Astronomer tells Athens audience: E.T. liable to phone any day

2006-11-13

By Andrew Tillotson

Athens NEWS Campus Reporter

Intelligent life is likely abundant in the cosmos, and we will find evidence of it soon, according to one of the world's top experts on the ongoing search for extraterrestrial life.

Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., gave a pair of talks in Athens last week about what his organization does to search for alien life, why he believes it is out there, and what might happen when we find it.

SETI is a general acronym for "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" that can apply to any group that does such work, and does not exclusively refer to Shostak's institute.

"The bottom line is we will find E.T. in the next two dozen years," Shostak said. "I'll bet you all a cup of Starbucks on that." "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," of course, was the name of Steven Spielberg's popular 1982 film about a lovable alien.

Full article here:

http://www.athensnews.com/issue/article.php3?story_id=26636

Some quotes:

"[Those] who think that we're the only grain of sand where anything interesting is happening, you have to admit that that's a very audacious point of view," Shostak said. "And if there's one thing that astronomy's taught us in the last 500 years, it's that every time we thought we were special, we were wrong."

...

And as for what the aliens might look like, he said the best guess is what we might look like in our near future -- machines.

Regardless of what happens in outer space, he implied, the prospect of having machines that can out-think us here on earth by as early as 2020 is far more ominous:

"You may be the last generation to run the planet, ergo I suggest a hedonistic lifestyle."

"...for what can more concern us than to know how this world which we inhabit is made; and whether there be any other worlds like it, which are also inhabited as this is?" - De Fontenelle, 1686