I think we just have to do whatever experiments are available to us. I don’t think anybody would pretend that sending messages was the most efficient way of finding extraterrestrial life, but that’s all that’s been available, isn’t it? It’s extraordinary that, here on Earth, radio waves are quite an old technology and not a technology that we’re expected to use much longer for interstellar communications. Lasers are taking over, and who knows, gravitational waves may take over after that. So it’s kind of about what’s available to us, and the belief that we can look and should look. Even with the most optimistic estimates for the number of intelligent civilisations out there, we are still going to have to search a million or 10 million Sun-like Solar Systems before we find a civilisation that we can signal to. There will be others out there, but the timing won’t be right.
Ben Miller presented an episode of the BBC science series Horizon and wrote It’s Not Rocket Science
