New Report: What Has SETI Found?

How is this blog post like the Seinfeld television show? They both are about nothing. A recent extensive search for alien radio transmissions resulted in nothing. That is, there were no detections.

Frank Drake launched the first SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program in 1960. Drake realized that humans had been broadcasting radio transmissions for a few decades. Hence, if astronomers existed on alien worlds in nearby star systems, within a few tens of lights years away, then they could detect humanity’s existence by intercepting radio broadcasts from earth. Drake turned this around by attempting to eavesdrop on alien civilizations.1 Drake began using large radio telescopes (which were new technology at that time in 1960) to look for possible radio transmissions from civilizations like ours that might be on planets orbiting stars. With advancements in technology, this research has blossomed. But as I’ve previously reported, there are no positive results.

While SETI’s search has advanced significantly since Drake’s time, the results remain the same—nothing! A recent news item reported on the latest venture into SETI. The Commensal Open-Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster (COSMIC) is a computer and software system that piggybacks onto research being done with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) of radio telescopes in New Mexico. This system rapidly pores through the vast data looking for any signs of intelligent signals. This was not possible just a few years ago. The program has completed its scan of nearly one million individual pointings of the telescopes, and it found zero indications of intelligent signals.2

What does this mean? It’s not good news for secular scientists who are convinced that life arose naturally on earth from more primitive life-forms. They rely on the existence of extraterrestrial life to support and somehow justify their belief in a naturalistic origin of life and man, a process that we usually call evolution. The null result from COSMIC means that with increasing confidence we know that we are alone in the universe. Well, we aren’t exactly alone—there is God. Due to man’s special place in God’s creation, we at Answers in Genesis are not surprised by this null result in the search for other civilizations. That is, starting our thinking with the Bible, we don’t expect alien life to exist on other planets in the universe, and so these findings (or I should say lack of findings) are consistent with a biblical worldview.3 God fashioned earth as a special habitat for humanity, and then God uniquely placed man here to fulfill God’s pleasure (e.g., Isaiah 45:18). People may be surprised to learn that we at Answers in Genesis encourage the kind of work done by COSMIC, for it continually demonstrates man’s unique place in creation.