An interesting comment from Dr. Gerry Harp, who recently succeeded Dr. Jill Tarter as director of the Center for SETI Research:

This endeavor is not as long a shot as people think. The technology is growing exponentially, especially signal processing, as computers are getting faster. Every six years our search speed is increased by a factor of 10. It’s not like we’re looking at star after star after star at the same rate.

This example shows that, contrary to certain “space cynics,” Moore’s Law of exponential growth can apply in space research.

Unfortunately, many space programs are still stuck in a pattern of slow (or even negative) arithmetic growth, due to political decisions that have kept NASA wedded to last-generation technologies and systems like Orion and JWST.