There's plenty of wishful thinkers with cash out there who I'm sure are more than willing to foot the bill for what is in reality an enormous waste of time.
Let’s see, if we receive signals from some intelligent broadcaster,
the signals would have had to originate thousands of years previous to reception...
and what would have happened to that civilization in the “present” (gets weird when you deal in time and distance like this)...
doesn’t seem like a good use of time and resources.
Yep.
Consider, too, what intelligent life would want to attempt communications with a species which radiates the sort of crap that has overwhelmingly taken up our broadcast bandwidth for the past thirty years?
If I'm not mistaken, taxpayer funding for SETI was discontinued several years ago. I switched over from SETI to Folding@Home some time back.
Sure it might be a huge waste of money. But if there is a signal to be found, it would still be interesting to know about it. Even if the senders are long gone.
As money-wastes go there’s way bigger targets anyway.