Is Anyone Out There?

THERE is a man in Massachusetts, U.S.A., who as part of his work every day checks to find out if any messages have come in. Day after day, none do. For years now, none have. But he still checks regularly, and he is disappointed regularly. Is he unpopular? Is his answering machine broken?

Neither. He checks a machine, but it is not hooked up to a telephone line. It is a computer connected to a huge electronic ear that points up, away from our world, into the depths of outer space: a radio telescope. This man is helping a team of scientists to scan the stars for a message from intelligent extraterrestrials, beings from beyond our world.

Others, like him, have also been listening for 30 years now. In 1960 astronomer Frank Drake became the first man to listen with a radio telescope for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Since then, man has, in effect, put his ears in space. Some 50 different extended searches of the sky have been made so far.

Radio telescopes all over the world have joined in the hunt​—in France, the Federal Republic of Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, the Soviet Union, Argentina, the United States, and Canada. As one person put it: “SETI [an English-language acronym for mankind’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence] is becoming as international as space itself.” One symposium on the subject drew some 150 scientists from 18 countries spanning all five continents.

The most ambitious SETI project yet, though, is due to be launched in 1992. NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the United States, plans to use a powerful new device that will make it possible to scan millions of radio frequencies at the same time. The search is projected to last ten years at a cost of $90 million. It will be some ten thousand million times more extensive than all the previous searches put together.

But when man asks of the vast universe, “Is anyone out there?” he will need more than high-​tech hardware to find an answer. In many ways it is a spiritual question. In groping for an answer, man reveals some of his most cherished hopes: the end of war, the end of disease, perhaps even the attaining of immortality itself. So the stakes are high. But after centuries of wondering and decades of searching, how close is man to an answer?