How much money has been "wasted", I mean spent, by SETI over the last 30 years?

Question

How much money has been "wasted", I mean spent, by SETI over the last 30 years?

Answer 1

What's it to you? It's not your money. People are allowed to spend their own money on whatever they want.

Answer 2

who cares? they are a privately owned organization, they can do what they want.

Answer 3

The United States Government contributed to SETI early on, but recent work has been primarily funded by private sources.  So nothing since the early 90's when it went to private funding.

In 1960, Cornell University astronomer Frank Drake performed the first modern SETI experiment, named "Project Ozma", after the Queen of Oz in L. Frank Baum's fantasy books. Drake used a 25-meter-diameter radio telescope at Green Bank, West Virginia, to examine the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani near the 1.420 gigahertz marker frequency. A 400 kilohertz band was scanned around the marker frequency, using a single-channel receiver with a bandwidth of 100 hertz. The information was stored on tape for off-line analysis. He found nothing of great interest.

The first SETI conference took place at Green Bank in 1961. The Soviets took a strong interest in SETI during the 1960s and performed a number of searches with omnidirectional antennas in the hope of picking up powerful radio signals. TV host and American astronomer Carl Sagan and Soviet astronomer Iosif Shklovskii together wrote the pioneering book in the field, Intelligent Life in the Universe which was published in 1966.

In the March 1955 issue of Scientific American, Dr. John Kraus, Professor Emeritus and McDougal Professor of Electrical Engineering and Astronomy at the Ohio State University, described a concept to scan the cosmos for natural radio signals using a flat-plane radio telescope equipped with a parabolic reflector. Within two years, his concept was approved for construction by the Ohio State University. With $71,000 total in grants from the National Science Foundation, construction of the first Kraus-style radio telescope began on a 20 acre plot in Delaware, Ohio. The 360 feet (110 m) wide, 500 feet (150 m) long, and 70 feet (21 m) high telescope was powered up in 1963. This Ohio State University radio telescope was called Big Ear. Later, it began the world's first continuous SETI program, called the Ohio State University SETI program.

In 1971, NASA funded a SETI study that involved Drake, Bernard Oliver of Hewlett-Packard Corporation, and others. The resulting report proposed the construction of an Earth-based radio telescope array with 1,500 dishes known as "Project Cyclops". The price tag for the Cyclops array was $10 billion USD. Cyclops was not built, but the report formed the basis of much SETI work that followed.

In 1974, a largely symbolic attempt was made at the Arecibo Observatory to send a message to other worlds. It was sent towards the globular star cluster M13, which is 25,000 light years from Earth.

The OSU SETI program gained fame on August 15, 1977 when Dr. Jerry R. Ehman, a project volunteer, witnessed a startlingly strong signal received by the telescope. He quickly circled the indication on a printout and scribbled the phrase “Wow!” in the margin. This signal, dubbed the Wow! signal, is considered by some to be the most likely candidate from an artificial, extraterrestrial source ever discovered, but it has not been detected again in several additional searches.

In 1979 the University of California, Berkeley launched a SETI project named "Search for Extraterrestrial Radio Emissions from Nearby Developed Intelligent Populations (SERENDIP)". In 1986, UC Berkeley initiated their second SETI effort, SERENDIP II, and has continued with two more SERENDIP efforts to the present day.

In 1992, the U.S. government funded an operational SETI program, in the form of the NASA "Microwave Observing Program (MOP)". MOP was planned as a long-term effort, performing a "Targeted Search" of 800 specific nearby stars, along with a general "Sky Survey" to scan the sky. MOP was to be performed by radio dishes associated with the NASA Deep Space Network, as well as a 43-meter dish at Green Bank and the big Arecibo dish. The signals were to be analyzed by spectrum analyzers, each with a capacity of 15 million channels. These spectrum analyzers could be ganged to obtain greater capacity. Those used in the Targeted Search had a bandwidth of 1 hertz per channel, while those used in the Sky Survey had a bandwidth of 30 hertz per channel.

MOP drew the attention of the U.S. Congress, where the program was strongly ridiculed, and was canceled a year after its start. SETI advocates did not give up, and in 1995 the nonprofit SETI Institute of Mountain View, California, resurrected the work under the name of Project "Phoenix", backed by private sources of funding. Project Phoenix, under the direction of Dr. Jill Tarter, previously Project Scientist for the NASA project, is a continuation of the Targeted Search program, studying roughly 1,000 nearby Sun-like stars. Seth Shostak also worked on Project Phoenix. From 1995 through March 2004, Phoenix conducted observing campaigns at the 64-meter Parkes radio telescope in Australia, the 140-foot (43 m) Telescope of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia, USA, and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The project observed the equivalent of 800 stars over the available channels in the frequency range from 1200 to 3000 MHz. The search was sensitive enough to pick up transmitters with 1 GW EIRP to a distance of about 200 light years. (A typical airport radar has this much peak power, but is only on about 1/1000 of the time, and would not have been detected in this survey.)

Founded in 1994 in response to the US Congress cancellation of the NASA SETI program, The SETI League, Inc. is a membership-supported nonprofit organization with 1500 members in 62 countries on all seven continents. This grass-roots alliance of amateur and professional radio astronomers is headed by executive director emeritus Prof. H. Paul Shuch, the engineer credited with developing the world's first commercial home satellite TV receiver. Many SETI League members are licensed radio amateurs and microwave experimenters. Others are digital signal processing experts and computer enthusiasts.

The SETI League pioneered the conversion of 3 to 5 metre diameter backyard satellite TV dishes into research-grade radio telescopes of modest sensitivity. The organization concentrates on coordinating a global network of small, amateur-built radio telescopes under Project Argus, an all-sky survey seeking to achieve real-time coverage of the entire sky. Project Argus was conceived as a continuation of the all-sky survey component of the late NASA SETI program (the targeted search having been continued by the SETI Insititute's Project Phoenix). There are currently 135 Project Argus radio telescopes operating in 26 countries. Project Argus instruments typically exhibit sensitivity on the order of 10^–23 Watts/square metre, or roughly equivalent to that achieved by the Ohio State University Big Ear radio telescope in 1977, when it detected the landmark "Wow!" candidate signal.

Answer 4

As much as they have been able to get from private persons and organizations through donations, not from any of your tax dollars.  So, stop your misinformed griping.

Answer 5

It certainly has not been wasted since it is a project that is trying to answer one of the oldest and most fundamental questions of human history: Are we alone, or is someone out there?

Answer 6

It will be much less than money wasted by smoking  which increase the green house gases.