Artful Dodger: LOL Yeah, no kidding! Someone really did a bang up job of getting the funding (tax dollars?) for building radio dishes and installing monitoring equipment and paying salaries to people to monitor the monitoring equipment and etc etc and computer experts and etc etc and Joe the janitor/handyman/toilet unplugger/ window washer and etc etc... Hey, come on, it takes money to run ANY kind of operation!

Where was I? Oh yeah, and all of this for the sake of maybe picking up intelligently designed (what, intelligent design?) signals from an alien race some scientists are hoping exists. So you see, even hope costs money. You didn't really think all that hope and change crap was going to save you any money, did you? Foolish peons! Money doesn't just grow on trees ya know.

If we want to find those aliens, we had better darn well be ready to spend the money for it. We can't assume the aliens will come to us... who do we think we are, anyway? If we are going to find the aliens, any aliens, even the stupid and technologically primitive ones, then we might have to be the ones who go looking for them.

So as you can see, this has been money well spent.