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By Root 1953 0

its interest was limited; it was too expensive. But every civilization in human history has devoted some of its resources to investigating deep questions about the Universe, and it’s hard to think of a deeper one than whether we are alone. Even if we never decrypted the message contents, the receipt of such a signal would transform our view of the Universe and ourselves. And if we could understand the message from an advanced technical civilization, the practical benefits might be unprecedented. Far from being narrowly based, the SETI programme, strongly supported by the scientific community, is also embedded in popular culture. The fascination with this enterprise is broad and enduring, and for very good reason. And far from being too expensive, the programme would have cost about one attack helicopter per year.

I wonder why those members of Congress concerned about price tags don’t devote greater attention to the Department of Defense, which, with the Soviet Union gone and the Cold War over, still spends, when all costs are tallied, well over $300 billion a year. (And elsewhere in government there are many programmes that amount to welfare for the well-to-do.) Perhaps our descendants will look back on our time and marvel at us, possessed of the technology to detect other beings, but closing our ears because we insisted on spending the national wealth to protect us from an enemy that no longer exists.*

[* The SETI programme was briefly resurrected, using $7 million in private contributions, in 1995 under the appropriate name Project Phoenix.]

David Goodstein, a physicist at Cal Tech, notes that science has been growing nearly exponentially for centuries and that it cannot continue such growth, because then everybody on the planet, would have to be a scientist, and then the growth would have to stop. He speculates that for this reason, and not because of any fundamental disaffection from science, the growth in funding of science has slowed measurably in the last few decades.

Nevertheless, I’m worried about how research funds are distributed. I’m worried that cancelling government funds for SETI is part of a trend. The government has been pressuring the National Science Foundation to move away from basic scientific research and to support technology, engineering, applications. Congress is suggesting doing away with the US Geological Survey, and slashing support for study of the Earth’s fragile environment. NASA support for research and analysis of data already obtained is increasingly constrained. Many young scientists are not only unable to find grants to support their research; they are unable to find jobs.

Industrial research and development funded by American companies has slowed across the board in recent years. Government funding for research and development has declined in the same period. (Only military research and development increased in the decade of the 1980s.) In annual expenditures, Japan is now the world’s leading investor in civilian research and development. In such fields as computers, telecommunications equipment, aerospace, machine tools, robotics, and scientific precision equipment, the US share of global exports has been declining, while the Japanese share has been increasing. In that same period the United States lost its lead to Japan in most semiconductor technologies. It experiences severe declines in market share in colour TVs, VCRs, phonographs, telephone sets and machine tools.

Basic research is where scientists are free to pursue their curiosity and interrogate Nature, not with any short-term practical end in view, but to seek knowledge for its own sake. Scientists of course have a vested interest in basic research. It’s what they like to do, in many cases why they became scientists in the first place. But it is in society’s interest to support such research. This is how the major discoveries that benefit humanity are largely made. Whether a few grand and ambitious scientific projects are a better investment than a larger number of small programmes is a worthwhile question.

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