Finally, rather than lamenting the fact that a few hundred thousand crunchers are hunting aliens or solving puzzles

If you think about it, nobody would be crunching FAAH today if it were not for the contributions of physicists, chemists and mathematicians. Those people gave us the transistor, large scale integrated circuits, high density hard drives, optical drives, 100MBPS ethernet, fiber optics, broadband internet and many other tools that FAAH needs. If you think DC projects like LHC, Einstein, Reisel Sieve and Prime are not worthy of CPU time then maybe you should think again. They may not be medical research but they may very well discover stuff that benefits medical research in a major way. Solving puzzles, for example, may seem like a silly pastime to some of us but there are some very complex and interesting mathematics behind puzzles and games, probably some very cool computing science too. It may seem silly on the surface but I suspect there may be worthwhile research going on behind the scenes. It is entirely possible that with their puzzles they may discover a new principle or refine an existing principle that eventually contributes to a breakthrough in AIDS research. It is entirely possible that CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will discover something about the fundamental structure of matter and energy that will allow transistors 100 times smaller, faster or cheaper so we'll have even more powerful computers with which to crunch FAAH.

Finally, rather than lamenting the fact that a few hundred thousand crunchers are hunting aliens or solving puzzles, I think we could get a lot more done if we stopped spending money on wars and used that money to buy a thousand Blue Genies for the scientists. Think of all the money that Bush spent in Iraq and figure how many Blue Genies that would have bought. Or how many programmers could have been hired to fix the deficiencies in BOINC, Rosetta, HPF2, etc.

Think also of all the dollars spent on oil that is/was way overpriced just because of wars. You see, it's not really the alien hunters that are slowing down FAAH it's people like president Bush.



--
This post has been edited to comply with forum rules - nelsoc

Well, that tells me they need to look harder because I'm convinced there are aliens to be found. It's just that the univese is such a huge place and there are so many places to look. We need more sensitive search instruments with finer resolution so we can gather more data. Yes, that will require even more crunchers but the pay off will come when the aliens tell us how to cure AIDS.

Nullified only if you assume c (the speed of light) is the limiting factor (maximum possible speed). It may not be. It may be possible for some things to travel faster than c, maybe just information carriers, maybe all things. They may be millions of light years away but the first message we receive may reveal to us methods and devices we can use to communicate across that vast distance in something close to real time. After that they may tell us how to traverse a million light years in less than a year. You may call that wishful thinking but escaping Earth's gravity was once considered wishful thinking too.

In short, when given two equally valid explanations for a phenomenon, one should embrace the less complicated formulation.