While I do share a certain romantic admiration for the grandeur of SETI's goals, I have to agree with those who call this a waste of money and brainpower in our times. The most ludicrous AGI apocalypse scenarios seem orders of magnitude more likely than finding conclusive evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. A second terrestrial intelligence is about to emerge, and the consequences of that might conceivably be…
It’s science. It’s not in preparation for some kind of imminent encounter whose likelihood is weighed against some other event, but simply trying to understand our universe. Maybe AI can do much better at interpreting signals than humans do, and we should build this lunar station so that the post-human AGI can listen to calls from other distant AGIs. It would certainly have more patience for interstellar communicatio…
Now, I'm not asking that carpenters be reassigned to work on AI extinction scenarios. That wouldn't make sense, because it's not their area of expertise. But if you are already going to spend resources on hypothetical non-human intelligences, surely the kind of intelligence we are by far most likely to actually encounter deserves the most attention. And in the absence of unlimited resources (i.e., in reality), that goes at the expense of lower priority intelligence scenarios.
Note that these people are asking for a telescope to be built on the moon. That's an absolutely enormous expense, that, needless to say, wouldn't be funded by those scientists but by society as a whole. Resources are limited, so every decision to fund something means not funding something else. Priorities are a thing, and "it's science" doesn't change that.
