SETI is seen by many Astrobiologists as Necessary to Finding Intelligent Life and Possibly Being Refunded by Congress and or NASA.

NASA Should Start Funding SETI Again

In 1992, Sen. Richard Bryan (D-Nev.) introduced a last-minute amendment that ended funding for Project HRMS, the last major Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program funded by NASA. "This hopefully," he quipped, "will be the end of Martian hunting season at the taxpayer's expense."

From article, (Congress currently seems not hostile but downright receptive to SETI, and there is no actual statutory prohibition on NASA supporting a SETI program. NASA recently chartered the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to form the ad hoc Committee on Astrobiology Science Strategy for Life in the Universe to evaluate its astrobiology portfolio, and this committee should recommend that NASA embrace SETI as part of its mission.

NSince the late 1950s, astronomers have realized that our technology is sufficient to send and receive signals of sufficient strength to be detected at interstellar distances. If there are other technological species in the galaxy, a simple radio or laser signal would be an unambiguous sign of their existence. Finding such intelligent life is the goal of SETI.

finding alien life has become a major priority for NASA. Supporting the field of astrobiology is a major part of NASA's research portfolio, and finding signs of microbial life in the solar system or in the atmospheres of distant planets is one if its top priorities.

And yet, “traditional SETI is not part of astrobiology” declares the “NASA Astrobiology Strategy 2015” document. But as many members of the field will tell you, this is incorrect. According to NASA, astrobiology is defined as the study of the "origin, evolution, distribution, and future in the universe" of life.

And indeed, NASA has ambitions to identify biosignatures—the results of interactions between life and its environment—that would reveal the existence of primitive life on other worlds. NASA uses studies of the origin and evolution of past life on Earth as a guide to identify these biosignatures.

But some of the most obvious ways in which Earth is inhabited today are its technosignatures such as radio transmissions, alterations of its atmosphere by industrial pollutants, and probes throughout the Solar System. It seems clear that the future of life on Earth includes the development of ever more obvious technosignatures.

And there is no a priori reason to believe that biosignatures should be easier to detect than these technosignatures. Indeed, intelligent, spacefaring life might spread throughout the galaxy, and therefore be far more ubiquitous than planets that have only microbes. Life might be much easier to find than the NASA strategy assumes.  

 Indeed, it has been noted cynically, but not untruthfully, that NASA eagerly spends billions of dollars to search for “stupid” life passively waiting to be found, but will spend almost nothing to look for the intelligent life that might, after all, be trying to get our attention. This is especially strange since the discovery of intelligent life would be a much more profound and important scientific discovery than even, say, signs of photosynthesis on the nearest exoplanet to the solar system, Proxima b.)

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