We haven't had a message from ET yet, but maybe we're not looking in the right way. (courtesy of flickr user Robin Hutton)
The search for intelligent life in the universe took a hit earlier this year when SETI had to put the Allen Telescope Array on hiatus due to lack of funding. (It now appears that SETI may soon raise enough money to get the ATA up and running again.) But then, there’s a good chance that this approach, based on the idea that somewhere in the universe alien civilizations are sending radio messages directed at Earth, may be completely misguided. “In my opinion,” Arizona State University astronomer Paul Davies writes in his book The Eerie Silence, “this ‘central dogma’ simply isn’t credible.” He points out that if even a fairly close civilization, say 1,000 light years away, were to look through a telescope and find Earth, it would see the planet 1,000 years in our past. Why would they bother to send a message to a planet that hadn’t even discovered electricity, let alone built a receiver for such a message?
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