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credit: SPDO/TDP/DRAO/Swinburne Astronomy, SETI Institute
Imagine surfing to your favorite science news website tomorrow to see headlines announcing the detection of a radio signal coming at us from an extraterrestrial civilization.
Impossible? Not really.
Yes, it’s true that over the past 50 years approximately 100 SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) programs have come up empty handed. But veteran SETI scientist Jill Tarter has pointed out that in terms of the volume of the Milky Way, we have only surveyed the equivalent volume of a Starbucks cup of coffee as compared to the volume of Earth’s oceans. The galaxy in a big place. Or, as 19th century Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle put it, potentially a "sad spectacle, . . . for misery and folly."
Assuming there are other technological civilizations in our galaxy, and that some subset of them attempt interstellar communication via radio beacons, then detecting a signal is only a matter of when, not if....
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