots from the head." Compare these quotes by Andrew Carnegie to today's "Death Tax" opponents: "Surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community." and "The man who dies rich dies disgraced."
Individuals like Warren Buffet, George Soros, and Bill Gates (yes, boo hiss, his software sucks, but he understands that a charitable foundation is a better use for ridiculous amounts of wealth than creating the next Paris Hilton) stand out today as exceptions to the "Greed is good." attitude that dominates.
Re:Crunching for their profit (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Crunching for their profit (Score:5, Insightful)
1) If a company starts manufacturing a product so expensive that they cannot make a profit on it, they will soon cease to exist, as will the benefitial product they hoped to give to the world. So what would you have them do? Commit organizational suicide so they can manufacture medicine to cure a few people, and lose any chance of contributing to the engineering of a better, more accessible solution for the world?
2) Companies are not soul-less collections of worker drones, however much karma it may provide to claim that they are. Most of us work for companies. Most of us are not horrible, soul-less drones. Individuals within companies make decisions, and those individuals usually do the best they can to make the right decisions based on several important angles, like:
a) what is best for the people that make up this company (see #1 above)
b) what is best for the community we serve
c) what is best for the people who invested in our success
More than one (Score:5, Informative)
Right now I'm attached SETI, Einstein, Rosetta & LHC. It works on one for a bit and then will switch to another for a bit. And so what if SETI@home will never find anything, it's a cool looking screen saver!
Re:More than one (Score:5, Insightful)
The other problem is deciding which project deserves most attention. I think it's well beyond me to judge whether computer time is better spent running climate change simulations or protein folding for some medical research. Hence if someone wishes to donate computer time it will be useful if all one had to do is to download a BOINC like client that will then run whatever the server sends it. Of course you'd need a reputable institution with a sensible scientific board running the server...
Re:More than one (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:More than one (Score:4, Insightful)
I know you what you're gonna say, I guess could have configured it better, RTFM, yadda yadda, but that's the point really isn't?
I'm donating my CPU cycles to some altruistic cause, I don't want to have to RTFM. I just want to install and forget. For this reason I miss the old SETI client, and have, as a result, now stopped contributing.
I simply can't be bothered.
Re:More than one (Score:2)
Well excuse me (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well excuse me (Score:2)
Re:Well excuse me (Score:2)
Just wait until you get, or someone you know gets it. Your attitude might change.
Re:Well excuse me (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Well excuse me (Score:3, Insightful)
This sounds FUDish, unless the doctor was trying to market the treatment. IANAMD, but I thought doctors could prescribe any legal treatment, regardless of FDA approval. (By legal, I mean they can't prescribe some controlled substances like cocaine, heroin, etc.) For example, chicken soup is not FDA-approved, but the doctor can pres
Re:Well excuse me (Score:5, Informative)
Since people posting FUD gets modded up like crazy here I guess I have to repost this:
From the Folding@home FAQ [stanford.edu]
"Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money off of it.
Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the results from Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after publication. Next, after publication of these scientific articles which analyze the data, the raw data of the folding runs will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on this web site."
For instance, you can read the 37 papers generated so far here [stanford.edu].
Re:Well excuse me (Score:5, Insightful)
By objections to this:
a) You don't know for sure that will/can happen.
b) If the steps taken to take this research and create a anti-cancer drug from it were obvious, it would be an outcry if the US pantent office gave the patent to a single company.
c)Even if this worst-case scenario did happen, the cycles donated would not be wasted. You would have helped advance human scientific research, and the medicines created would still be saving peoples' lives.
Re:Well excuse me (Score:2)
Do you? I think that perhaps linking to another comment about the same topic that sounds like the guy knows more than me would be better here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=189760&cid=15
Re:Well excuse me (Score:3, Insightful)
Does this sound rediculous to you?
Some people have other areas of interest -- we can't let the world stop so that some people can cure cancer, or save the children, or whatever.
Sorry.
Re:Well excuse me (Score:2)
I don't associate myself with the candy-ass-liberal-bed-wetting types that cry save-the-children, etc. to promote a cause. I have just seen first-hand the ra
Global warming project? (Score:4, Funny)
Global Warming (Score:4, Interesting)
Does this attempt to determine how much global warming is being caused by donating CPU cycles.
Re:Global Warming (Score:5, Informative)
Does this attempt to determine how much global warming is being caused by donating CPU cycles.
I think that issue is answered pretty well in the FAQ [climateprediction.net]. When it comes to the real experiments being run by that particular project and their results, you can start here [climateprediction.net].
Writing the article (Score:2)
I would complain more, but I've used too much CPU time on my computer already; people are dying because of this post.
Wastes of time (Score:5, Funny)
People should stop gardening and focus their time and energy on solving global warming, but I don't presume to tell anyone what they should be doing with their time.
Look. Global warming is easy to solve. (Score:3, Interesting)
While that isn't happening you know your government aren't taking global warming seriously and if they aren't, you should probably ask yourself why you should take it seriously.
Re:Look. Global warming is easy to solve. (Score:3, Insightful)
High prices don't cause inflation. (Score:3, Informative)
Do you think inflation is something magic which only applies to money? Did you think money just magically decreases in value? It decreases in value because either nobody wants it (they don't believe it's worth anything) or because there's lots more of it around. e.g. The government prints a load of money to... say... finance a war, instead of raising taxes.
Funnily eno
Re:High prices don't cause inflation. (Score:4, Interesting)
While I agree with the principle here, don't forget that with legalized banking fraud ("fractional reserve banking") they don't have to actually print more money to increase the effective amount of currency; they can simply lower the mandantory reserve ratio. Should the LBF system ever fail, the FDIC will be forced to step in and print massive amounts of paper currency to back all those accounts.
Conversely, credit contraction (higher interest rate & reserve ratio) has a deflationary effect equivalent to that of taking paper currency out of circulation. While I do believe that the long-term trend is toward inflation, indications are that we may be approaching a credit contraction phase, and thus short-term deflation. It may or may not manage to balance out the overall inflationary trend, but it's something to watch for none the less.
Re:High prices don't cause inflation. (Score:2)
Re:Wastes of time (Score:2)
Re:Wastes of time (Score:3, Funny)
I, for one, welcome our alien overlords with open arms. Eat me last.
Global warming (Score:5, Funny)
Instead, he donates his spare computer power to a global warming project.
Funny....I think that all the Slashdot gaming rigs out there are contributing quite a bit to global warming, but you don't hear us bragging about it... ^_^
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
bittorrent dist (Score:2)
As for SETI@home, maybe the aliens can't be detected using radio telescopes?
thinking (Score:2)
The AI recommends a complete shutdown and immediate termination
Just like donations to charities (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just like donations to charities (Score:5, Insightful)
Still true today.
Re:Just like donations to charities (Score:2)
While the sentence above was never quite true and many a starving dog has bitten the hand that feeds it. I understand it's sentiment. The human mind has a much bigger capacity for cruelty than dogs, but that is simply because the human mind has a much bigger capacity for thought, and thus also a much bigger capacity for compassion and love.
The dog will also not provide deep conversations, create magnificent works of art, cure diseases or simply just
Re:Just like donations to charities (Score:3, Funny)
Drug research (Score:2)
No unix/linux clients, but then I don't really want my linux boxes running at 100% anyway.
Re:Drug research (Score:3, Informative)
You do know what "nice" [wikipedia.org] means right?
My main linux box is running at 99.7 for Distributed.net but when something else needs CPU time the dnetc process is set for maximum niceness and it gives it up.
LK
Grinding axes (Score:2)
Well we know what his position is on social-security.
WSJ telling what you should(n't) do with your CPU? (Score:2)
Obviously there is the statement that the guy in question doesn't want to tell people what to do with their own CPUs, but that is exactly what he, and the article, are doing.
If the people want to search for ET, let them.
Corporations have the money for research... (Score:2, Insightful)
Journalist's opinion is better (not) (Score:5, Insightful)
I postulate that the returns for finding out if there is intelligent life in outer space has greater implications for the world's population. Not immediate concerns mind you (unless something extraordinary happens), but the practical usage will eventually seep out of the acedemic and scientific circles and benefit the population in ways that we cannot possibly imagine.
The opinion the journalist writes is the simple (IMO shallow) doubts of doing science for it's own sake.
Besides, this whole opinion is practically moot. There are MORE than enough extra computing cycles out there. People can choose to which project they wish to donate too. Slow news day perhaps.
-FlynnMP3
People are using their things wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a waste that people are storing ice cream in the fridge when they could be storing donated blood plasma.
Re:People are using their things wrong (Score:2, Insightful)
You could have made a more correct analogy like "It's a waste that people spend time squinting their eyes trying to see individual atoms rather than using them to read to the blind.", but that would have undermined your position. That *is* a waste of time, because there's no chance for t
Re:People are using their things wrong (Score:2)
YOUR position depends on their being no ET, which is not possible to prove or disprove. Do you go around telling people that they are wasting time going to church because there is no God?
More to the point, stop trying to tell people what they should be doing with their time and stuff, whether it's computers or eyes. It's annoying.
sure SETI@home's dumb, until we find them (Score:2)
I recall some time back that (Score:2)
Anyone else recall this or have more details?
Last time I checked the SETI institute website (Score:3, Insightful)
As far as I know, there have been no other signals detected. SETI seems pretty pointless to me. Their whole basis for study is the "drake equation" which was an estimate, based on 1950's understanding of cosmology and evolutionary biology which estimated the likelihood of finding sentient life. What we know of cosmology has d
grid.org - Cancer research, etc. (Score:5, Informative)
I have been running grid.org [grid.org] for many years. They focus on medical research. They provide great features for managing all your computers that run the grid projects. You can even choose which research to participate in. And, to satiate a geek's lust for power, they have rankings for your aggregate compute time.
Re:grid.org - Cancer research, etc. (Score:2)
Unless they've changed their terms recently at least...
Personally I use my cycles hacking a puzzle for an ARG
Re:grid.org - Cancer research, etc. (Score:2)
Good point. I guess I'm ok with that. If they can cure important diseases, I'm willing to suffer the consequences. One could argue that a commercial venture will yield beneficial results sooner, since they are poised to act on any breakthrough that the project may produce.
/. effect (Score:2)
It's not their fault! (Score:3, Funny)
Freedom (Score:2)
Someone needs to.. (Score:2, Funny)
Summary (Score:2, Interesting)
That summary is more than a page and a half long on my screen (800x600), because the author doesn't know a thing about Slashdot and submitted a summary that looks more like a WSJ article.
Why can't the Story Accepters do a little editing on the side? It would have looked perfectly okay if you'd cut it off at "likely to yield results":
Carl Bialik from WSJ [mailto] writes
Darwin@Home (Score:2, Interesting)
Okay, I'm not finding a cure for Alzheimer's, but at least I'm exploring the world of the Flying Spaghetti Monster [venganza.org] with http://www.darwinathome.org [darwinathome.org].
Reasons to be cheerful... (Score:5, Insightful)
Number 2 - Seti was the seed-corn for the whole concept of doing scientific computing as a distributed calculation. It was directly responsible for the development of BOINC, which is a very valuable tool for all the scientific community.
SETI runs on OSS (Score:2)
Chip H.
There wouldn't be other projects without SETI@home (Score:3, Insightful)
While SETI@homes's managed to retain nearly a million members, the claim that it steals participants from other projects is absurd. Most of those other projects would face far greater obstacles to acceptance by having to woo new participants not already familiar with DC. Probably the originators of those other projects would not have even heard of DC themselves, or at least would have started several years later without a clear success story to look up to.
I gave up on SETI (Score:3, Insightful)
It's happening right now for ourselves. The entire hi-power broadcast radio phenomenon on this planet will have begun and essentially ended within about a single lifetime, maybe two. We've no data to indicate that radio would remain a prefered means of communication anywere in the universe for any race that understands technology *that* well.
SETI has always barked up the wrong tree. Not because there are no intelligent races out there -- and I really do suspect there are -- but because if they *are* intelligent in a way that we would even recognize then they've moved on to other forms of communication, or settled into a fine state of just dealing with everyday as it comes and not worring about events in their version of Iraq.
Optical SETI versus Radio (Score:4, Interesting)
1) Visible light-emitting devices are smaller and lighter than microwave or radio-emitting devices.
2) Visible light-emitting devices produce higher bandwidths and can consequently send information much faster.
3) Interference from natural sources of microwaves is more common than from visible sources.
4) Naturally occurring nanosecond pulses of light are mostly likely nonexistent, although there are all kinds of radio signals that could be similar to intentional SETI transmissions. Thus Optical SETI does not require grid computing to find signals.
5) Exact frequencies of light are not required, as nanosecond unfiltered light pulses would still outshine the planet's star by over 30 times.
Optical SETI detection out to 100 light-years is doable today, with a bit more work optical SETI out to 1,000 light-years is possible.
Optical SETI paper [princeton.edu]
Helping people with Alzheimer's (Score:3, Insightful)
One time my manager showed me some statistics for drug discovery. Drugs need to go through various rounds of testing: it might start with assays with just receptors, move up through animal tests to full blown clinical trials. He showed me two interesting facts: firstly, the correlation between success at one stage and success at the next stage was low. This meant that the correlation between the earliest stages and the final in vivo drug activity was tiny. Secondly, the best drugs were often outliers in the sense that you could often discern some kind of pattern allowing you to predict drug activity for a class of molecule, but that the good drugs fell way outside this pattern. Because activity levels predicted from simulation are so poorly correlated with the first stage of drug trials, and we already know that trials at this stage are poorly correlated with actual drug usefulness, simulations are just as much a waste of resources as SETI.
It seems to me that molecular modeling is actually one of those hard 'macho' (but ultimately pointless) projects that gets funding because to criticize it makes you seem anti-drug, anti-therapy and ant-human-progress.
(I'm not saying people shouldn't try to model molecules. This is a great blue-sky goal. But people who are trying to find drugs or therapies shouldn't be wasting their time with such techniques.)
It's not CPU power American medicine lacks... (Score:3, Insightful)
If there was a way to make as much money on a one-shot cancer cure as on pills to control stomach acid, we would have it now. Antibiotics are easy to develop, the test procedures have been refined by years of experience, they've been mass-produced for a hundred years now, yet no new antibiotics have gone on the market in the last 20 years. Does anyone really think science has run out of substances that kill bacteria? No, the problem is that there's no money on cures or prevention, people take them once and then recover (or don't get sick in the first place). There's far more money to be made in selling Americans with health insurance $3 purple pills to treat heartburn or baldness or enlarged prostates or to let old farts have sex until they're ninety than in saving hundreds of millions in Africa from certain death by AIDS.
If the drug companies that stand to benefit from current medical research want donated CPU cycles, then they should start acting like they really intend to develop and market (at affordable prices) a cancer cure or a vaccine for AIDS or some other miracle cure rather than yet another heavily advertised long-term treatment to help baby boomers keep pretending they aren't getting old. If they want to keep on milking the old folks' prescription drug benefits for all they're worth, they can use some of those profits to pay for supercomputer time.
Re:Useful CPU cycles use (Score:2, Interesting)
I am doing the BBC global warming, but a lot of CPU hours got wasted when they found one of the input files was duff http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/hottopics/climatechange/up dates1.shtml [bbc.co.uk] DOH!,/p>
I could have wasted that time looking for aliens.
Anyway, what is that guys problem, no amount of theory will prove or disprove if aliens watch TV like us. We need to at least look for them to prove anything.
Re:Useful CPU cycles use (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just a little thought about SETI@Home... - BS (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course there will still be the fringe whackos who actively work against the rest of the human race (we welcome our alien overlords!) but the majority always rises to the challenge and a challenge presented to eve
Re:Just a little thought about SETI@Home... (Score:2)
A few hundred years ago, in Europe they probably couldn't build guillotines fast enough. Many of those countries have already abandoned capital punishment.
As for surveillance, 1000 years ago they couldn't imagine the technology that is available today. Surveillance consisted of sneak
Re:Just a little thought about SETI@Home... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah! really dig those medieval infant mortality levels ... who wants antibiotics, the chlorination of water and vaccination anyway.
A thousand years ago you would have lived in a small village, every one would have known everything about you, who you were, where you were, what you ate, when you took a dump, the whole thing. Mo
Re:Just a little thought about SETI@Home... (Score:2)
Levels of technology. (Score:2)
If one group has the technology to reach the other, the other stands no chance in the first place.
Very little thought (Score:2, Insightful)
Perhaps because we have some spare time on our radiotelescopes. I for one have no interest in uniting with the rest of humanity under anything less than the United States Constitution.
For the love of God, the level of surveillance that the anglosphere tolerates is unfathomable by the standards of 1,000 years ago. In Britain, there's a movement to monitor every child's eating habits and American intrusion is legendary in its
Re:Just a little thought about SETI@Home... (Score:2)
Huh? This is just clearly untrue and with absolutely no basis in history. Throughout most of our history your life would have been worth next to nothing to anyone except the people that knew you directly. Sometimes not even parents would put that much value into your life, because they were used to losing children and adopted the self-sustaining idea that they could always have more children.
Times are clearly different now, because of
Inaccurate (Score:5, Insightful)
As others have said, Bullshit with a capital "B".
I could go on (the acceptability of massive civilian casualties during the first two wars, up to and including the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, vs. the unacceptability of even modest collatoral damage today, etc. etc.), but you get the idea. Human life has seldom if ever been prized so highly as it is today.
... and the stimulus for growth that will push our species into addressing and developing further refinements in ethics, diplomacy, and the wisdom to use military force (or not) as needed. As with any challenge, we will either rise to the occasion or fail.
For the love of God, the level of surveillance that the anglosphere tolerates is unfathomable by the standards of 1,000 years ago.
Hardly. The surveillance was done by a different entity 1000 years ago, namely the Catholic church. Its mechanism was low-tech...guilt and mentally batter your subjects into such a perpetual state of guilt and then encourage them to go the "confession" and receive absolution. Everyone reported their sins to the local priest, and often discussed their "concerns" with said priests likewise. Even kings had their confessors...which gave the church an immense level of day-to-day surveillance of an entire continent during the middle ages that is still unrivaled even today.
Even 50, 20, 10 years ago (hell, today for that matter), if you think government serveillance of your life in the big city is bad (and it is IMHO very bad, and very dangerous), it is nothing to what your family and neighbors make a point of knowing about you when you live in a small community. Talk about "Big Brother", try adding "Big Aunt", "Big Sister", "Big Cousin", "Big Mother", "Big Father, "Big Neighbor", "Big Gossip Down the Street", etc. to that.
So your arguments are false on their face, and as for reasons not to venture into space, spurious and irrelevant at best. Space brings with it problems and solutions, just as the discovery of America did, and every other migration and advance of the species has over the millennia. If and when we do meet another sentient species, that too will bring with it challenges
However, if we cower in our little corner and forsake progress because we fear it, then failure (as in the end of the species in the nearer term) is no longer merely a possibility...it becomes a certainty, and along with it our certain extinction, the next time the planet experiences one of its many recurring major disas
Re:It is a waste... (Score:4, Insightful)
They support seti for the same reason that they support Soccer/Baseball teams that never have a hope of winning anything, it's more sentimental than logical.
No coersion, so please cool down (Score:3, Insightful)