The Convention at the End of the Universe

It's been almost 50 years since Frank Drake first pointed the 26-meter radio telescope at Green Bank, West Virginia towards the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani with the hope of catching bits of chatter between any extraterrestrials that might be out there.

And while we've yet to hear a peep from ET, that hasn't stopped a core group of amateur and professional researchers from continuing the quest to answer perhaps the most profound of human questions–are we alone in the universe.

Recently, nearly 1000 of these enthusiasts came together at SETIcon in Santa Clara, California, as part of the first annual conference of the Mountain View-based SETI Institute. SETI, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, is the scientific effort to locate signals from intelligent alien lifeforms.

The search, in one form or another, is probably as old as humanity itself, though most agree that Drake's seminal experiment in Green Bank ushered us into the modern era by using tools and techniques that, for the first time, offer a reasonable chance of providing a definite answer.

Make no mistake, however, SETIcon was not your typical pointy-eared, light saber-wielding confab. With sessions ranging from "Multiverses: Is One Cosmos Enough?" to "Dark Energy and the Runaway Universe," this was serious business where talk of quantum entanglement mixed smoothly with conversations about what shape and form ET might take.

At the same time, discussions about the arrow of time and the origins of the universe were entertaining enough to have caused Chewbacca to chuckle, had he chosen to attend.

All of which made SETIcon such a wonderful forum. With speakers ranging from actors to astrophysicists and cosmologists to science fiction authors, SETIcon offered a rare opportunity for leading thinkers to challenge each other (and the audience) in an informal and conversational setting.

Where else, for example, could you hear Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll, Berkeley astronomer Alexei Filippenko, and science fiction phenom Robert J. Sawyer ponder about the nature of multiverses and the moral implications of multiple versions of you causing untold mischief in a parallel world?

But where do we stand in the search for ET in this universe?

It turns out that while finding and confirming a signal from ET is hard enough (considering that there are over 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone), an even bigger question is what happens if the interstellar phone starts ringing.

Any message that we're likely to receive will probably have originated hundreds or even millions of years ago, which implies that the calling party is at least that many years ahead of us. As Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute has suggested, it might be like trying to communicate with trilobites, only in this case, we're the trilobites.

A similar question exists on whether we should be trying to actively communicate out into the cosmos. Stephen Hawking, the noted theoretical physicist, has come out strongly opposed to the idea, saying that it's simply too dangerous.

Others, including Douglas Vakoch, also at the SETI Institute, are working on ways to figure out how to construct messages that might convey our unique humanness to alien civilizations. Sending schematics of our latest iPads, for example, would hardly impress a potentially artificial sentient that might be grappling with understanding the implications of an intergalactic consciousness across an infinitely expanding multiverse.

There's also the question of where to listen. Work by astronomers such as Debra Fischer at Yale University, who was the first woman in history to discover new exoplanets, offers one option for narrowing the list of potentially billions of targets.

Others, including Shostak, hypothesize that artificially intelligent beings might have long-ago jettisoned their home planets in search of massive sources of energy, such as those next to super hot giant stars or in the vicinity of black holes (the kind of neighborhoods that biological critters like us would most likely try to avoid).

One thing's for certain though. Hearing from ET will almost certainly be nothing like that portrayed in the film Contact, where Jodie Foster (playing a researcher based on real-life scientist Jill Tarter, director at the SETI Institute) finally catches the long-awaited howdy from space while relaxing on the hood of her sporty convertible.

But what reality might lack in dramatic effect, it will almost certainly make up for in hope. Because while any message that took 100,000 years to reach us would probably be a very one-sided conversation, it would show that Earth and the life that it supports is not a miracle. And that in itself would be profound enough.