WE HAVE been hunting for intelligent life in the universe since Frank Drake inaugurated the first modern radio search in 1960. So far, no interstellar communications have been detected, but I have always agreed with the final sentence in Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison’s famous Nature paper of the year before: “The probability of success is difficult to estimate; but if we never search, the chance of success is zero.”
I am a fan of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), and I served as the official SETI historian before Congress cancelled NASA’s programme in 1993. I disagree with…
