As other commenters have covered, SETI makes a whole lot of assumptions about what extraterrestrial contact would look like and wastes time exploring the hypoth

As other commenters have covered, SETI makes a whole lot of assumptions about what extraterrestrial contact would look like and wastes time exploring the hypothesis that another civilization would behave just like us in our infancy, except at a time when they have the capability and surplus energy to transmit signals many orders of magnitude stronger than we do. To my knowledge, we are not currently transmitting sustained signals that would be detectable through the noise by any neighboring systems, and to do so for any sustained period of time, let alone a significant enough amount of time to be noticed (geological time scale) AND then wait for a response would take a ridiculous amount of energy, and provide no return on investment for literally thousands of generations. And even then, that return on investment might just be an invasion. So in my opinion, SETI is a poor use of compute and investigating the more credible of the tens of thousands of as-of-yet unexplained UFO reports would be a better use of time. Either they are already here, or we will not have the tools to discover neighbors (if they exist) until our technology is far more advanced.