Father Sky

If anyone hasn’t heard of SETI, it stands for “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence”. Despite the somewhat “fringe” impression one gets any time you hear the word Extraterrestrial, there are a good many amateur and professional astronomers who take this quite seriously. I’ll let you do your own on-line search into everything the SETI Institute does but will share their mission here.

“… is to Explore, Understand and Explain the Origin, Nature and Prevalence of life in the universe.”

And as an amateur astronomer myself I too often wonder who else is out there and what are they like.  Surely, with all those billions of stars in our galaxy and all those other galaxies each with billions of stars themselves, there’s got to be a few with planets like ours and life, even intelligent life on some of those. It would be great to know that.

But there’s one aspect of SETI that worries me, making contact.

I am reading The Last Days of the Inca’s by Kim MacQuarrie, an excellent but tragic account of what often happens when two very different cultures meet and one has something the other wants. If this was an isolated story I might not be as worried. But anyone who follows history knows this is anything but an isolated event.

So after we’ve made contact with the Alpa Centaurian’s what then? Are we mature and evolved to the point where it truly is an intellectual exchange of idea’s and philosophy? Or would it end as something more, something quite different but tragically familiar? And what is in it for them?

So by all means, let’s keep our eye’s and ear’s open. But please, let’s keep our mouth shut.