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After 50 fruitless years of scanning the stars for ET signals using radiotelescopes, Frank Drake, the godfather of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is acknowledging the obvious: SETI’s foundation might well have been erected atop wet cement.
It happened this week, just days after the New Zealand Defence Force became the latest foreign bureaucracy to announce its intentions to unload hundreds of UFO documents into the public domain. The venue was London, and the occasion was 350th anniversary celebration of the venerated Royal Society. But the conservative science fraternity had never convened for a topic like this: ”The Detection Of Extraterrestrial Life And The Consequences For Science And Society.”
The assembly didn’t confront UFOs head-on (that would’ve been way too Whoopee Cushion for the distinguished panelists), but its attending luminaries included NASA reps and Arizona State physicist Paul Davies, whose “Are We Alone?” book made it into Hillary Clinton’s hands during a presumed UFO briefing by Laurance Rockefeller in 1995.
Drake, author of the famous equation projecting how as many as 10,000 civilizations might well be thriving amid the Milky Way galaxy, shared his latest epiphany with the BBC. It went something like this: As cable, fiber optics, digital and other communications technologies continue to evolve, Earth is emitting fewer radio-band signals and growing more silent. Maybe that’s why we haven’t heard anything. Maybe advanced cosmic societies have dispensed with radio altogether. Consequently, SETI astronomers are now on the lookout for optical flashes that could account for ET laser communications.
“In searching for extraterrestrial life, we are both guided and hindered by our own experience,” Drake conceded. “We have to use ourselves as a model for what a technological civilisation must be, and this gives us guidance for what technologies might be present in the Universe.
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