Apologetics means giving a reason for our faith.
When questions concern the identity of Jesus or reliability of the Bible, we are on home turf. However, sometimes questions emerge from unlikely places. How about outer space?
SETI stands for ‘Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence’ and is a project now over 50 years old. Interest in alien life, space travel and UFOs is older still, but SETI is a dedicated scientific research project. Given that the earth is one planet out of an estimated 50 billion planets in our galaxy, and there are hundreds of billions of galaxies (the numbers cause my mind to glaze over too!), surely it is reasonable to infer that there must be quite a number of advanced alien civilisations out there? But the distances between stars are so vast that actual physical contact between any of these civilisations is thought to be nearly impossible. However, radio signals can travel at the speed of light so researchers have tried to send and hear messages from distant reaches of the galaxy.
Quiet universe
In the 1960s SETI had lots of enthusiasm and high expectations from Soviet and American scientists. After 60 years of listening, SETI has found nothing conclusive. In 1977 a transmission dubbed the ‘Wow’ signal was heard and has since been considered a mistake. More recently, SETI has focused on stars which are thought to have earth-like planets in orbit around them. Such planets are incredibly rare, less than 100 have been detected. When the Kepler telescope began listening to these stars, there was another flurry of enthusiasm — several unusual signals were publicised. These have subsequently been identified as local interference and not extra-terrestrial at all. No sooner is a sensational new candidate announced in the news than it is quietly dropped as a false lead. The universe remains uncannily quiet.
