TEDTalk Tuesday: Why SETI Matters

Today's TEDTALKTUESDAY features a 2009 TED Prize winner whose TED wish is for all of us to become actively engaged in the search for cosmic company.

Enjoy!

JILLTARTER

Talk Title: Why the search for alien intelligence matters (Video runtime: 21:23)

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Jill Tarter

Wiki bio

It's a lovely thought, the idea of bumping into another intelligent race, and it's a shame that so many involved in the promotion of science and rationalism don't stop for a minute to consider the most likely reality:

Should we actually encounter another planet capable of supporting life, it's not going to be a wonderment-filled engineer making the call of how we proceed, it's going to be the guy who owns the mining company, the transportation company, and the munitions factory.

Wakey wakey, tools.

I really don't think we have much to worry about, there would be no instantaneous communication at our current level of technology.

SciFi is nice, but the hundreds to thousands of years that it would take to hear a hello and respond likewise is the reality of the situation.

Special Effects artist Doug Drexler had an article forwared tohim by Michael Okuda (both "Star Trek" production alumni), and he posted it on his blog:

http://drexfiles.wordpress.com/2009/03/03/the-importance-of-space-exploration/
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I received this from Mike last night and thought you would find it of interest:

Just got the following from Jeff Hanley, who is the manager of Project Constellation for NASA. Jeff, of course, grew up loving Star Trek, just like the rest of us, but now he’s helping to launch the next generation of spaceships. - Mike

Good morning, all…

Just a few thoughts to share, including some reflections on what the space program generally means to the nation, and more specifically the value of what Constellation both symbolizes and cultivates…


As I cruised around the web recently, I was looking for data on just how big the ’space industry’ (or ’space economy’ as preferred by some) is… many numbers are thrown about, and any given number has to come with many ‘what’s in and what’s out’ explanations. But I came upon one site that seemed to rack up some numbers that were consistent with other various sources I had seen and organized it in a way that I could get my head around it.

As you likely understand, NASA’s annual budget hovers in the range of $17B to $18B per annum. That is for the entire human spaceflight, science, aeronautics, and exploration portfolios, as well as the upkeep of NASA’s institutions to execute those missions across 10 NASA centers around the country. The preponderance of that annual budget flows to industry, whom we contract with to produce most of our mission hardware and support.

The context of the global space market really puts the nation’s investment into perspective. See the links below… but the upshot is, the space economy within which NASA operates is 10x to 20x the size of our annual civil space outlays… that’s $200B to $300B or more, depending again on what you count in or out. The data shown in these links is from 2005 and 2006, so one can reasonably expect 5-10% growth over the last couple years in most sub-sectors.
http://www.thespacereport.org/content/overview/activity.php

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