Are we alone? ... I don't think so ..... but I don't think we will ever succeed in proving that. Space is just too big, the Universe is too old and we won't last long enough. Dinosaurs ruled the planet for quite a long time but it was well less than 1% of the age of the Universe and they are gone. On our own planet civilisations have come and gone and been forgotten. But we can see evidence of them and know were to look. The needle we (the Seti community)are looking for is very small; the haystake is just too large. My own feeling is that great civilisations have risen and fallen out there; if there were survivors they have forgotten it, just as we have lost huge chunks of knowledge about our past.
Too much pessimism! and that is no reason not to search!!
The little kid who harboured dreams of meeting little green men still exists within me even if the older pragmatist is the one doing the typing.
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.
