Looking For A Ping From Centaurus A

It's fun to wonder if alien civilizations exist. It's even more fun to look for them. Thanks to a wonderful program called Seti@home, anyone with a computer and an internet connection can join the hunt.

I've been doing this for a few years now, and there are over five million others like me. We get chunks of radio signals from an observatory in Puerto Rico, run them through our computers, and send the processed data back to the University of California at Berkeley. The most promising sources of radio signals get tagged for further investigation. With all these computers hunting together, hopefully it won't be long before we find a signal from another civilization. One of the key people in the SETI@home program expects to hit paydirt within twenty years - which means that success will come well within my lifetime!

Of course, there is also the possibility that we won't find anyone. Maybe there isn't anyone else, or they're too far away, or we just don't know how to look. Luckily, when thoughts like that arise, I can always turn to kooky new-age science for reassurance. Enter Graham Hancock, who makes a convincing case for a lost civilization that centred on Antarctica, and implies that it was seeded by aliens. Or Alan Alford, who was more specific in proclaiming that humans were genetically modified clones of aliens from the as-yet-unidentified tenth planer in our solar system, Niburu. And that Niburu is not really a natural planet; it is in fact a giant spaceship.

You can imagine my delight when in 2003 scientists announced that they had in fact found a tenth planet in our solar system. Unfortunately in 2006 this planet, now named Eris, joined Pluto in getting demoted to dwarf-planet status. That is quite an insult to deliver to what is effectively our homeworld.

Be that as it may, the search goes on. If all goes well we'll start using a telescope in Australia, so we can look at the skies in the southern hemisphere. And as more people with newer computers join the program, the data gets crunched faster.

In the meantime I'll keep my eyes open for a sight of little green men, and my ears pricked to hear the magic words "Greetings, Earthling. Take me to your leader".