The SETI Institute has put its renowned Allen Telescope Array into hibernation because it doesn't have the money to run the giant cluster of radio dishes that search the heavens for extraterrestrial life. The shuttering of the ATA was disclosed on Friday by scientists who said the project was unable to find the $5m infusion it …

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Wednesday 27th April 2011 11:38 GMT Anonymous Coward

If SETI really wanted funding

They should have done a better business case to the US Gov (TM):

SETI : We are looking for extra terrestrial life on other planets and we only want $5m measly dollars.

US GOV(TM) : <yawn>

SETI: Oh and we also want to shoot things too!!!

US GOV(TM): Excellent! quick write this organisation a big fat cheque! <hoorar>

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Wednesday 27th April 2011 13:00 GMT Bilgepipe

Aliens

Cue the sound of countless alien civilizations turning their radios back on now that those dumbass humans have stopped listening in.

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Wednesday 27th April 2011 15:32 GMT Bob Foster

Par for the course

I seem to remember that at the time the movie Armageddon was released the entire budget for looking for real near earth asteroids that might really hit us was one fiftieth of that movies budget!

Shows where our priorities lie!

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1. Wednesday 27th April 2011 18:17 GMT Oninoshiko
  
  Why would we track things we can't do anything about anyway?
  
  Odds are, one of them is going to hit us. It's not really a matter of if, but when. We really can't do anything about it, Bruce Willis not withstanding. Now, what is your morbid fascination with your own demise that you really want to go looking for something we can't stop anyway?
  
  Not that it's getting funding either, but maybe we should concentrate on getting off this rock. A self-sustaining colony on mars increases the chance of our long term survival substantially. IDing space debris we can do nothing about doesn't.
  
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2. Wednesday 27th April 2011 19:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Precisely ...
  
  (see above)
  
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Wednesday 27th April 2011 18:18 GMT Anonymous Coward

Ed's Correction...

...after the compilation of 1,235 new hostile planets,

Sorry.

...Mines the one that is "off the hook", for now.

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Wednesday 27th April 2011 19:53 GMT Andy Fletcher

Damn shame

I ended up in the top 1000 UK contributors on the orignal distributed crunching thing. I'm sorry to see it go.

$5M doesn't sound like a lot of money when I read elsewhere we're planning to spend trillions of Dollars globally this century tryng to fight hot air.

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Sunday 1st May 2011 23:59 GMT Anteaus

Unlikely to succeed, but...

Agree that SETI is unlikely to find anything, since the timespan over which a civilization uses radio is probably too short. The likelihood of any near us to be doing so right now (or a few hundred years ago to allow for transit time!) is slim.

Though, if they want funding, they need to weave a climate-change argument into the request. Then billions, not a few paltry millions, will flow in.

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