"Is it worthwhile?" is not a bad question to ask. If someone proposed to use all of our resources to discover life outside of Earth, we would probably agree th

"Is it worthwhile?" is not a bad question to ask. If someone proposed to use all of our resources to discover life outside of Earth, we would probably agree that's not the best use of our resources. But this means there's an upper bound to the cost we're willing to bear. Which leads to the question, how much resources should we devote to finding life outside of Earth? The answer to that question is, yes, dependent on the expected economic outcome of finding extraterrestrial life.