The alien hypothesis?

[Blake Stacey]

Quoting John Doe <tristero69 at yahoo.com>:

> My point about funding , I believe, stressed the same
> point you just reiterated - the majority is done under
> institutional auspices...but... original ideas arise
> unbidden by bucks, and no I don't believe all the
> subscribers to this "site" understand the difference
> between thinking up ideas vs. executing them and then
> marketing them...many mathematicians still work this
> old-fashioned way...and Frank Drake by the way, was
> not being paid per se to develop the Drake
> Equation...Ihe did it out of passion and
> curiosity...there are plenty of mavericks...it's just
> that the great bulk of them never make the Big
> Contract...that's the way it's always been...

Don't forget the effect of "institutionalization".  Often, professors go into
"empire-building" as they get older, learning the tricks to pile up 
grant money
for themselves, their close colleagues and their students.  Work might
originally get funded because it has direct military applications (e.g.,
radar).  However, once the mechanisms for distributing funds are in place,
bureaucratic inertia tends to resist change, and money -- even federal 
money --
just keeps flowing, regardless of the applications it meets in the end.

This is a special case of the general phenomenon James Burke called "the
institutionalization of change".  When some social device works, we tend to
protect it by turning it into a ritual or an "institution".  For example,
representative democracy got invented in ancient Athens, in an era when only a
few could reach the capital to speak for the many, and we still use 
most of its
forms today, even though Athenian democracy's initial causes are now 
moot.  This
tendency to ritualize leads to an odd effect when societies learn they can
benefit from technological change, i.e., from scientific advances:  the
scientific process, the process of making "tomorrow better than today", 
becomes
itself an institution.  And there you have the birth of MIT, Bell Labs, etc.,
etc.  Even though the very nature of the scientific method means that we will
have to un-learn facts our forefathers once accepted, and even though applying
new science to make new technology means tomorrow **will** be different than
today, we have entrenched bureaucracies built to enshrine and safeguard this
process.

To take a more specific example, I did my thesis with lab equipment and 
computer
time paid for by the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense, even
though my thesis covered the entropy of electron-swarm motion in weakly 
ionized
gases and the use of genetic algorithms to extract scattering cross 
sections --
a subject, I assure you, of negligible military or anti-terrorist potential.


> I
> personally do not believe we have ever been
> "visited"...for many reasons...but I think CETI is a
> noble endeavor, and for what it MAY "return" on our
> investment, it's a bargain; the funding is peanuts
> compared to the sensless waste on military antics
> which cost lives, among other things..
>

"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists 
elsewhere in the
universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
--Bill Watterson, **The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes**, p. 158