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Hopes Those most hopeful about the consequences of contact range from mille- narians who expect that extraterrestrials will guide us toward utopia to moderate optimists who simply hope for a net gain from contact. Here are some common themes. Contact with another technological species could be reassuring to a species as doubtful about its future as we are. Discovering others would tell us that life and intelligence had survived and prospered elsewhere, even after acquiring powerful technologies. Several SETI scientists have placed particular stress on the dangers of our own time, which some have described as a period of “dangerous tech- nological adolescence.” If we were to discover that many other civilizations had survived the same sort of transition that we are presently passing through—and if we could learn from their experience—we might improve the odds for our own long-term survival. A detection would provide “a tremendous morale boost to those of us who are concerned about our own existence in a technological framework,” predicted Robert Edelson of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “It would say that technological societies can find ways to have a life span of thousands or tens of thousands of years.” Billingham, too, thought that contact “would change the opinions of many people who feel very strongly that we only have another twenty-five years to go here.”? (He made that comment 25 years ago, in 1981.) Despite their emphasis on progressive change, those most optimistic about the feedback effect have shown a striking fixation on social stability. Sagan proposed that “advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, motivated either by altruism or through a selfish interest in maintaining a stimulating set of communicants, convey the information for stabilizing societies.” Jill Tarter hoped that the detection of a signal, even without any information 219 Reassurance