I have a question: is SETI actually useful? There's a couple of agencies on Earth that spend their time capturing human communications. It's a very difficult t

I have a question: is SETI actually useful? There's a couple of agencies on Earth that spend their time capturing human communications. It's a very difficult task and they need more than $ 200,000 to operate. Now I understand we just want to detect with a good degree of certitude that a transmission is intelligent but not human. We don't care about descrambling it. Yet, I think it's an almost impossible task because those communications will most likely be compressed and ciphered and therefore look like noise.