• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 549 0

“Drake equation”—was raised “Very strong Baptist. Sunday school every Sunday,” and made this observation: “A strong influence on me, and I think on a lot of SETI people, was the extensive exposure to fundamentalist religion. You find when you talk to people who have been active in SETI that there seems to be that thread. They were either exposed or bombarded with fundamentalist religion. So to some extent it is a reaction to firm religious upbringing.”37 In his 1992 book on the subject, Is Anyone Out There?, Drake even suggested that “immortality may be quite common among extraterrestrials.”38 Contact with ETIs would amount to a type of second coming for many people. SETI pioneer Melvin Calvin noted: “It would have a marked effect. It’s such a broad, major subject of concern to everyone, no matter where they are, that I think people would listen. It’s like introducing a new religion, I suppose, and having it picked up by a lot of people.”

Many other scientists and science fiction visionaries agree. The scientist and science fiction writer David Brin suggested that SETI combines “serious and far-reaching science with a kind of gosh-wow zeal that seems (at times) to border on the mystical—perhaps as much religious as a product of science or science fiction. Indeed, to some, contact with advanced alien civilizations may carry much the same transcendental or hopeful significance as any more traditional notion of ‘salvation from above.’”39 In a 2003 speech at Caltech, the science fiction writer extraordinaire Michael Crichton opined that “SETI is unquestionably a religion,” noting: “Faith is defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof. The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief.”40

“What I am more concerned with is the extent to which the modern search for aliens is, at rock-bottom, part of an ancient religious quest,” the astrobiologist (and SETI consultant) Paul Davies wrote in his 1995 book, Are We Alone?41 Fifteen years later, with the skies still quiet, Davies noted in The Eerie Silence that “a project with the scope and profundity of SETI cannot be divorced from this wider cultural context, for it too offers us the vision of a world transformed, and holds the compelling promise that this could happen any day soon.”42 Even Carl Sagan, the scientist more equated with aliens than anyone before or since, and who was equally notorious for his religious skepticism, nevertheless said of SETI’s importance: “It touches deeply into myth, folklore, religion, mythology; and every human culture in some way or another has wondered about that type of question.”43 He even seemingly wrote the deity back into the cosmos through the extraterrestrial intelligences in Contact, when his heroine Ellie discovers that pi—the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter—is numerically encoded in the cosmos, providing proof that a superintelligence designed the universe:

The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover a miracle—another circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point. In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist’s signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates the universe.44

Why should so many people—theists and atheists, theologians and scientists—believe in the existence of superior celestial beings? Basalla cited the work of psychologist Robert Plank, who suggests that humans have an emotional need to believe in imaginary beings.45 “Despite all their scientific trappings,” Basalla wrote, “the extraterrestrials discussed by scientists are as imaginary as