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Could you perhaps qualify as a 501(c)3 educational organization (as opposed to social club, etc.)?

Way way back I worked with a university organization that was able to qualify for this. It seems the greek letter organizations had to apply as a social organization, but since we had an educational mission, we got the educational exemption.

Not sure if you need to be affiliated with a university for this, though.

IANAL, and of course you should talk to an attorney first.

Here's some interesting links for more info:
http://www.tgci.com/publications/96summer/tobeor.h tm
http://www.taxexemptlaw.com/lr-04.shtml

And did you know SETI At Home is a 501(c)3 educational organization?
http://www.setileague.org/admin/taxexmpt.htm

Is he going to try bouncing his DSL off the moon?[SETI League]

A better link for info about more telescopes.

What most people don't tell you about the SETI@home project is that there are far more people processing the data than there is data to process. Most of the packets you're downloading to scan have been scanned dozens of times already--there just isn't enough data to justify all that computing power.

Now, if we built more radio telescopes...

A lot of the early supporters of SETI@Home ( myself included ) joined it mostly as a political statement.

"You are going to cut our funds?? Big deal. We'll find another way.
Guess what? Now we have the biggest computer power in the world, all by volunteers!"

It was one of the first glimpses of the Internet as a tool for "light civil disobedience", followed (?) by PGP, MP3, etc...

I honestly think that "The Demon-Haunted World" should be required reading in American schools. In many ways, it's quite a scary book.

There's a paper here about an experiment where students read the book and discussed it, which is pretty interesting, and a good review of the book can be found here at the SETI League.

(The SETI League Mini-Manual)

Hundreds of people are doing this already! They're already finding weird things they can't explain (usually secret satellites, planes and so on) with just a dish, some relatively cheap electronics and an old PC & sound card.
Imagine the kudos the next time someone starts boasting about how many blocks they do in a day... "Well, I've just been focusing on the waterhole frequencies in the vicinity of Proxima Centauri..."

It is a short story called "They're made out of meat." You can find the text here.

It's called They're Made Out of Meat by Terry Bisson.

Ask and you shall receive.

http://www.setileague.org/articles/meat.h tm

It's a very short story by Terry Bisson. Very funny. I'd like to see Outer Limits do a show based off of it.

--
Ty
alSeen@narnia.net

When speaking about how likely there are to be intelligent civilizations, people often refer to the Drake Equation. Carl Sagan thought that the equation showed that there should be a significant number of civilizations. Although a recent book, Rare Earth has called into question how probable civilizations are.

This is good news, though, adding a bit to the likelihood of their being other civilizations out there somewhere.

Want to help look for proof of life in outer space? Check out http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ and http://www.setileague.org/ for two ways that you can use your computer at home to speed the search.