Annotations:

Bias= Yellow
Phrasing= Red
Loaded words= Grey
Stereotypes= Blue

The Search for Signals From Space

CARL SAGAN Sept. 19, 1993, issue of Parade.
As children, we fear the dark. Anything might be out there. The unknown troubles us. But,
ironically, it is our fate to live in the dark. Head out from the Earth in any direction you choose,
and—after an initial flash of blue and a longer wait while the Sun fades—you are surrounded
by blackness, punctuated only here and there by the faint and distant stars.

Even after we are grown, the darkness retains its power to frighten us. And so there are those
who say we should not inquire too closely into who else might be living in that darkness. Better
not to know, they say.

There are 400 billion stars comprising the Milky Way Galaxy. Of this immense multitude, could
it be that our humdrum Sun is the only one with an inhabited planet? Maybe. Maybe the origin
of life or intelligence is exceedingly improbable. Maybe civilizations arise all the time but
promptly wipe themselves out.

Or, here and there, peppered across space, orbiting other suns, maybe there are worlds
something like our own on which other beings wonder about who else lives in the dark. Could
the Milky Way be rippling with life and intelligence—worlds calling out to one another—while
we on Earth are alive at the critical moment when we first decide to listen?

Our species has discovered a way to communicate through the dark, to transcend immense
distances. No means of communication is faster or cheaper, or reaches out farther. It’s called
radio.

After billions of years of biological evolution—on their planet and ours—an alien civilization
cannot be in technological lockstep with us. There have been humans for more than 20,000
centuries, but we’ve had radio only for about one century. If they’re behind us, they’re likely to
be too far behind to have radio. And if they’re ahead of us, they’re likely to be far ahead. What
is for us technologically difficult or impossible—what might seem to us like magic—might for
them be trivially easy. They might use other, very advanced means to communicate with their
peers, but they would know about radio as an approach to newly emerging civilizations. Even
with no more than our level of technology at the transmitting and receiving ends, we could
communicate across much of the Galaxy. They should be able to do much better.

If they exist, but our fear of the dark rebels. We conjure up objections:

“It’s too expensive.” But, in its fullest modem technological expression, it costs less than one
attack helicopter a year.

“We'll never understand what they’re saying.” But, because the message is transmitted by
radio, we and they must have radio physics in common.

The laws of Nature are the same everywhere, so science itself provides a language of
communication even between very different kinds of beings—provided they both have science.

“It would be demoralizing to learn that our science is medieval.” But, by the standards of the
next few centuries, at least some of our present science will be considered medieval,
extraterrestrials or no extraterrestrials. (So will some of our present politics, ethics, economics
and religion.) To go beyond present science is one of the chief goals of science. A serious
student is not commonly plunged into fits of despair on turning the pages of a textbook and is
covering that some further topic is known to the author but not yet to the student. Usually the
student struggles a little, acquires the new knowledge and, following an ancient human
tradition, continue to turn the pages.

“All through history, advanced civilizations ruin slightly more backward civilizations.” Certainly.
But malevolent aliens, should they exist, will not discover our existence from the fact that we
listen. The search programs only receive; they do not send.

The debate is, for the moment, moot. We are now, on an unprecedented scale, listening for
radio signals from possible other civilizations in the depths of space. Alive today is the first
generation of scientists to interrogate the darkness. Conceivably, it might also be the last
generation before contact is made—and this the last moment before we discover that someone
in the darkness is calling out to us.

This quest is called the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and I want to describe
how far we’ve come.
The first SETI program was carried out by Frank Drake at the National Radio Astronomy
Observatory in Greenbank, W.Va., in 1960. He listened to two nearby sunlike stars for two
weeks at one particular frequency. (“Nearby” is a relative term: The nearest was l2 light-years—
70 trillion miles—away.)

Almost at the moment Drake pointed the radio telescope and turned the system on, he picked
up a very strong signal. Was it a message from alien beings? Then it went away. If the signal
disappears, you can’t scrutinize it. You can’t tell if, because of the Earth’s rotation, it moves
with the sky. If it’s not repeatable, you’ve learned almost nothing from it—it might be
terrestrial radio interference or a failure of your amplifier or detector ... or an alien signal.
Unrepeatable data are not worth much.

Weeks later, the signal was detected again. It turned out to be a military aircraft broadcasting
on an unauthorized frequency. Drake reported negative results. But in science a negative result
is not at all the same thing as a failure. His great achievement was to show that modern
technology is fully able to listen for signals from hypothetical civilizations on planets of other
stars.

Since then, there have been other attempts, often on borrowed time, almost never for longer
than a few months. There have been some more false alarms—at Ohio State, at Arecibo in
Puerto Rico, in France, Russia and elsewhere—but nothing that could pass scientific muster.

In our fascination with SETI, we might be tempted, even without good evidence, to succumb to
belief. But this would be self-indulgent and foolish. We must surrender our skepticism only in
the face of rock-solid evidence. Science demands a tolerance for ambiguity. Where we are
ignorant, we withhold belief. Whatever annoyance the uncertainty engenders serves a higher
purpose: It drives us to accumulate better data. This attitude is the difference between science
and so much else. Science offers little in the way of cheap thrills. The standards of evidence are
strict. But, when followed, they allow you to see far, illuminating even a great darkness.