Rich <someone@somewhere.com> writes:

How can you research something when you got zero examples
to research?

Answer: You can't.

So far so good.  So now we have two hypotheses:  no examples
exist, or they exist and we have not found them yet.  Hpw can
you tell the difference between these two?  According to the
scientific method, you have to go look.

Failure to find strong evidence of ETI in any given SETI 
program is not a failure of the program, it is a scientific
*result*. 

You cannot derive meaningful boundaries for something
undetected. 

This is completely untrue.  Look at all the gravity wave searches,
dark matter searches, or proton decay searches.  None of these
has found anything yet (just like SETI).  But each of them
sets meaningful limits.  Gravitational waves, if they exist,
are no stronger than this.  Proton decay, if it occurs, is no
more common than this, and so on.  These boundaries are extremely
meaningful since they allow us to rule out theories where these
effects should be detected.

And you can search for a million years for anything that
does not exist, refining your so-called boundaries again
and again, but you ain't doing science.

Negative searches explicitly rule out
theories where the waves are stronger, the decays more common,
and so on.  This is *exactly* what science is about, using
experimental evidence to rule out possible theories.   For example,
check out research into general relativity.  Some of the
theories have been ruled out since a search for galactic tides in
the Earth-moon system found nothing, IIRC.

Is there any limit to the amount of resources you are
willing to commit to this 'search' Christopher?

This is a very different question.  The amount of resources to
spend on SETI vs other scientific questions is a matter of
priorities.

That's just it, none of these [SETI] "investigations" are necessary.
Not one.

This is science.  You have a hypothesis, alien life does not exist.
You have made (correctly by the scientific method) a prediction
that can in theory be falsified.  Your prediction is "SETI
searches will all fail".  Now, if you want people to believe
your theory, they must try to falsify your theory and fail.
So, from the scientific method, you want the best possible
SETI searches, and have them all fail.  This is the only
(scientific) way to strengthen your hypothesis.

So far a lot of money has been spent on SETI. 

Actually very little.  For example, Jody Foster's salary for 
the movie "Contact" was many times larger than the yearly 
funding for SETI.

Compare this with extra-solar planet studies. 

These are actual studies, real science, and we have real
results, not bogus and fraudulant statistics paraded as
science.

And how did it get to be real science? This is *exactly* like
SETI.  We had one example (the solar system), from which you
cannot derive statistics.  So some theories held that planets
were uncommon, and some that they were quite common.  Since
this is science, the answer is to go look.  Suppose these
searches had come up empty (like some searches in globular
clusters have)?  Would you then say they were not doing science?

There are many productive ways that our research dollars can
be spent, I don't see that chasing a negative to the ends of
the universe is a constructive or sensible allocation of
resources.

So you don't believe, in the case of a negative result,
that the limits set by the search are worth the expense.
This is perfectly fair, but far different than the arguments
that SETI is not science.

Actual atronomy deals with the observable universe, and as such
any theories can be tested and potentially disproved. SETI is
not open to disproof, as no amount of negative evidence will
falsify it. SETI is not a science.

There are two basic hypothesis, mutually exclusive.  Either
technically capable alien life does not exist, or it does.
The hypothesis (your hypothesis) is that such life does
not exist.  This of course CAN be disproved, and the way 
to do this is SETI searches.  So you should be in
favor of them, and hope that they fail, since it makes your
hypothesis stronger.

    Lou Scheffer