Trying to meet the neighbours

Is there anybody out there? Give the question some thought before you answer, because it’s more perilous than it seems. Deny the possibility of a universe populated with intelligent extraterrestrials that can speak and mate and battle with humanity, and the science-fiction canon collapses; more than a century’s worth of novels, from “The War of the Worlds” to “Old Man’s War,” would find their speculative foundations swept out from underneath them. But admit to a sincere belief in the remotest potential for alien life, and prepare to be fitted for a straitjacket; a recent survey conducted by Baylor University found that more Americans believe in ancient civilizations like the lost continent of Atlantis than in U.F.O.’s. If intelligent humans think the existence of aliens is a perplexing notion, the idea that a small group of astronomers and physicists are attempting to determine if aliens exist is even more so. To the uninitiated and the ignorant (and those of us who fall into both camps), the science of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is as inscrutable as the phenomenon it seeks, conjuring up images of mad scientists out of old EC comic books, their ears trained to intricate listening devices as they scan the interstellar static for unearthly broadcasts — or worse, of hapless crackpots chasing down every report of alien abduction they read in Weekly World News.

Surprisingly, the science-fiction community (which knows a thing or two about being misunderstood and dismissed) is not unequivocally supportive of SETI’s work. In a 2003 lecture entitled “Aliens Cause Global Warming" Michael Crichton declared, “SETI is unquestionably a religion.” And authors free of Crichton’s political baggage do not cast SETI’s mission in particularly upbeat terms, either: in his short story “The Puzzle,” the Serbian author Zoran Zivkovic writes of a scientist pursuing a SETI-like experiment, whose “gloomy exultation” can end only with irrefutable evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence — only “with contact made would he be able to say that his life’s work had meaning.”
View: Full Article | Source: New York Times