Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

Maxwell and The Nerds
from Earth, bouncing them off Venus, and detecting the faint
echoes, is named after him.
Less than a century after Maxwell's prediction of radio waves, the
first quest was initiated for signals from possible civilizations on
planets of other stars. Since then there have been a number of
searches, some of which I referred to earlier, for the time-varying
electric and magnetic fields crossing the vast interstellar distances
from possible other intelligences - biologically very different from
us - who had also benefited sometime in their histories from the
insights of local counterparts of James Clerk Maxwell.
In October 1992, in the Mojave Desert, and in a Puerto Rican
karst valley, we initiated by far the most promising, powerful and
comprehensive search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). For
the first time NASA would organize and operate the programme.
The entire sky would be examined over a ten-year period with
unprecedented sensitivity and frequency range. If, on a planet of
any of the 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way
galaxy, anyone had been sending us a radio message, we might
have had a pretty fair chance of hearing them.
Just one year later, Congress pulled the plug. SETI was not of
pressing importance; its interest was limited; it was too expensive.
But every civilization in human history has devoted some of its
resources to investigating deep questions about the Universe, and
it's hard to think of a deeper one than whether we are alone. Even
if we never decrypted the message contents, the receipt of such a
signal would transform our view of the Universe and ourselves.
And if we could understand the message from an advanced
technical civilization, the practical benefits might be unprecedented.
Far from being narrowly based, the SETI programme,
strongly supported by the scientific community, is also embedded
in popular culture. The fascination with this enterprise is broad
and enduring, and for very good reason. And far from being too
expensive, the programme would have cost about one attack
helicopter per year.
I wonder why those members of Congress concerned about
price tags don't devote greater attention to the Department of
Defense, which, with the Soviet Union gone and the Cold War
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