Having just received an emarketing blast from SETI requesting funding for their research efforts, and also been playing too much on-line poker, and also reading some Phillip K Dick novels, and also been waking up too early due to jetlag, the following, slightly loopy idea occurred to me…

SETI should set up an online poker system in which people wager either computer cycles or money against the possibility of winning space related freebies. The ‘money’ bit could be done in partnership with a major online poker company (PokerStars, PartyPoker), and wouldn’t cost them anything as they could offer to transfer winnings (minus buy-in) to SETI instead of the user. The space-freebies could consiste of some kind of alien cred league table or information, for example essays by Carl Sagan, appropriate Sci-Fi… all distributed digitally. The computer cycle bit could tie into their @home software and it could tell you how much ‘time’ you owe to SETI each time you log in to either the poker application or SETI@home.

For those that don’t know what I’m talking about, SETI is all about discovering intelligent life on planets other than Earth…

Anyway, brain clearly addled. Toodles.