October 12th, Columbus Day. The
Planetary Society activates META II
beginning planet Earth's only continuous
all-sky search for extraterrestrial
intelligence funded exclusively by
donations from Planetary Society members
project META was conceived and built by
Professor Paul Horowitz of Harvard
University. It is capable of scanning
more than 8 million radio frequencies
simultaneously. For Planetary Society
president Carl Sagan, this technical
progress is what has made the present
era unique.
There has never been a time like
that before. So there is some chance
that in the next few decades we will get
the signal from some spectacularly
distant spectacularly exotic
civilization and everything on Earth
will as a consequence change. That is
possible. META II is a duplicate of META I, which began searching the Northern
Hemisphere in 1985 when motion picture
producer and director Steven Spielberg
threw the switch to kick off the program.
Is anybody out there? Frank Drake,
who conducted the first SETI search in
1960, thinks there may be thousands of
civilizations.
Take the solar system,
which we know has happened and life
on Earth as typical. And as far as we
know it is typical. We know of nothing, no
freakish event that was required for us
with our motorcycles and our video tape
recorders to exist.
I think even if
there's a plausible argument for a few
we ought to keep looking. I even go
further than that. If there's a plausible
argument that there isn't anybody out
there, bearing in mind that we can be
wrong, we ought to keep looking because
the question is of the most supreme
importance. It calibrates our place in
the universe. It tells us who we are. And
so it is worthwhile trying to find other
civilizations, I would say, no matter what.
