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Searching Much of the debate about this question has been conducted at a high intel- lectual level, in the language of science and metaphysics. Scholars have given us fine histories of the idea, particularly Karl Guthke’s elegant liter- ary analysis in The Last Frontier, Michael Crowe’s fascinatingly detailed study The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750-1900, and Steven Dick’s paradigm-setting book The Biological Universe.® There is another level in this debate—the level of emotion and personal experience. Many people look forward to contact because they expect more than scientific and philosophical discussions. They hope to learn about other arts, other moralities, other ways to organize societies. They hope for guidance that will help us to solve our problems. They want to be reassured about the future of intelligent life. There is a yearning that goes beyond a thirst for knowledge. We seek encounters with things strange and wonderful and larger than ourselves. We want a more appealing and responsive universe than the lifeless, mind- less expanse that science has so far revealed to us. This intellectual venture connects us with deep emotions. In the recent past, we have relied on science fiction to disrupt the mundane. Now we hope that our scientific explorations will achieve the same end. “Across the seas of space lie the new raw materials of the imagi- nation,” Arthur Clarke told us. “Strangeness, wonder, mystery, and magic—these things, which not long ago seemed lost forever, will soon return to the world.”’ Many hope that contact will change us for the better; others worry about the demoralization of Humankind, even its destruction. The cosmos is a vast canvas on which we can paint our most imaginative and radical theories, our hopes, and our fears. “Space is a sea without end which washes on countless strange and exotic shores,” wrote space visionary Dandridge Cole, “where the conceivable forms of the living and the dead are greatly outnumbered by the inconceivable; where the known is lost in the unknown; where new dangers hide in undiscovered shadows in unimagined forms.”* How realistic are these hopes? How realistic are these fears? We will consider the arguments about both. After Galileo, humans could begin testing theories about extraterrestrial life and intelligence by observation. Astronomers first studied the Moon; when the near side appeared lifeless, pluralists populated the other side.’ The search then expanded outward to the other planets of our solar system, particularly Mars. Although some observers thought they had detected the Hopes and Fears Searching