In infinite wisdom Louis Scheffer answered:

Rich <someone@somewhere.com> writes:

Am I to understand that Berkely will pay for it's operation
and staffing? Do you know what they plan to use it for?

As I understand it, Berkeley will use it for radio astronomy,
to basically replace another radio telescope they had on the
site (which is moving away).

OK.

I understand that together Paul Allen and Nathan Myhrvold are
donating 12.5 million. That seems to be about half the $25 million
dollars you say it will cost. Where does the rest come from?

Paul Allen recently gave the other half, too (it was dependent
on meeting a bunch of milestones).  However, the costs have
increased somewhat (normal for big projects as you note) and the
SETI Institute has to cover the rest.

Any idea how large an increase?

The total cost,
spread over about 5 years, is in the range of $25M. The next big public radio telescope (ALMA) is costing taxpayers about $50 million this year alone, and will take many years to complete, and will end up at least on order of magnitude more expensive.

And don't think I don't question these costs as well. But Alma
is partly funded by the the ESO and partly by the NSF. I've not
found what the split is.

The USA contribution for 2004 alone is 50.8 million dollars.

That's around 10% right off.

[...]

The total cost of the Allen Array will be less than 1/4 of
what NSF spends on new astronomy facilites *every year*.  It is less than 1% of NASAs yearly expenditure on astronomy.
SETI is not a big project, even in the astronomy world.

NASA is another money pit. 

Note that the whole Allen array is about 1/5 the cost of the
smallest NASA mission (discovery mission).

The discovery missions are just low cost space missions, which
would seem necessarily more expensive than ground based telescopes.

    http://discovery.nasa.gov/missions.html

One of em, Kepler, shows that NASA's getting back into SETI.

    http://discovery.nasa.gov/kepler.html

And every once in a while, someone gets a brilliant idea and everything changes for the better.

The Allen telecope array, in many people's minds, is exactly
such an idea.  It's MUCH cheaper than any comparable telescope,
and for many purposes much more useful.

How does it compare to the ALMA?

They run in different frequency ranges.  ALMA needs a high dry site,
the Allen array does not.  ALMA is a more or less conventional
design, optimized for high frequencies.  Allen is a radical design
running at lower frequencies, aiming for lower costs and higher
productivity.  It is trying 3 major departures from
existing radio telescopes:
  1) Dishes stamped out using an extension of satellite TV dish
     technology.
  2) Wideband feeds with low-cost, wide bandwidth pre-amps
  3) Full bandwidth transmission to the control center on      fiber optics.
Note that all these things make it cheap, and all of them make it
more useful.  Small dishes give a wide field of view.  Wideband
feeds and pre-amps, and full bandwidth transmission, allow
simultaneous observations at all frequencies, something no other
telescope can offer.

Seems to me that there's a bit more to it than the bandwidth of the
feeds.

They say that the view is much better there. How is the situation
in Hat Creek WRT interference?

It looks OK.  The reason for Chile is high-and-dry, not low interference.
Since much of the interference is from satellites, Chile won't help
much in this regard anyway.

OK.

And who is driving this?
The SETI Institute, with private funds.

Well, you've already mentioned Berkeley, which is not a private
orginization. So unless I misunderstand something, this cannot be
totally true.

True, but Berkeley is already running a radio telescope on this site,
which they are closing down.  (It's a high frequency design and will
be moved to a high dry site, like ALMA, and combined with a similar
array from Caltech).  So Berkeley, a public institution, gets to use
a new radio telescope, paid for by private interests, to do radio
astronomy (which they are already using public money for).

And I'd assume that the flip side is that SETI does not have to pay for
the operation and staffing of the Allen Telescope. I'd assume that
operating costs, while not vast, are not inconsiderable.

If you
believe it's OK to use public money for radio astronomy at all, this
is a very good deal for the taxpayer.

Sounds like it.

But the problem is that it's not public money that's being used, but
borrowed money. If SETI operated like the US govt, you'd be several
trillion dollars in debt already. Unfortunatly, it looks like whatever
contributions from Berkeley may well be on borrowed dollars.

SETI money is helping a public institution do what it is already doing,

> only better.

Well, Paul Allen's money.

    Lou Scheffer

Rich