Silence falls over Proxima Post at the Top Secret Military Base. Eyes grow large as the control room loudspeakers broadcast a strange, warbling, gibbering sound.
“Hold on… Enhancing…” A technician peers intently into a monitor, adjusting his glasses with one hand, slowly twisting a dial with the other. The odd noise resolves into a musical-sounding speech.
The Proxima Post control room erupts into cheers. The perpetually grumpy and skeptical project leader turns, flashes a grin and thumbs-up to the Hero, who’s hoisted into the air by jubilant teammates.
“We did it! First contact! Woooo!”
“Now,” the Hero says, the camera zooming in, “let’s get to know each other.”
Fade to black, roll credits.
The Hollywood version of alien contact is unrealistic and targets the wrong thing. It’s more exciting to look at the inevitable global effects: Science gets a jumpstart with new information about planetology, biochemistry and biology. World religions must replace or amend doctrine. New fields are created for planetary exploration and expansion. Politics refocuses on cooperative off-planet expansion. The human race better understands its own origins and place in the cosmos.
Finding evidence of an alien race will certainly be exciting and world-changing, but first realize one thing: Space is really, really big, and there are a lot of places to look when searching for cosmic phone calls. Just within our Milky Way galaxy, our sun is one star in 100 billion.
The closest star to our own sun is Proxima Centauri, located 4.2 light-years (twelve trillion miles) away. No available communications technology travels faster than the speed of light. So if an alien race lived at Proxima Centauri, caught some Earth-based radio signals broadcast today, and replied with a message, we wouldn’t receive it until almost nine years from now. If we managed to hear and respond to that message, we’d wait another nine years for Centauri’s reply! This best case assumes aliens live nearby. If they don’t, response times could easily take dozens, hundreds, thousands or millions of years. And you thought your Internet connection was slow.
The SETI@Home project is hundreds of thousands of computers around the planet working together to process information. You can join, too: Download the free software fromhttp://setiathome.berkeley.edu and donate your PC’s unused processing cycles to interpret radio telescope data. That’s fancy talk for saying, “When you’re not using your PC, use it to automatically crunch numbers, aiding in the search for intelligent life on other planets.”
We must learn and explore. This drive for knowledge is beyond “science for science’s sake”. Without this growth, we stagnate and become complacent. The problem with SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) is a lack of immediate return, or even a promise of results within our lifetime. It’s hard to swallow when there are more immediate issues. SETI research needs dedication and very long term thinking. A SETI project is only effective when measured in human lifetimes.
Perhaps the only reason aliens haven’t contacted us yet is because we’re not worth it. Do we really expect contact after continual galaxy-wide broadcasts of “Deal or No Deal” and “American Idol”? Any self-respecting, intelligent alien would stay far away from those weird Earthlings.