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Mercury, September/October 2002 Table of Contents

Courtesy of Seth Shostak.

by Seth Shostak

Ben Zuckerman is wrong. There are plenty of reasons why Earth hasn’t been visited by extraterrestrials.

Is there intelligence elsewhere in the Galaxy? Are there other beings who not only can see the stars, but who can also understand where they are and how they work? That’s the question today’s SETI experiments try to address. A single signal from the cosmos — a sudden burst of photons or a soft radio squeal — would immediately provide an answer.

It is now four decades since the first modern SETI experiment, and we still have not detected and confirmed such a signal. This is reason for some astronomers, including my distinguished opponent Ben Zuckerman, to question the premises of SETI, or simply the likelihood that it will ever succeed. To my mind, this is as if the crew aboard The Resolution, Captain James Cook’s ship — having sailed for months in search of Terra Australis Incognita — opted to set up debating clubs to argue the possibility that they would ever stumble across the postulated southern continent. In fact, debate would have been far less useful than continuing to sail. Cook’s repeated probes into uncharted southern latitudes both constrained the search space and indirectly told his successors where to look next. In 1820, nearly a half century after Cook’s forays, Thaddeus von Bellinghausen finally sighted Antarctica. In other words, experiment is better than debate, and that’s why SETI researchers continue to deploy their telescopes.

Frankly, it’s possible that tomorrow, next week, or next year, SETI will receive a signal that renders all argument about the likelihood of success obsolete and quaint. I personally believe that the telescopes and techniques currently being developed — instruments that will increase by three orders of magnitude the number of star systems scrutinized for cosmic company – are likely to result in the detection of someone else’s technology. But that’s my opinion. Meanwhile — and in the spirit of interesting pugilistic polemics — I will take issue with some of the rationale Ben Zuckerman has offered in support of his assertion that SETI will fail. After all, he’s not only telling us it will fail, he’s telling us why.

Click here to read Ben Zuckerman's response.