Surely there's at least one Bill Gates who could spare 5 mil :)

Bill Gates might rather cure river blindness, malaria and cholera. He's at that stage when a billionaire thinks about humanitarian legacy. Similar to Andrew Carnegie and the moguls of that generation.

Discovering another instance of intelligent life would be one of the most profound transformational experiences that we could have as a species. I would think that there would be more than one billionaire out there that would like their name to be associated with such a discovery.

I'm rather bullish on matters of space exploration, but I'm pretty skeptical about just how profoundly transformational a SETI discovery would be. If there were such a discovery, it would be beset by difficult-to-imagine communication challenges, not the least of which is a years- or decades-long delay between sending a signal and receiving any response.

There have also been some cogent arguments that it might be in the best interests of our own self-preservation to not broadcast our presence, for now, just because we are still technologically primitive. Being loud represents a big wager that anything else within hearing distance is friendly.

I'm mostly disappointed at this announcement because it is part of a trend in dwindling government support for exploration.

I think the transformation would be similar to the psychological change our species went through when it saw earth from space for the first time.

Putting it simply for the first time it would be us and them where us is our species rather than the us that happen to be on an arbitrary lump of earth, speak the same language or worship the same god.

It could be the next psychological development stage for our species as it grows up. I'd like to have my name associated with that.

We're already being loud. We've been leaking radio transmissions into space for the past century.

We have been leaking analog radio transmissions for such a short period of time during the lifetime of the universe that any other life out there would most likely be either underdeveloped or overdeveloped to receive the transmissions.

We have barely uttered a sound in the universe.

The mind-blowingly relevant picture: http://proto-knowledge.blogspot.com/2011/02/human-radio-bubb...

Of course, light goes really, really fast compared to anything physics says we can possibly manage for things with more rest mass than photons. Although there could be aliens on another spiral arm, or Andromeda, communication would take longer than the lifetime of our civilization; and material trade would take longer than the lifetime of our species.

Yes. Why do people assume you can just make a phone call to Andromeda? 'Ya, hi ET, what's new?' If Andromeda disappeared into a black hole 1 million years ago, we wouldn't even know yet. We have to wait 2.5 million years for news from Andromeda, assuming the news can't transcend the speed of light.

That's true, but the same would apply to any deliberate attempt to reach other life.

Possibly, but the chances of it happening are very very small, even with adequate funding.

The cost/effectiveness ratio is much higher, though.

Seems like more of a Paul Allen thing to me.

or maybe a Google

Given that so many have already helped with SETI@Home and used far more of their resources than $1, I'd say that's definitely true.

For instance, back in the 1990's, I had a NeXT, a couple Apollos, an SGI Challenge, and a few Macs cranking away on SETI@Home blocks, some of those machines running 24/7.

Aha, clearly the solution is to release a new version of SETI@home that mines Bitcoins and donates them to SETI.

That's what the SETI Institute thought: private fundraising was intended to support the telescope. But they had a massive shortfall relative to their expected donations.

Edit: just read the letter to donors; looks like the near-term problem was cuts by the state of California to the UC Berkeley budget.