ere’s what I don’t understand about the alien civilizations that send spacecraft to Earth and abduct people in their sleep to subject them to mysterious experiments back on board the Mothership: Why don’t they just read about it on the Internet? We’re posting genomic data about human beings and other organisms right there on the Web. Isn’t the abduction thing a lot of fuss and bother? I know what you’re going to say: The aliens aren’t just interested in our DNA, they also want to map our aura, our chakra and the source of our chi energy. That’s right: They’re technological, but they’re also really into yoga.
From a purely scientific standpoint, the great mystery of aliens is why we haven’t found any yet. You know: the Fermi Paradox. “Where are they?” Fermi suddenly blurted out in a conversation in 1950.
The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is 50 years old this month. It was April 8, 1960, that Frank Drake used a telescope at Green Bank, W. Va., for the first search for radio signals from other worlds. It’s the subject of a new book, “The Eerie Silence,” by Paul Davies, who is one of my favorites — imaginative, smart, lucid. He’s sort of a throwback natural philosopher who takes on cutting-edge ideas about time, space, life, God, the whole ball of wax.