SHOULD WE GET SERIOUS ABOUT THE SEARCH FOR E.T.?

Did our earliest human ancestors look up at the points of light in the night sky and wonder: are we alone in the universe?

Well, they certainly had no concept of stars or planets or evolution, but they saw patterns in those bright dots that spoke to them of strange beings and creatures. And there’s no doubt that once we did comprehend that some of those dots were planets like our own, we wondered if they could be inhabited.

The question has persisted, and though it might have been dampened a little once we learned how inhospitable our sister planets Mars and Venus are to life, there’s been a resurgence fuelled by our discovery of hundreds of planets circling other stars. Collectively, the pursuit of answers to such questions has become known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Although ‘outer space aliens’ would have to be awesomely powerful to create something we could see through optical telescopes, it was understood early on that an advanced civilization would very likely produce energy transmissions detectable on the radio bands. Scientific genius Nikola Tesla thought he’d detected a Martian signal in 1899, and in 1924, when Mars was at its closest distance to Earth in 80 years, the USA held a ‘Radio Silence Day’, halting radio transmissions for five minutes every hour to enable scientists to listen for possible signals from the red planet. Radio telescopes have been actively involved in SETI since the late 1950’s, and especially during the 1970’s and later, although US government funding of NASA’s SETI efforts was cut in 1981. The SETI@home project involves average people lending the processing power of their home computers to the search, analysing telescope data. After a bit of a slump in interest, in 2015 famed physicist Stephen Hawking and billionaire Yuri Milner announced a ten-year $100 million project called Breakthrough Listen that pays for dedicated telescope time. And now in 2020, on the heels of an announcement that the Very Large Array radio telescope in Mexico will join the search, the director of the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, Dr. Anthony Beasley has been quoted as saying that it’s "time for SETI to come in from the cold and be properly integrated to all other areas of astronomy". Beasley insists that governments should commit funding to SETI. Of course, the idea of using tax dollars to search for intelligent life in outer space has always been controversial.

Why is it so important to know if there are intelligent species out there?

Science fiction has gotten its teeth into the subject from the earliest days. H.G. Wells’ War Of The Worlds raised one of the most compelling reasons: what if a race of aliens came to Earth with hostile intentions? It’s a given that such invaders would be more technologically advanced than we are, or they wouldn’t be able to cross the enormous distances involved, and we know that the clash of unequal societies in human history has never gone well for the less advanced ones. Human explorers travelled to distant lands for specific reasons: to take resources from the new territory back home with them, to capture slaves, or to use the new lands strategically in their conflicts with others. A secondary motivation was to convert inhabitants of such places to their own belief systems. That motivator was outwardly characterized as altruistic benevolence—wanting to help the ‘less fortunate’—and there may have been benefits along the way, but few would argue that they’ve outweighed the harm done.

Of course, we can’t judge the motivations of alien species by human standards, can we? They may think in completely different ways with utterly different values.

Sure. Statistically, I suppose the spectrum ranges from species that would squash us like ants, to godlike races determined to bring peace and love to the galaxy. The thing is, we can’t afford to assume the latter, so every bit of warning we can get about who is out there is vital.

I want to make it clear that, while I do think we should search for signs of extraterrestrial life, I do not support sending out signals to attract attention. It’s just too risky. (Besides, with nearly a century of profligate radio and television transmissions, what’s the point of adding more?! That’d be like holding up a sandwich board in Times Square.)

And if all of the above has given you the impression that I expect hostility from non-terrestrials, in fact I don’t—I believe they would have good intentions. But you know what they say about the road to hell….

Even without the threat factor, there are other extremely valuable results that could come from  the confirmation of intelligent life around other stars.

We would know that intelligence/sentience is an integral part of the universe, and not just a fluke. That would open our eyes to seeing the potential for sentience among our fellow life forms on Earth, gaining a better appreciation of the other life that shares our planet. It would also force us to be more open-minded about the ways of those strange to us.

We would know that other places in the galaxy are inhabitable, motivating us to spread human life (and hopefully other Earth life) beyond our fragile globe, either because we need to, or just to ensure against a cosmic catastrophe.

We might gain clues that would help us advance our own science in unknowable ways, perhaps by whole new approaches that wouldn’t have occurred to us. We might even find ways to consult and partner with another species for our own betterment.

And one of the most important benefits of discovering a more advanced civilization: we could see proof that it’s possible to survive the enormous technological change we’re undergoing without rendering ourselves extinct. Not only survive, but thrive, perhaps with the kind of benevolent egalitarian society envisioned in our most optimistic imaginings, like the world of Star Trek.

Discovering intelligent life elsewhere in the universe could provide tangible hope for the whole human race.

Isn’t that worth a few million bucks?