Page  1  |  2  |  3

AN INHABITED UNIVERSE? - cont.

For nearly two decades, SETI was a NASA program, carried out by NASA centers in California. But in 1993, an amendment by Senator Richard Bryan of Nevada ended this effort. Since then, SETI has been a private endeavor, funded by individual donations.

       The most ambitious search for cosmic company is known as Project Phoenix, and is conducted by the SETI Institute, in Mountain View, California.  Phoenix scrutinizes the vicinities of about one thousand, nearby, sun-like stars for signals that are clearly of artificial origin.  Since no one can be certain exactly where on the radio dial the aliens might be broadcasting, Phoenix carefully sifts through two billion narrow-band (1 Hz) channels between 1000 and 3000 MHz.  It is in this spectral regime that the natural background noise from galaxies, quasars, and other celestial transmitters is minimal.  It is a good band for a cosmic “hailing” signal.

       To begin with, we would be confronted with one of the biggest news stories of all time. Unlike the daily reports of UFOs buzzing the countryside or of sex-starved aliens abducting citizens for salacious purposes, a signal detected by SETI researchers wouldn’t rely on anecdote or unsteady home videos. It could be quickly and repeatedly confirmed by scientists world-wide. The signal itself would come under intense scrutiny, and new receivers would be built to check it for “fine structure”—rapid variations that might convey a message. 

       But even if such variations are found, it’s unclear whether we would ever understand them. Humans have had radio technology for only a century, but any extraterrestrials we hear will more than likely have had it much longer. Their civilization will be far in advance of ours, perhaps by tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Only if they wish to educate us, to enlist us as members of some sort of “galactic club,” will they make it easy for us to decode their signal.  In that event, we could experience a transcendent moment in human history. We would be brought into the fold of a society beyond our abilities to imagine, and might leapfrog millennia of history. 

       But even if none of this happens, even if we never understand the signal that we receive, we would still know that in the desolate vastness of a brutally hostile cosmos, other thinking beings exist and thrive. In Stephen Hawking’s universe, neither he nor we would be alone.

Page  1  |  2  |  3

[Home]  [Unsolved Mysteries]

[PBS Online]  [Thirteen Online]