Yes, and what they also need to believe is that when we make contact, they will turn out to be the modern progressive's ideal--peaceful, secular, brilliant and anxious to help us solve all those great conundrums of existence scientists like to ponder. Wouldn't it be fun if the 1950's Japanese sci-fi films got it right? I like to imagine a group of these types asking the oh-so-advanced and sagacious aliens why war and hatred persist on earth and hearing the answer "because that's the way it is, Buddy," as they are unceremoniously gobbled up.

Seriously, wouldn't a rational materialist conclude making contact with an alien planet was the most dangerously foolish idea anyone's ever come up with?

"All hype and noise" is a perfect description of SETI.

That was the best theme of Independence Day: the aliens came to kill us. The scene that perfectly captured the theme was the New Agers getting zapped on top of the highrise while holding welcome signs. Close down SETI and convert the Arecibo radio dish into a missile defense "laser."

Mr. Jacobsen;

Nah. People who write those movies are clueless. It's unlikely that aliens would have any interest in Earth to start with. For a civilzation able to travel between stars, planets are expensive, dirty and almost useless. There's simply nothing here that couldn't be obtained more easily somewhere else in the solar system.

If the aliens found the presence of humans bothersome, they wouldn't send a fleet, they'd just drop an asteroid in to the Sun to roast us, or an ocean to drown us, or build a sunshade a L1 and freeze us. Most likely, though, they'd treat us the way we treat ants.

I'd keep SETI around just because I'd hate to think that somebody would send us a signal and we wouldn't be listening. That said, I'm not sure I'd want to respond or start a dialogue. Taking into account the usual conservative distrust of new things, I'd prefer that they not know we're here.

The thought that man is somehow the culmination of creation is staggeringly depressing.

I prefer the view that the universe is young, and we are just the first, at least in these parts.

And it isn't helped by OJ getting snyde about Godless Science (TM). Would solid evidence of ETs somehow automatically negate the existence of God or something?

SETI found an anomalous signal. They're checking it out. The last time something like this happened, it resulted in the discovery of pulsars and resolved a lot of astronomical anomalies. It might be ET (admittedly a very long shot); it might be the next discovery in astronomy; it might be little or nothing.

Matt:

Too late for that. 1950s TV broadcasts are starting to reach the nearby stars now.

Alien life and civilization are unlikely to be anything we can conceive of. It is entirely possible that any species advanced enough for star travel are employing communication techniques so advanced we can't even detect them.

If aliens that can star travel are enlightened, they are unlikely to contact us in any way even to "help." History on Earth shows that everytime a more advanced civilization interacts with a primitive one (relatively speaking of course), the less advanced civilization is destroyed. Sometimes that is done by conquest, but it is also done by the well intentioned as the new food/technology/weapons/trade/ideas introduced overwhelm a society that has not developed with it and thus can handled it. The "Prime Directive" is very important if you want that primitive civilization to survive.

Who's running all the casinos?

>If aliens that can star travel are enlightened,
>they are unlikely to contact us in any way even
>to "help."

But the idea and mythology of Advanced Aliens as Our Saviours has taken hold. Even Carl Sagan (writing on the early proponents of this mythology, the "Space Brothers" UFO contactee cults) described it as a new religion with the aliens as the new gods.

Unfortunately, Dr Sagan did not see that he himself believed a more subtle variant of the same Saviour mythology, using contact by SETI radio instead of face-to-face from visiting saucers.

I think the Pierce Broznan character in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks (i.e. "They're an advanced race. Their intentions MUST be peaceful.") was a spoof of Dr Sagan.