This sent me looking for the total half-century $ cost of SETI, but couldn't find it. Have any idea if that's been calculated?
* Most of their projects have a relatively static cost[0] year-by-year.
* The big variable is SETI@home. From the SETI PoV it's zero-cost, but that's not the case for society (compute, electricity, pollution).
It's not difficult to find TFLOPS estimates via BOINC or wiki. Translating that back to cost is rather difficult, for me at least. Most people did not buy computers for this. Network bandwidth cost is also difficult to estimate. I suspect main component is power for processing. But electricity estimates vary widely depending on hardware used, I dunno how to estimate the average consumption per TLOPS.
[0] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-annual-cost-of-operating-S...