SETI was originally part of NASA, now an independant organization and funded by donations is searching the universe for life.  You’ll hear that the search for life in the universe is almost entirely an American inititive.

SETI is trying to receive messages from aliens on far planets – an electronic message in a bottle. This is a great interview with SETI’s Seth Shostak. Shostak mostly seriously, I think, wants to beam the World Wide Web into outer space. You’ll be intrigued by his rational for sending the World Wid Web from Google’s servers, complete with all the pornography out to the stars (about 26 minutes into the interview).

He discusses how astronomy has caused a shift in the beliefs here on earth – Galileo and his telescope showing that man and the earth weren’t the center of everything and causing shifts in even religious beliefs.

Wikipedia says: Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is the collective name for a number of activities to detect intelligent extraterrestrial life. The general approach of SETI projects is to survey the sky to detect the existence of transmissions from a civilization on a distant planet – an approach widely endorsed by the scientific community as hard science (see, e.g., claims in Skeptical Inquirer [1]). The United States Government contributed to SETI early on, but recent work has been primarily funded by private sources.

SETI has a podcast called: Are We Alone, Science Radio For Thinking Species, the show today is called “Thinking Klingon” and past shows from subjects such as the chemistry of love to the human brain.

What do you think?  Is the whole idea insane or is there something to it?  What form do you think aliens will be?  Will they be spiritual beings and are they already here as voiced by Abraham and Seth?   Are there both spiritual and physical beings?

You can get Seth Shostak’s book from Amazon: Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence