The Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia is listening for evidence of intelligent life in the
universe.
Credit: NRAO
While we haven't yet found any evidence for alien life, there are a group of dedicated radio scientists who listen to the skies, hoping to find some evidence of intelligence outside of Earth. The cost of this search isn't easy to justify — which is why a new paper suggests using a combination lottery and savings bond to keep funding flowing.
Jacob Haqq-Misra, a research scientist at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, suggests that people could purchase a lottery bond that would give them a chance of a big cash prize if and when SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) finds evidence of life elsewhere in the universe. Unlike a conventional lottery ticket, the SETI lottery ticket would function like a bond, with ticketholders receiving a small percentage of its value every year, making the value of the ticket grow.
"The SETI Lottery Bond is a fixed rate perpetual bond with a lottery at maturity, where maturity occurs only upon discovery and confirmation of extraterrestrial intelligent life," Haqq-Misra writes in the paper, which was published in the journal Space Policy and is available in preprint version on Arxiv. "Investors in the SETI Lottery Bond purchase shares that yield a fixed rate of interest that continues indefinitely until SETI succeeds — at which point a random subset of shares will be awarded a prize from a lottery pool." https://www.livescience.com/58576-search-for-alien-life-lottery-proposed.html
