Terrestrial ETs

Why does the privately-funded organisation called Seti, an acronym for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, seek for signs of sentience elsewhere in the universe? What does it hope to achieve? Or, to put it more plainly, why does it — along with the rest of us —hanker so desperately to succeed in spite of decades of failure till date?

On the surface, the answer is quite simple: who wants to be alone in the entire expanse of all creation? If we got to know there were other entities somewhere in our galaxy or even in other more farflung ones, we would know we were not the only kids on the block. That the cosmos was not a ghost town populated with inanimate rocks and toxic atmospheres.

Actually, it doesn’t even matter if sapient ETs were so far away that there was no chance we would ever communicate with them in a million years because we could still take comfort in the fact that there was an ongoing continuity to life. That if a large asteroid were to hit Earth — as many have done so in the past — and snuffed out all traces of our existence, the cosmos would not die along with us since consciousness in some form or the other would persist.

Consciousness; that’s the important word. An awareness of a sense of being is so incredibly enchanting that we want ours to be for all time. Which is why long before Seti came on the scene, we discovered our own extraterrestrials as continuations of ourselves in various versions of heavens and hells. Hell, for instance, may be infinite eternal suffering, but at least our consciousness in some form or the other continues.