Andrew Nowicki <andrew@nospam.com> wrote in message news:<4090102C.42A15EF9@nospam.com>...

[Railing at SETI in general...] Worse yet, they
seem to believe that some extraterrestrial
civilizations have been sending powerful
microwave beams toward the Earth for millions
of years. Why would the extraterrestrial tax
payers support such an effort? 

This is a reasonable question.  Why look for a signal that no one is
motivated to send?  However, it turns out this signal is not very
expensive to transmit. (see the appendix on beacon construction in the
book SETI 2020.)  If you target your beam so it only covers the
targeted solar system, it takes less than 1 watt per system covered. 
So for 1 MW of power, costing at current rates about $700,000 per
year, you could hit each of the nearest 1 million stars with a beam
strong enough that we ourselves could detect it.  Although building
the transmitter costs somewhat more, it's still on the order of
existing SETI expenditures.

So transmitting need not be a government activity.  It could be easily
funded by the SETI Institute, any number of religious missionary
organizations, or any of thousands of wealthy private individuals.  We
should keep this in mind should we ever get a message.

     Lou Scheffer