My jaw has dropped, my body cringed, my eyebrow raised, my stomach turning, my pocketbook shriveling.
I ran across this article while perusing sciencedaily.com and could not believe what I read.
I guess it started out innocently enough...a blurb about how donors are helping to relaunch the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), which is part of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) movement. So what is wrong with individual people choosing to donate their money to this? Nothing.
What is wrong is how this ridiculous monstrosity came to be. According to a WikiPedia article, it is a special telescope cost something like $25 million that was paid for by the SETI Institute while UC Berkeley funds operations. Is that really who paid for it though? According to the article from NewsDaily, private donors were sought due to government cutbacks.
Backed by the AirForce to locate debris in space that could be destructive to satellites, the telescope also actively searches for alien life forms, when it is in use.
I am just as fascinated with the night sky as the next person, but putting $25 million into something like this, in California, no less, which is practically owned by the bank because they are so far under, rankles me just a little bit, especially knowing that we are so close to a recession it's scary.
Then I take into account all the millions, if not billions of dollars that fund other programs just as useless as this one and wonder, with all that money, shouldn't they have figured out a way to read my mind or something by this point?
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