“Our form of life and intelligence,” observes Silvano Colombano at NASA’s Ames Research Center, “may just be a tiny first step in a continuing evolution that may well produce forms of intelligence that are far superior to ours and no longer based on carbon machinery.”
“The nightmare of particle physics is the dream of astronomers searching for extraterrestrials,” says astrophysicist Brian Lacki, at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, who proposes that advanced civilizations may want to build a black-hole-powered particle accelerator to study physics.
“Perhaps in ten thousand years, the starry sky that humankind gazes upon will remain empty and silent,” writes Liu Cixin, China’s foremost philosopher of first contact and author of the Three Body Problem. “But perhaps tomorrow we’ll wake up and find an alien spaceship the size of the Moon parked in orbit.”
“This data release is a tremendous milestone for the Breakthrough Listen team,” said Dr. Danny Price of the search “pipeline” that scans through billions of radio channels, looking for signals of radio-transmitting extraterrestrial civilizations in our Galactic neighborhood that are too narrow and well-defined to result from natural processes.
A professor of physics, Kevin Knuth, formerly a research scientist who worked for four years at NASA’s Ames Research Center, attended the 2002 NASA Contact Conference, which focused on serious speculation about extraterrestrials. During the meeting a concerned participant said loudly in a sinister tone, “We have absolutely no idea what is out there!” The silence that followed was palpable as the truth of this statement sunk in.
“For nearly 70 years the scheme favored by most scientists has been to look for signals — radio transmissions,” says SETI scientist Seth Shostak. “That’s the classic approach of SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence), and frankly, it makes sense. Radio can easily traverse light-years, and the technology for detecting it is well known and highly sensitive. But is looking for signals really the best plan? Is it possible that we’re making the wrong bet?”
