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| Personal background |
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I'm a planetary astronomer working at the Center for Space Physics at Boston University.
I've been fascinated with astronomy and the exploration of other planets since age 6. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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As much as I would like to discover advanced civilizations
out there, I'm doubtful that there are any other
radio-broadcasting species to
communicate with. Sure, there's probably extraterrestrial
life of some sort somewhere, but most of it is probably
something like bacteria. On the Earth, single-celled life
popped up as soon as the environment became hospitable,
and these microbes were so content that they remained
single-celled microbes for the next 2 billion years! That's
half of the history of life on the Earth. Even when
multi-celled creatures finally sprang up, it still took
hundreds of millions of years more for random
mutations to produce life capable of interstellar radio
communication (us). Picture a universe full of
happy slime and nothing to listen to on the radio - that's
my guess.
But then, what do we really know? The Earth's history
doesn't necessarily tell us what to expect in the rest of
cosmos. We should still look just in case. It
would be an enormous tragedy to be sitting
"next door" to an advanced civilization without knowing it! |
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