Is anybody down there?

THE QUESTION OF WHETHER OR NOT

we are alone in the Universe has always fascinated me, but when I was a student the idea of searching for aliens was regarded as decidedly crackpot. One might as well have professed an interest in looking for fairies. The prevailing scientific opinion in the 1970s was well captured by Francis Crick, who thought life so improbable it was “almost a miracle”. The chances of finding a second sample somewhere else was surely vanishingly small.

Nevertheless, a tiny band of gung-ho radio astronomers had begun sweeping the skies with radio telescopes in 1960, hoping