Sure with that kind of short term thinking we will never get anywhere. It is far to early to call the investment a failure, in relative timescales it would be like calling a new school a failure because it had a bad first day.
Even if we do find a signal, there is no payoff. The money is better invested elsewhere, then, once we are better able to capitalize upon a signal being found, then, we should invest in finding one. Right now, its premature.
That's pretty narrow-minded thinking. Life isn't all about whether something pays off or not. There's science out there that you cannot capitalize on, but it's still worth it. It should be anyway, if humanity wants to progress as a species.
You're assuming a lot by saying "there is no payoff".
For instance, you're assuming that if we get a signal, from aliens, we will learn absolutely nothing of value from it.
I think we've got a few smart people hanging out on Earth; more than enough to learn something valuable from alien signals. For instance, we might learn how aliens send radio signals, which might have some relevance to our own communication technologies. We might learn something about alien linguistics, which might have applications here on Earth that could be beneficial. We might learn what alien porn looks like, and I know that most of you reading this comment would be very interested in that.
What seems vanishingly unlikely is that we'd learn NOTHING of value.
It's possible we won't get to a point where we're ready to do something with a signal unless and until a signal convinces us that getting there is worth the investment (an interesting chicken-and-egg problem).
I agree with you. Very few people have thought through what would happen if SETI found a clear signal. Say intelligence is only 20 light years away from us and they say "Hi! Here we are!"
What possible step could we take? They are soo far away.
We could talk to them. We could listen to them. Chances are at least one side would have something useful to learn from the other. (Think about how much we know that we didn't 100 years ago. Unless this hypothetical other intelligent civilization, having developed independently of ours, happens to be within 100 years of progress of us in every respect, someone's going to learn something.)
