> Would anyone care to comment on the appeal of SETI? Personally speaking, it
> doesn't interest me at all. I don't consider its goals to be terribly useful
> or important, and I don't think that it has a reasonable chance of
> accomplishing anything. But as number theory enthusiast I find something
> intrinsically interesting and worthwhile about finding factors and searching
> for Mersenne primes. I am probably in a minority of the general population
> in this regard.
Yes, I have a comment. As was said in the movie Contact, "[if there aren't
any intelligent civilations out there] it sure would be a waste of space".
If you look at it, the search for Mersenne primes is intrinsically same as
the search for extraterrestrial life. No one can say for sure if there
really are any more Mersenne primes to be found. We still look for them
though, because the statistical likelihood of finding one is pretty
compelling. Given the vast amount of space out there and the incredible
number of galaxies (most of which we do not know about) I would say the
likelihood is equally as strong, if not stronger that something
intelligent is out there. It is a highly subjective argument whether it is
worthy to find them or not, however you cannot deny the likelihood of them
being out there. One could argue that if we cannot even get along with
each other, why should we try to integrate another paradigm into our
culture. Personally, I am of the belief that everytime you raise the bar,
the issues and problems you once had, suddenly look insignificant.
Remember how hard multiplication was when you were in 1st grade? Did you
REALLY have it mastered by the time you got into long division? I bet you
have it mastered now, because you kept on raising the bar. In my travels,
I have never mastered anything by focusing on it like a laser. Instead, I
mastered it over time by looking at it from many perspectives. Lets just
imagine for a moment that we have made contact with a new culture and we
are able to transfer knowledge between us. Do you REALLY think that they
have developed along the same lines we have? Of course not. They might
think some of our problems are trivial, "Oh, 2^N-1??? Yes, that is part of
our basic math studies, we solved that problem like this and here are some
of our basic corollaries.". Other things might amaze them, "Wow, you
managed to tie together hundreds of different language systems, with this
UNICODE thing?". In this sense, the legitimacy of the SETI project is
based not on what we know we will find, but what we don't know that we
might find.
One other thing is that the concept of distributed computing (much like
the open source movement) is just starting to gain momentum because of
real world proof. We can't possibly believe that our project alone could
do that. Mersenne primes captured our hearts and minds, however other
people don't feel the same. Perhaps BOVINE is more interesting to them, or
maybe SETI, Golumb Rulers or PI is more interesting than GIMPS. Look at
the big picture, who says any project is more worthy than another. All of
the projects I have seen so far have advanced human knowledge more than
has ever been possible. I understand the fear that we'll lose momentum.
However I'd like to take George Woltman's lead on this one and embrace the
other projects. Not because we will lose members to these other projects,
but because the other projects will advance the science of distributed
computing, which in my humble opinion, will help us much more in the long
run.
Thanks for your time. And yes, I will continue to contribute my meager
CPU cycles to GIMPS.
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