But seriously that episode where Kirk and Spock fight on Vulcan is pretty good. (Photo: ussawesome.tumblr.com)

A couple of weeks ago, the SETI Institute asked the Internet to help name two tiny moons of Pluto. Well, the voting has now closed, and while no one hijacked the polls in favor of "Alderaan," it was a name near and dear to science fiction nerds that took the top spot: Vulcan (a write-in) pulled 174,062 votes out of 450,324 total.

Cerebus came in second with 99,432 and Styx rounded out the top three with 87,858, presumably all of them classic rock fans. The SETI Institute says it'll be another month or two before the names are finalized.

But it's not simply a reflection of Internet culture that the Trekkie option won out. In fact, as the Christian Science Monitor reports, it was the result of a sustained campaign by someone with influence and a lot of time on his hands. Vulcan was suggested and promoted by none other than William Shatner, a.k.a. James Tiberius Kirk, who spent the last week tweeting out regular appeals to his 1.35 million followers.

This despite the fact that Vulcan was the god of fire and had very little to do with the underworld, and Persephone would have been a far more thematically appropriate selection.

This concludes the latest update in our ongoing series, "What Is William Shatner Doing Now Instead of Appearing in the Relaunched Star Trek?"

Putting her money where her mouth is

Jodie Foster is apparently a more serious method actress than we thought. After playing a SETI scientist in the 1997 film, Contact, Mrs. Foster is now one of several celebrity donors who helped raise more than $220,000 dollars to get the defunct program up and running again. With the last American shuttle flight having left earth recently, it's nice to see America's real heroes, our movie stars, still believe space is worth exploring.

SETI, which was costing NASA $2.5 million a year, won't be able to completely relaunch with this new seed funding, but it may be enough to get the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) out of hibernation. You can see a similar array of telescopes on the poster for Contact. Once the ATA is up and running, "the search for evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations and insight into the nature of our cosmic origins."

After SETI was first cancelled, Betabeat reported on the online calls for a Kickstarter project to save the program. That never came together, but apparently the folks at SETI noticwed, because they seem to have set up there own funding platform modeled after Kickstarter, which they calls SETIStars.

Along with Mrs. Foster, big name donors include sci-fi author Larry Niven and Bill Anders, an honest to goodness astronaut who flew in the Apollo 8 mission, which was the first human spaceflight to leave Earth's orbit, be captured by the gravitational field of the moon, and then break free in order to return to Earth.

We're envisioning a made for TV movie in which a heroic celeb raises the funds for a new SETI program, only to find herself falling in love with a demonic alien who contacts her through Turntable.fm. Put that on Kickstarter.

SETI needs about $5 million over the next two years to reopen a telescope facility. That's more than five times the amount of money raised by the largest Kickstarter project to date. Dean McBeth, a digital strategist at Wieden + Kennedy in Portland, kindled the idea with a tweet yesterday: "SETI suspended for no $. Can we ask alien life to micro-fund on Kickstarter?" he asked. Twitter users from Minneapolis to Italy proposed the same thing. "Very sad to learn SETI is closing. They should do a Kickstarter to get their $5 mill. I'm serious," tweeted Londoner Tom Critchlow.

Betabeat reached out to Kickstarter to ask if they were in communication with the alien life-seeking institute, but a representative did not immediately respond for comment. We'll update if they do.

KickstartSETI.com is still available!