For the past 50 years of spending in probing the universe, whats the progress on SETI?
by 
kelana
ANSWERS: 1
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Although I'm not up on the latest, I know that SETI (search for extra-terrestrial intelligence) is chronically underfunded. It was once identified as one of late Senator Proxmire's "Golden Fleece" dishonorable awards -- typical of the public's mis-perception that SETI is just another part of the UFO nut-case subculture, rather than the valid scientific inquiry that it actually is. There is a huge amount of raw data requiring significant number crunching, so the SETI@home program is fairly popular. This is a form of distributed computing where individual citizens can volunteer their home computers to work on a small slice of data while their computers are idle -- kind of like a screen-saver -- and then upload the processed data back to the hub. Meanwhile technical advances in multi-channel analyzers have allowed greater bandwidth to make deeper and faster searches of the sky. But it's a long and arduous process -- and increasingly difficult to justify given the (so-far) consistently negative results.
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