SETI fifty years later

I'm sure most of you have heard of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It began in 1960 when Frank Drake, an astronomer, pointed a radio telescope toward the stars to listen for the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe. Thanks to Carl Sagan and many others, there was enthusiasm and real optimism that life could be found. It was their belief that life was easy to get started; all you needed were the right chemicals. After all, it wasn't like a god intervened, you know. But things have changed.

I was reminded of this when I read a book review for The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence. The author Paul Davies, who is a physicist, cosmologist, and astrobiologist at Arizona State University, has written a book that examines why it is taking so long to establish communications with other life forms in the universe.

Remember the book and movie called Contact? The main character says there's got to be a lot of life in this huge universe. But since Contact came out, scientists have discovered how difficult and complex life really is. I have reviewed two books which discuss this in some depth -- The Signature in the Cell and The Cell's Design. Check my past blogs for further information about these two books. So it appears it's much more difficult than previously thought to get life started.

Davies is referencing years of failure with SETI in the title of his book. It has been nothing but false alarms, interstellar static, and random noise. ET has not phoned home. That's the eerie silence Davies is referring to.

Here's the punchline of the book. Davies concludes with these words: "We are probably the only intelligent beings in the universe, and I would not be very surprised if the solar system contains the only life in the universe." I don't believe Davies is a theist, but he certainly recognizes the extreme difficulty of getting life started. It almost seems like a miracle, doesn't it?