Carl Sagan must be twisting and twitching in his grave. SETI, the project which became synonymus with searching for extraterrestrial intelligent life, was unable to gether the $5 million it needed – which is just 0.0074% (!) of the United States military budget; talk about priorities…
Anyway, SETI has shut down its telescope array, which consists of 42 20-foot-wide telescopes spread across a field 300 miles north of San Francisco and was used to scan the sky for clues about extraterrestrial life, due to lack of support and funding. The US government was never a big supporter of the SETI project, and as a matter of fact, it could have never gone live without the help of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who donated $25 million to the project.
However, the state seems unable even to support such a laudable and potentially revolutionary project; now, SETI has been forced to ask for public help, in an attempt to raise the 5$ million until 2013, in the hope that it could eventually go up again; this has a chance of succeeding, given the major amount of publicity that the project has received along the years (albeit not in recent ones), and considering that thousands of users participate in SETI@home, which requires donating CPU power of your computer to help interpret the immense amount of data which the SETI telescopes receive. Now, they are asking for help again, only this time, it’s donations instead of computer power. You can make the search possible once more, and you can help to one of the most monumental projects of all time, which requires a (relatively) very small amount of money to function. Each dollar you contribute buys 4 million channels scrutiny of a single world, and one of those channels might just show clues of hidden alien life – if you ask me, that’s definitely something worth participating in. So if you want to donate to SETI, go here. If you support the project, but can’t afford to donate, then help spread the word ! SETI is in desperate need of money, and sometimes, awareness is more important than anything else.