SETI largesse

Wealthy Microsoft alumni are to fund a giant array of radio telescopes that
will search for ET. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen will contribute
$11.5 million and former chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold
$1 million to the project, headed by the SETI Institute and the
University of California at Berkeley. Plans call for several hundred small
dishes with a total area of 10 000 square metres, at a cost of $26
million. When it is finished in 2005, the Allen Telescope Array will be able to
examine up to a dozen planets at once.