Decade after decade, man had
searched the heavens with his huge mechanical ears. The
Grand Banks, Aricebo, and the V.L.A. were but a few that
scanned in vain for the extra-terrestrial signal that
never came. We were so sure they were out there. Why
couldn’t we hear them?
Drake’s equation stated that there should be
thousands of civilizations, just in our quadrant of the
galaxy. In all those years, several good hits had been
recorded, but nothing that could be duplicated or not
explained away to a more conventional happenstance. Just
before the turn of the millennium, “SETI”, the
search for extra-terrestrial intelligence project, had
enlisted the help of hundreds of thousands of home
computer users in an all out effort to provide more
comprehensive analysis of the incoming data from the
Aricebo dish in Puerto Rico. It was the largest number
crunching project of all time, and true to SETI’s
warning that it would be the equivalent of finding a
“needle in a hay-stack”, when the location of
the haystack wasn’t even known. The search was
conducted over an extensive period, but nothing
conclusive was ever found. Every computer on the list was
given endless packets of data over the phone lines, and
when their owners slept or took a break from their
labors, those computers would process the data, and send
the completed work back to Puerto Rico. So many
frequencies, so many directions to look, the odds
weren’t in our favor.
Well over a century of signals now spread outward in an
ever-expanding bubble of energy from the earth. Radio,
television, and every other type of transmission that man
had ever devised went outward at the speed of light.
Potential eavesdroppers that were situated farther out
from the center of the galaxy, and therefore, farther
from source of the wave than the earth had the best
chance of hearing us. Unfortunately, those civilizations
that were located closer to the center of the galaxy,
would have lost their ability to hear us long before our
signals had made the one-hundred light year trip. Maybe a
not to distant civilization had heard us, and now their
greetings were speeding on their way through space back
to us. What a shame! Our ability to hear them would soon
die, and would not be resurrected for a very long time.
After so many long years of disappointment, the big ears
would be very low on our list of things to return to
service.
Perhaps it was for the best, as the wave and its
unrelenting assaults on the civilizations of the galaxy
made the chances of developing advanced technology slim,
to say the least.
|
