Will We Meet E.T.?

Drake, alas, detected nary a peep. Nor has anyone else since then. Even after spending thousands of hours scanning the skies, at myriad frequencies, at a cost of more than $100 million astronomers have yet to detect a single credible signal, though the most distant star probed is barely 1% of the way across the galaxy.

Still, Drake, 70, who devised the definitive equation for calculating the possible number of technologically advanced civilizations in our Milky Way galaxy, remains convinced that he will be around when one of them calls. "We're just at the beginning of our search," says Drake, who reckons that there are some 10,000 high-tech worlds scattered among the Milky Way's 100 billion or more stars. That's a much more modest figure than the late Carl Sagan's estimate of 1 million intelligent civilizations in just our galaxy--one of perhaps 100 billion galaxies scattered through the universe.

For years Congress funded various SETI efforts--until the political stigma of paying for the quest for "little green men," as cynics like to call them, scuttled federal funding in 1993. Nonetheless, NASA continues the search for unearthly life, even if it's only for little green bugs, under the more politically palatable label of astrobiology. Right now, NASA is eyeing the dusty surface of Mars (where water once flowed) and the likely ocean under the ice of Jupiter's moon Europa as sites for primitive life-forms. One recent false alarm: the much trumpeted Martian meteorite found in Antarctica apparently does not contain convincing evidence of the existence of microorganisms on the Red Planet, as originally claimed.

But the grander dream--of contacting extraintelligent E.T.s like those canal-building Martians imagined by the early 20th century astronomer Percival Lowell--lives on in the radio and optical searches underwritten by private outfits like Drake's SETI Institute and the Planetary Society. And even scientists dubious of success don't want to be spoilsports. They agree on the importance of continuing the quest, not just for microbes on Mars or Europa but also for those faint signals from some remote world--if only to underscore the preciousness of life and the importance of protecting perhaps its lone example. Admits Drake: "Even a negative answer is better than no answer at all."

Maybe you'd like to try tracking down E.T. yourself? If you have a PC or Mac that sits idle at least a few hours a day, you can join the 1.7 million people who have downloaded SETI@home, a free screen saver (available at setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu that uses your computer's downtime to help sort through the reams of noisy static gathered by radio telescopes. The odds of pulling a Jodie Foster (who snared the elusive extraterrestrial signal in the 1997 sci-fi flick Contact) are a zillion to one. But if you fail--or even if you succeed--nobody's going to burn you at the stake.