Recent polls show that about half of all people believe in extraterrestrial (alien) life, so there’s a good chance that you are one of those people. It seems logical to believers that with all of the stars and planets out there, at least one of them has to have life.
…and then there are all those people who claim to have seen an actual UFO.
Polls show that 10 to 20 percent of all people claim to have seen something floating around the sky that simply could not be explained. All of this lends to the idea that aliens have been visiting (and possibly making contact with us) for some time.
But what if we’ve been the ones making contact?
Of course, we don’t yet have the technology to send out our own manned space probes beyond the solar system, but, like E.T. did in the movie, we do have the ability to send and receive long-distance messages.
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) generally refers to a variety of different programs intended to discover alien life through airwaves. In the decades since World War II, various individuals, universities, and eventually even NASA have developed programs to study radio waves coming from space to see if any of them have been sent by intelligent life.
There are also programs where messages have been sent from Earth to beyond the solar system, which are known as “active SETI.”
This may sound like a pretty straightforward way of contacting aliens, but it is a lot more complex than it sounds. Any “message” received or sent would be contained inside radio waves, therefore making it difficult to determine if there is an actual message present. It would be up to the SETI scientists to peel off the layers of waves to see if there is a message hidden within. In other words, we may have already received alien communication without realizing it!
There is also the fact that any aliens out there might be at our level of technological advancement, or even behind us.
And finally, our messages may have been received by some beings who just don’t care.
Would you respond to one of our messages?