First of all, the signals you'd receive would probably be worthless. Even if you manage to understand them despite the fact that they likely use some totally different language and encode information in radio waves in a different way, it's not like we frequently broadcast "this is everything you need to know to build a computer" or anything super-useful. There might be some useful mentions of science they've developed (the equivalent of our NPR science programs), but it probably wouldn't be in enough detail (especially since their lay people would presumably have a much more advanced scientific base if they're so far beyond us) for us to really get anything out of it.
In the meantime, people have probably heard that you got alien signals, and they'd eventually figure out how to receive and decode the signals too. Maybe you could patent it or something, but again, if they're far enough away, your patent might run out before you do much with it. You'd get somewhat of a head start, I guess.
And since this whole thing would take so long to cash in, and your investors took an absurd risk, they'd expect at least 1000x on their money.
If there's life out there, we'll probably find it eventually.
Considering life is a binary condition (there or not there) and we haven't found anything to strongly indicate the odds of life existing elsewhere are very small, I certainly wouldn't call the odds of finding life absurdly bad.
That's quite possible, but you'd want a highly-advanced technological organization - some bacteria-type things in Martian ice would be a scientific breakthrough, but unlikely to be massively profitable.
I don't know. I would like to think that this is so, but it seems hard to reconcile with the Fermi paradox (referring to intelligent life, at least). We do not know the probability of intelligent life developing, but I consider it plausible that the probability is such that although other life exits, it is beyond the limits of known methods of communication (e.g. extragalactic).
"We've searched dozens of these floor tiles for several common types of pheremone trails. If there were intelligent life up there, we would have seen its messages by now."
Specifically, if you're broadcasting radio or TV signals that look like anything other than random noise from the perspective of an uncorrelated receiver, then you're wasting energy. Human history suggests that there's a window of about 100 years between the time when a civilization learns RF theory and starts to generate coherent signals, and the time when they learn information theory and stop.
Consider gravity. Is its effect instantaneous? That is, gravity varies as the inverse of the square distance between two bodies. If, say, the Earth were to suddenly get much closer to the Moon, would that gravitational effect be "instant"? Or does it propagate at the speed of light?
If gravitation is somehow "instant", then one could imagine an apparatus which allows you to transmit information instantaneously. (You would need a way to measure the effect of gravity from the sending body; perhaps by measuring the height of waves formed in a planetary-sized sphere of water.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Relativity#Gravitationa...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity#Causality_an...
I'm just trying to think this through, so we identify some sort of signal. I'll bet that there will be detractors, with legitimate arguments, why wouldn't there be? It's not going to be an English message encoded in a format we can't dispute. Maybe it's a bad assumption but assuming the aliens use radio technology, it seems at least somewhat reasonable to assume that they'd use it to communicate with themselves before attempting to communicate with others, for those aliens, we'd most likely intercept their communications signals rather than directed communication with us or others. Communications which happened years and years ago. The best case scenario would be one of the near by stars having alien life that happened to be listening too and in that case should we get a signal and send one back it would still be on the order of a decade long cycle. What's the average case? A century long communication cycle? Assuming both parties are listening and engaged? Likewise, if they're sufficently advanced, wouldn't they compress and encrypt their communications and it should appear to be entropy to us?
I think there are a lot of things you should do just to do. The best upside here seems like hope or an easing of the beliefs about the universe, it just seems like we'd have to get really really lucky to actually communicate with something else and it could take centuries to establish that. Which in a round about sort of way makes it seem like shutting down a telescope for a few years isn't so harmful after all. Then let's just toss in nuclear proliferation, Islam fundamentalism (as well as other religious zealotry over the centuries,) AIDS in Africa (imagine should it some how become more communicable...) hunger, and global warming as issues that might affect our ability to concentrate on a problem for a century or more, is stoppage that bad?