SETI, Fear and Trembling

Though the recent discovery of what is purported to be an extraterrestrial signal is deemed by SETI (the privately funded Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute) as being highly exaggerated, it does raise the question of what happens when -- years, decades, centuries from now -- we eventually determine that humankind has received a signal from an alien intelligence. With 200 million stars in this galaxy alone and (based on initial surveys) most having planets – odds would have it that somewhere in the universe several worlds might produce life technologically advanced enough to announce their presence at great distances.

Throughout the years conventional wisdom has proposed several scenarios that would result from such a find: a) Upon discovering another intelligence not of this world, all religions will be rendered trivial, the sectarian violence that has plagued mankind for two millennia will end and we’ll all become tasteful secular humanists; b) Mankind, forced to view itself as one species instead of a group of divisive, carping nationalities, will band together and realize how silly it is to fight over trivial things like genocide and slavery; c) Mankind, upon finding evidence of another intelligence, will no longer feel alone in the universe.

It is the last of these scenarios that seems the most reasonable and grounded. But for those who have the privilege of pondering such things, I am not convinced that such a discovery would make them feel any better about their place in the universe, and they may feel a whole lot worse. Any signal will most likely not be found in our galactic neighborhood, some five, ten, or one hundred light years away, but will most likely be found many orders of magnitude more distant, perhaps even outside our galaxy. Even at the speed of light, this distance would make practical communication with a civilization impossible, assuming a signal that had traveled some 100,000 light years would still have someone around to hear its reply some two hundred thousand years later.

Arthur Clarke once wrote that space is small; it is planets that are big – you can conceptually put your arms around a planet’s dimensions, but space doesn’t offer that kind of grappling hook. A distant signal would provide scale and heartbreaking perspective to the immensity of the universe, driving home our isolation, putting into sharp relief a question that was previously academic.

Why Medical Savings Accounts Can't Work

During the last week, in the backdrop the Republican convention, we started to hear again of the "ownership society", where we citizens would have control of our social security and medical savings accounts. Though one might concede the privatization of social security as a possibility due to the prospect of bankruptcy, medical savings accounts will never work, for two reasons:

1. Outside of insurance, even the most routine medical procedures are beyond the savings capacity of most Americans (who are tasked as is with saving for their children's college education). Routine childbirth costs in the neighborhood of $10,000, not to mention the catastrophic diseases that can rack up hundreds of thousands of dollars of bills and are responsible for half of the personal bankruptcies in the U.S. Because of its high costs, medicine requires the leveraging capability of insurance -- for a relatively small premium paid each month, I have access to a vast insurance pool to handle medical bills that I would not otherwise be able to afford.

2. By privatizing even routine procedures such as checkups or early-symptom doctors visits, you discourage the one factor that is crucial to holding down medical costs -- prevention. Even if I have, say, $3000, in my medical savings account, I still have an incentive to not go to the doctor for a slight pain that "might be nothing". I will probably think about saving my limited funds for something more substantial. However, by the time I make the determination that my condition is worth a doctor's visit, my condition may have progressed that much further and be that much more expensive to treat.

Those on the right find this type of scenario essential. They argue than we users of medical care are currently insulated from the true costs of our procedures, and until we are re-attached to the financial consequences of those procedures, we'll never get control of soaring medical costs. The conceptual mistake in this argument is that medicine falls outside of normal market forces. When we are sick we don't price shop doctors or hospitals. As a result, the normal transactional analysis that we make when we buy a house, car or backyard grill, never occurs. The only market force that will work in medical care is the downward pricing pressure that a large insurance pool, such as a city, state, federal government or large corporation, can provide. President Bush alludes to this very advantage in the most workable of his medical reform proposals -- allowing small businesses and individuals to join in multi-state buying groups that would give them the clout of our largest insurance users. Unfortunately, the Bush Administration, in a sop to the drug companies, refused to allow the federal government this very pricing advantage when enacting the Medicare drug benefit, adding billions to its cost.