I mean, I get his points, I really do. That said, it doesn't mean we shouldn't try looking. Of course, there's the question of priorities and allocation of scarce resources...

Now, if we're talking about a situation where the money just goes to propping up an administrative overhead and it necessary perqs, well, that's a different issue entirely.

ETA: One other thing occurs to me; spending telescope idle time looking for weird patterned radio waves in places that aren't considered astronomically interesting may end up leading to something astronomically interesting... you could look at it as the ultimate version of blue-sky research.

ETA 2.0: While I'm at it... we are able to detect planets by the wobbles they create in their parent stars, as well as what happens to what we can see of the star's output when they pass in front of it. What would earth look like using those means? Just like another planet, or as a relatively bright radio source?

Some thought about what we look like from the outside looking in might help us figure out what we should be looking for. Planets that are anomalously bright in unusual wavelengths is probably a good candidate.

Sort of to be expected, even to be considered background noise (ha, see what I did there?) given how we seem to function on this continent.