Why not open a paypal or other kitty to find financing?

https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/money-pools

@+
*_*

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Paul Allen was a major contributor to The SETI Institute, which is a very different organisation to SET@Home. I'm not totally certain, but in recent years he gave little/nothing to SETI@Home.

Elsewhere Eric has posted that for nearly the whole of the last 20 years SETI@Home has been underfunded in terms of dollars, but more significantly in terms of people to do the work. If you wanted to raise money the figure quoted is in excess of $1 MILLION per year to cover the salaries, server operating costs, overheads etc., which is a very big ask for either a PayPal or a GoFundMe appeal.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

Wikipedia successfully raised millions of dollars why not Seti @ home?

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User base size

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

Personally, I think there were numerous paths to keeping the project going as-is, still with Nebula analysis:

1) Required donation level. Stop calling it a "donation" and call it a "maintenance fee". $12 annual contribution to be able to download work and post in forums. Voluntary higher contribution levels for perks ie special forum icons, recognition walls, etc. With 80K volunteers, that's $960K annually. If the number shrinks, the fee goes up accordingly or vice versa to keep it at $1M annually.

2) More detailed pleas for donations. Not once was it indicated that the project would have to shut down because there wasn't sufficient funding to have a concurrent Nebula going. If this was made very clear, I think that they would have made that $1M annual goal!

3) Corporate partnership. Given the trade-off between having an Amazon etc. ad banner on pages and no SETI@Home at all, I'd very happily choose the former.

Where there's a will...

Edit: There are also other wealthy donors out there. Yuri Milner I would consider already did his bit with $100M for BL, but Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and others are strongly interested in space sciences and tech. and I 'm sure that a million would be fiddly pocket lint to them.

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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundation_financial_development_multilanguage.svg

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The big drawback is that after 21 years of collecting results the outcome is zilch.

Why haven't we found anything? Many possibilities.

1. There is nothing to find
2. ET doesn't want to be found
3. We are not looking in the right place
4. We aren't looking for the right type of signal
5. Our algorithms aren't up to the task.

6. Maybe we have, but as our results haven't been looked at yet, nobody knows we have.

Remember the project is being mothballed, not closed down. I'm elsewhere but my back door is unlocked.

And only the collaborative part is mothballed. If they actually find something interesting in our 20+ years of crunched data (unlikely as it is), chances are we'll get more work to examine this portion of the sky in more detail.

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Gazing at the skies, hoping for contact... Unlikely, but it would be such a fantastic opportunity to learn.

My alternative profile

And even if they don't find anything, it's as you said: we've only analysed a tiny portion of the sky. Once they've got Nebula up and running and published scientific papers about it all, they could concentrate on installing new servers and generally fixing all the problems we've had in recent months, which would allow them to start sending data to crunchers again.

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Gazing at the skies, hoping for contact... Unlikely, but it would be such a fantastic opportunity to learn.

My alternative profile

Wikipedia successfully raised millions of dollars why not Seti @ home?

Seti@Home doesn't help people with their college term papers or win internet arguments