Somewhere, some day, we’ll find ET

March.26 : Ten years ago, when our son was in high school, he told me that he had hooked up his computer to look for other intelligent life in the universe. He seemed quite excited about it. I asked him if he really believed that there is intelligent life elsewhere in space, and he pointed his finger at a tiny dot on a map of the universe on his wall, and said, “This is the earth. Now look at this chart. See how many dots there are. Do you really think we are the only intelligent species in so vast a universe?”

The vastness of our universe is truly mind-boggling. When we talk about space we don’t talk in millions and billions but in trillions and even sextillions (that’s one followed by 21 zeros). The flight distance from Delhi to New York is about 9,500 miles. Our nearest star, the sun, is 93 million miles away. The next closest star is some 25 trillion miles. Astronomers estimate that our home galaxy, the Milky Way, has anywhere between 200 billion and 400 billion stars. And there are billions of other galaxies in the universe.
Purely for the sake of argument, if each galaxy has just one planet with conditions similar to those on earth, then there must be thousands of planets in deep space with intelligent life. Wernher von Braun, the man known as the father of the US space programme, once said, “It would be the height of presumption to think that we are the only living things in that enormous immensity”.
The project that our son was so excited about was the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, a collective name for the search for life on distant planets. Teams of scientists were looking into outer space through radio telescopes in the hope of picking up signals from intelligent aliens. This required sifting through huge amounts of data and there was no single, powerful computer to handle it.
So the University of California at Berkeley thought up of an ingenious idea: utilise the combined computing power of the hundreds of thousands of computers spread across the globe when they are switched on but not in use. They called it Seti@home, and all that a participant had to do was download some software and leave the rest to the computer. Till date, some five million people are said to have downloaded the software. This month marks two anniversaries in our search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
The first began 50 years ago when Frank Drake, a Cornell University astronomer, pointed a radio telescope at a star similar to our sun in the hope of picking up a signal from an extraterrestrial civilisation.
Twenty-five years ago the SETI Institute, a private, non-profit organisation was set up to “explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe”.
Over the last 50 years, our technology has advanced phenomenally and we have expanded our understanding of the universe. A National Aeronautics and Space Administration spacecraft has travelled a billion miles past the sun and is on its way to Pluto. We have detected planets orbiting stars with conditions that can support life form. We have found water on the moon and there are indications of abundant water on Europa, a moon of Jupiter. But we haven’t yet come across intelligent species.
In their quest for intelligent life, Drake and astronomer Carl Sagan designed what is popularly known as the Pioneer Plaque — an illustrated message for extraterrestrials that explains what humans look like and the location of Earth in the solar system. The plaque was sent into space on the Pioneer spacecraft in 1972. We have lost contact with it; it’s drifting in interstellar space.
The only mysterious hint we have received so far was in 1977 when a SETI astronomer discovered a signal that lasted over a minute. He took a printout and wrote “Wow!” in the margin. Till date scientists do not know the source of the signal. If the signal was from an alien species, they haven’t bothered to contact us again.
Yes, so far we have not encountered an ET or little green men. But that also does not mean we are alone in the universe. It is said that if the universe is the size of our Earth, then so far we have explored an area the size of a golf ball. It may not be an accurate analogy but it gives an idea. And considering the vastness, it won’t be incorrect to say that we have just about begun our search.
The famous science-fiction author and futurist Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering”. I am a firm believer that we are not alone; that one day either they will find us or we will find them. I only hope I am still around when that happens.

Shekhar Bhatia can be contacted at shekhar.bhatia@gmail.com [2]

Shekhar Bhatia