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SETI and Religion Even in the most primitive ages of every normal intelligent world there existed in some minds the impulse to seek and to praise some universal thing. At first this impulse was confused with the craving for protection by some mighty power. Inevitably the beings theorized that the admired thing must be Power, and that worship was mere propitiation. Thus they came to conceive the almighty tyrant of the universe, with themselves as his favored children. O1A£ Cant. a. 19971 We cannot avoid the connection between SETI and religion, although many SETI advocates wish that we could. Religious belief has been a recurrent factor throughout the long debate about a plurality of worlds inhabited by intelligent beings. SETI can be seen as a religious quest, proposed Dick, as science in search of religion. It is a search for superior intelligence, for knowledge, for wisdom, and perhaps for power. Religion in a universal sense is the never-ending search of each civilization for others more superior; the major difference in this case is that the intelligence is not supernatural.’ Guthke found that the modern belief in extraterrestrial intelligence had become a religion or quasi-religion with a popular following. McNeill too saw in the CETI movement a pseudo-religion or scientific religion. Secular religions are not new, and many of them have missionaries.* Astronomer Gerrit Verschuur made the point more bluntly, describing SETI as a technological search for God. Some proponents claim that through contact we will learn answers to fundamental questions about the nature of life and death, issues that once were God’s bailiwick.* Although some argue that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence reflects an alternate belief system, others see the search as a rebellion against conventional religions. Some SETI pioneers have suggested that their interest in the search was, in part, a reaction to a firm religious upbringing; science offered a secular alternative. Hostility toward religion was particularly noticeable in the writings of Soviet scientists interested in 202 —Olaf Stapledon, 1937!