In March 1975 life as I know it began. My favourite pastime as a kid, was sneaking out on summer nights to watch the stars. I don't think I realized what they were; they were just awsome to look at.
A few years later, on a rainy day and bored out of my wits, my literary interest took a leap from Donald Duck to Nils Mustelin's Life Among Billions of Stars (original Swedish title "Liv bland miljarder stjärnor", 1978, Kultur och Natur) It was a popular science book way too complicated for a 10-year-old, but stubborn as I am, I had no intention of letting strange words and concepts deter me from reading it.
Up to that point Earth was my Universe; it was just a huge room to me. Boy was I wrong! That summer I was glued to the book. Over the years I read it over and over again, gradually beginning to comprehend.
Lately I've had the pleasure of studying IT and Law at Ã…bo Akademi University, and I still have a habit of reading books I don't quite comprehend, for instance professir Stephen Hawking's brilliant The Universe in a Nutshell.
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"No one would have believed, in the last years of the 19th century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. No one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets. And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us."
"War of the Worlds" - H.G. Wells - 1898
Yes, there probably is some form of extraterrestrial life. Taking the size of the universe, searching for a tiny needle in such a gigantic haystack requires activity on both ends, unless of course we are very lucky indeed.
Making contact with ETs might not be as pleasant as we would like to think. Let me para-phrase professor Hawking's thoughts on the subject expressed in a lecture on Life in the Universe. In effect what he said was, that we should be wary of answering back, until we have developed a bit further, and that meeting a more advanced civilization, at out present stage, might be a bit like the original inhabitants of America meeting Columbus; they were not better off for it.
What about the signals we have been transmitting since the invention of radio technology? How would another civilization react to broadcasts such as I Love Lucy and The Simpsons? And why does most people insist on aliens being intelligent or even peaceful: They might just be highly advanced killing machines that would make our own acts of cruelty seem like child's play in comparison. They could be some ancient beings advanced beyond our comprehension and utterly uninterested in us. Or just a lump of sticky goo on some rock. We should not make assumptions on what aliens look like.
"Curiosity", is the only reason I do run SETI@home. It is also the thing that "killed the cat"...
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