The search continues even when the traditional concept of god, the Bronze Age superstition, becomes untenable, or we become too sophisticated to fall for it any more. But there is still Mystery aplenty in the cosmos. Those of us who are of a spiritual nature but who are logically compelled to be atheists must find a way to continue that search.

For me, the fascination with ETI is the validation of my own faith, that there is a meaning of some kind to it all, even if it is only that the universe is fundamentally knowable, that it makes sense. And it is only faith. I don't know it for sure, no one can. My conviction, my faith, is not intellectual necessity. Even I understand it is a historical accident, a cultural conceit. I have inherited the Western intellectual tradition from the Ionian philosophers of almost three thousand years ago. It is not a Law of Nature or a logical inevitability, its just the way I was brought up, an artifact of where and when I was born.

If the little green men are out there, its because there are natural laws that make them inevitable, that its not a whim, or blind luck, that we are not alone. How terrible it would be if we were just a pointless, random accident, signifying nothing. We can never know for sure that we are alone, but at least its possible that one day we'll learn we're not. Its possible, but even that is not a sure thing.

I believe that is the reason we all come here, to the Zone, that is. We seek the company of others who also seek. We hope our knowledge of scientific law (or for some of us, ideological political certainty) will provide us with certainty, rescue us from the loneliness. But when the idea of a traditional god can no longer be seriously considered, the Mystery is not solved, it just gets deeper. This is what the Principle of Mediocrity is all about, or as astronomers call it, The Perfect Cosmological Principal.

The PCP tells us that the no matter where or when we are in the universe, if we look as far as we can see in any direction, we will always see pretty much the same thing, the same distribution of matter, the same density of energy, the same architecture, the same repeated structures always different in detail but essentially the same overall.

But that comfortable, reassuring idea has been shown to be mistaken, by direct empirical observation (and in my lifetime!). The universe had a beginning, and it will have an end. It evolves, it rushes to some final, entropic state, it is mortal too, and if we look far enough away it appears to be fundamentally different than it is right here. That is an astonishing fact. That we can even say this with some high degree of certainty is itself astonishing.

The alien creature under an alien sun is our guarantee of some kind of immortality. We know when we die, which is inevitable, our race will carry on. And when our race dies, which is also inevitable, we want to know someone will carry on. We need to know that intelligence, consciousness, sentience will continue, that it is immortal. We are afraid of chaos, we fear and hate death, it is the ultimate mediocrity.

In Ursula K Leguin's "The Left Hand of Darkness", one of her characters says that it is pointless to be able to foretell the future because there is only one question that really matters, whether or not we die. And we already know the answer.