In infinite wisdom Christopher M. Jones answered:

Rich <someone@somewhere.com> wrote in message news:<4096BAF0.9050408@somewhere.com>...

I'm reminded of discussions I had with an ex-roomate
who was into magic. Despite a tower of theories explaining
why magic works (you know, like that it causes the wave-
function to collapse), he was somewhat aggravated when
I suggested that first he needed to show *that* magic
worked. Oddly, for as yet unexplained reasons, he was
never able to show me this, or point to anyone who could.

SETI is in a similar position near as I can tell.

Utterly wrong.  SETI is not about finding extra-terrestrial civilizations per se,

It's not? Boy did I misunderstand the acronym. So then what
*does* 'SETI' stand for?

it is about scientific research into
the abundance and nature of extra-terrestrial civilizations.

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

Answer: You can't.

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

I'm amazed at how many think that you can derive population
statistics from one example, the earth.

Sufficiently well constructed and well executed
SETI programs that produce a negative result provide critical data defining boundaries on the abundance and nature of ETIs.

You cannot derive meaningful boundaries for something
undetected. You cannot research something you've not found.

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.

To obtain hard boundaries on ETI parameters
it will be necessary to perform a wide variety of robust
search programs using a wide assortment of techniques (not just searching for radio waves but also searching for other incidental signs of ETI activity).

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

I submit that you cannot do science on anything that cannot
be detected, regardless of whether it exists or not. SETI
is not science, it's not studying 'something', rather, it's
looking *for* something, something as yet undetected.

But in order to
eventually conduct ALL those investigations it is necessary to conduct each of them.

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

In other words, the only way to
build something whole and of substance is to build it with
bits and pieces which are each incomplete.

SETI is not building anything, SETI is looking *for* something.

Which is what
we are starting to do now with our limited, incomplete
SETI programs.

So far a lot of money has been spent on SETI. Looks like
you are willing to spend lots more, of other people's money
of course. As long as it's your dollar, you can do what
you want with it. But I don't for a second imagine that
your goals are limited to your personal funds. And when
you present SETI as something it is not to generate support,
that's when I have issues with what you are doing.

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.

Long before the 1990s there had been many extra-solar planet searches.
They all were very limited and they all came up empty.
This placed certain upper limits on the abundance and size
of extra-solar planets, but did not at all rule out the
possible existence of planetary systems below the detectability thresholds of those studies.  Indeed, as better systems and new search techiques were developed
we started to find a large number of extra-solar planets.

Last I read the count was about 113. And some of them exist
where current theories of planetary formation say they cannot
be. None is even potentially a canidate for life as we know
it. Nor are current studies sensitive enough to detect
habitable planets.

And those searches were good enough to allow us to make
informed estimates of various upper and lower limits and
abundances and such-like.

I'm not so sure about that. The dataset is still very small.
It's not clear, for example, that metal poor stars can have
planets, or perhaps planets not gas giants. There are whole
populations of stars that are metal poor, especially the
populations of globular clusters.

The surface has just been scratched, we don't really have
enough data to extrapolate. We don't know if this corner of
the milky way is typical, or if the milky way is typical.

The best data we are likely to get is very local, and I
see no clear reason to assume that we can extrapolate from
it to the rest of the universe.

But they have not yet given us the entire picture, and it will take more effort and different searches to ferret out the information in other
areas to give us a more complete picture.

But still, planetary searches are one thing, SETI another.

Again, we have
to do each search in order to do all of them, and though
each may be incomplete and limited, each provides useful
data which forms an important *part* of the bigger, better picture.

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.

Or, compare with estimates of the Hubble constant and the
age of the Universe.  There was a time not too long ago
when the data was so poor that estimates of the age of the
Universe differed by a factor of 10.

Compared and contrast that to the 3 or 4 orders of magnitude
between the output of the Drake equation the 'experts' derive.
Considering that they have no data whatsoever for most of the
terms, and only a little data for one of the terms (but not
data applicable to ET life). As all results are pure guesses,
this should not come as a great shock.

Even as recently as
the 1990s estimates ranged over a factor of 2.  Now it's
down to about +/- 20% or so.  But in order to get that level of knowledge we had to start at a much poorer level and work our way up inch by inch through one investigation
after the next.  This is the nature of science, and SETI is just another example of that process.

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.

If we stumble upon ET, or they on us, then we can take it from
there. But what we have now is an infinite resource sink, and
while you and others don't have any problems with massive fiscal
irresponsibility, someday this madness is going to break the
bank. When they happens, SETI will die with everything else.

Rich