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Comment by noibl | Hacker News Reader

  > The quote: "if everybody contributed just 3 extra cents on their 1040 tax 
    forms, we could find out if we have cosmic company." suggests that the 
    organization is focused on government funding, rather than individual donors

It also suggests that the problem of finding intelligent life is basically a financial one.

s/we could/there is a very slim chance that &/

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Or, we could take the cost of one day of our Libyan Kinetic Military Action ($100 million) and fund this program for a generation.

Or we could take the 2.5 million for SETI and help people get access to safe drinking water, food, and vaccines. After all, people on Earth suffering should be a higher priority than looking for spacemen, right?

edit: This might have come across as snarky - that wasn't my intention. I just wanted to show that you can argue that any government spending can be spent better, and/or more morally, somewhere else.

"After all, people on Earth suffering should be a higher priority than looking for spacemen, right?"

Of course not. That line of reasoning is always flawed, as it is presumably always typed on a computer that was purchased with funds that weren't used for free water/food/vaccines.

Once worldwide military funding goes down to the level of the rest of budgets everywhere, we can talk about which one deserves more money than the other.

Until then, anything is a joke. A sad joke. And we're the clowns.

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