[hermanmerman]

Well contrast that with Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner's $100m initiative to search for alien life[1], and I'd say that we're still pretty optimistic about that. We're basically searching for aliens who would've had the same idea as we had with Voyager :) almost naive now that I think of it...

[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/stephen-hawking-russian-billiona...

[duskwuff]

Well, more precisely, aliens who are transmitting something akin to the Arecibo message:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message

Except we only sent ours once in 1974, so aliens who didn't happen to be listening in the right direction right then are out of luck.