A Major Bequest Finally Puts the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence on Solid Financial Ground

For 40 years, the scientists of the SETI Institute have been scanning the galaxy for evidence of extraterrestrial life, and more specifically, intelligent life. But that’s a tough line of study for a research institute, what with so few philanthropic and government funders willing to support such an endeavor, despite its scientific and spiritual profundity. In 2011, for example, budget problems forced the SETI Institute to pause the operation of its main radio telescope while it sought new funding.

So it was beyond welcome news recently when the SETI Institute learned it was receiving a watershed philanthropic gift of $200 million from the estate of the late Franklin Antonio, a cofounder of semiconductor and tech giant Qualcomm and a longtime friend and supporter of the institute. We often use the word "transformative" (maybe too often) when we talk about philanthropic gifts on this scale, but in this case, it's not hyperbole. The gift will finally give the SETI Institute, based in Mountain View, California, a nice financial cushion and ensure it can keep the lights on. But more significantly for the long term, it will provide what amounts to wealth-building endowment that will let the organization carry on and expand its multidisciplinary research well into the future.

This isn’t the only nine-figure gift Antonio left behind. I wrote just a few weeks ago about a similar $200 million bequest from Antonio's estate to the Summer Science Program, a nonprofit science education program for science-oriented high schoolers. Antonio himself had attended the program as a teenager and clearly valued the experience enough that he remembered it many decades later in the very last decisions of his life. That, too, was a game-changing gift for the grantee — the Summer Science Program had a typical annual budget of just $7 million.

Antonio, who was chief scientist at Qualcomm and a prolific innovator with hundreds of patents to his credit, was a longtime supporter of SETI and its mission to study the universe and its origins. Between 2012 and 2019, he gave at least $4.7 million to support the Allen Telescope Array, SETI's powerful radio telescope. In addition to the funding, Antonio was also an active participant in the organization's research, contributing his knowledge of communications technology to the institute’s science and engineering team.

“Entirely reliant on philanthropic sources”

The $200 million Antonio bequest will be a game-changer for the SETI Institute, said Bill Diamond, its president and CEO. The 100-plus scientists working at the institute conduct a range of planetary and space research, much of which is funded by federal sources like NASA, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. But the portion of the institute’s work that’s involved in actual SETI — the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — doesn’t receive government funding, which is, of course, why private philanthropy is so vital.

"The namesake endeavor of SETI research, where we use radio telescopes and optical telescopes to look for signs of technology in space as a proxy for life and intelligence — that has not enjoyed federal funding since the early 1990s," Diamond said. "That endeavor has been entirely reliant on philanthropic sources."

The Antonio gift is large enough that the SETI Institute intends to invest it to function as a long-term wealth-building endowment, taking annual distributions of $6 million to $12 million, depending on investment performance. Such sums would be a sizable boost for the organization, which had been operating with annual budgets of $25 million to $30 million.

"Unlike other sources of funding,” Diamond said, “the gift is unrestricted. So not only in size, but also in terms of being completely unrestricted, it's hugely impactful."

SETI has outlined some of its intended uses for the new funds, including plans to undertake more research programs and projects involving space and planetary science topics. The organization also plans to establish postdoctoral fellowships and internal grants for science and education programs, and will devote more funding toward the development of new observational instruments and research technologies.

"Funding our own postdoctoral researchers is transformative in that it provides a means of attracting new and younger talent to the institute, and hopefully some of them would stay on to become permanent scientists at the institute," Diamond said. The institute will set some funds aside to allow its own scientists to write grant proposals to test out new ideas; if results are promising, the researchers can then apply for larger, external sources of funding, including the federal grants that are so important to the SETI Institute's research.

The institute says it will also expand on international collaborations with cosmos-oriented science organizations and resources around the world. And finally, as with many nonprofit science institutions, SETI will develop more educational programs to engage the public, including underserved communities.

A rare commitment

Major gifts to help search for extraterrestrial life come along occasionally, but rarely. Paul Allen, for example, contributed some $30 million in the first decade of the century to build SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array. In 2015, Yuri Milner — a science philanthropist who founded the Breakthrough Foundation and Breakthrough Prize — committed $100 million for the 10-year Breakthrough Listen initiative, expanding the search for civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy. In fact, SETI Institute and Breakthrough Listen work closely together on research efforts.

These days, scientists in the wider SETI community are more excited than ever, due to advances in technology and the construction of new telescopes — some with philanthropic backing — such as the Giant Magellan Telescope currently under construction in Chile, or the orbiting James Webb Space Telescope, which has been regularly altering our knowledge and understanding of the universe since its launch two years ago.

To circle back to Franklin Antonio, it’s clear that he never forgot the impact of educational programs early in his life, like the Summer Science Program, nor did he lose the curiosity that pushed him into a career in science in the first place — as evidenced by this massive SETI gift. It's still possible that a few more substantial bequests will come out of Antonio's estate in the coming weeks and months, and it certainly wouldn’t be a surprise if they went to other science causes or organizations.

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