The Bond That Matures Upon Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life

For whatever reason, it’s hard to fund the search for aliens. Personally, because it’s easy to do, I’m going to blame Hollywood for making it seem like meeting extraterrestrial intelligent life would be a catastrophe. This baseless assumption is somewhat undermined by the fact that rich people love investing in things that cause catastrophes, so who knows?

In any case, Jacob Haqq-Misra, a research scientist at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, thinks that he’s found a solution to SETI’s perpetual search for intelligent life that is willing to donate to the search for intelligent life. He calls it the SETI Lottery Bond.

In a paper submitted to the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Haqq-Misra explains that people can buy fixed rate, perpetual bonds that mature upon the discovery and confirmation of extraterrestrial intelligent life. “Investors in the SETI Lottery Bond purchase shares that yield a fixed rate of interest that continues indefinitely until SETI succeeds—at which point a random subset of shares will be awarded a prize from a lottery pool.”

The money collected via selling bonds can be invested and the dividends used to fund SETI’s giant telescope array and listening on every radio frequency for signs of life.

Haqq-Misra suggests that the bonds be transferable, so investors can pass them to their next of kin because even if SETI stumbles upon a promising radio signal, confirming that it’s not just a collapsing star or an echo or just a mistake could take years if not decades.

As opposed to just running a lottery, everyone would get their initial investment back when the bond matures, plus interest. However, the plan for the SETI lottery bond is to have a really low interest rate, offset by the hope of big payoff.

“If SETI takes hundreds or even thousands of years to succeed, then SLB shares may become treasures that are cherished and guarded by families and charities, both as a relic from the past and a hope for a prosperous financial future,” Haqq-Misra’s paper states.

Lottery bonds have been issued by the Belgian and British governments. The UK Premium Bond holds monthly drawings for cash prizes.

The SETI Lottery Bond still sort of sounds like a tough sell—there's a chance it will never pay off if SETI never finds anything, or a chance that by the time humans have found something, the dollar and the bonds are effectively worthless.

But hey, you wouldn't think that Warren Buffet would spend a lot of money investing in Exxon either, so who knows? Maybe your family or charity will end up owing you big.