'We are alone, almost certainly the only sentient beings in our unimaginably vast universe'
The universe, as we all know, is a very big place: several hundred billion sun-like stars in our Milky Way alone – each with its retinue of orbiting planets – and several more hundreds of billions of galaxies beyond. The twofold implications would seem to be, first, cosmologist Carl Sagan’s deflating verdict that, ‘We inhabit an insignificant planet of a humdrum star tucked away in a forgotten corner of the universe.’ And next, given the (estimated) several hundred trillion rocky planets in those billions upon billions of galaxies, some at least must share similar characteristics to our own, capable of giving rise to and sustaining intelligent life. Back in 1971, scientists (including Sagan), attending a joint US-Soviet conference on ‘Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligences’ (CETI) at the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory in Armenia, anticipated there might be several hundred advanced civilisations in our galaxy alone. Almost fifty years on, the increasingly unarguable...
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