In 1901 the Italian inventor and engineer, Marconi, broadcast the first transatlantic radio signal.  The first successful long-distance wireless telegraph was actually linking continents together.  Some twenty years later the question was asked whether this new invention might possibly listen in on signals from outer space – to see if we humans on planet earth are perhaps, after all, not alone in the universe.

So it’s about a hundred years ago that SETI commenced.  SETI, of course, stands for Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.  Marconi had stated his belief that radio could be used to send signals to Martians.  Indeed he claimed that his stations had picked up potential Martian signals.  In the next forty years some serious attempts were made to connect with intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.  The first modern SETI experiments, using radio telescopes, had to wait until 1960... and since then the search has only intensified.  In 2015 a huge program called ‘Breakthrough Listen’ was launched with a Russian-born billionaire pouring in $100 million worth of funding.

Many people find it an intriguing question: are we perhaps alone in the universe... or is there intelligent life on another planet in some other solar system in a distant galaxy?

As a Christian I have some serious issues with SETI programs.  I’ll begin with a ‘tongue in cheek’ comment that in view of the stupid things we humans often do, perhaps we ought to begin by searching for intelligent life on earth.  Often that seems to be in short supply.  The present situation in the Ukraine comes to mind.

One big issue for me is the huge cost factor.  Imagine if the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on SETI programs had been used to improve the lives of people in third-world countries.  What different places some of those countries would be today.  In view of the immense needs for health and education in the world at large, how can we justify the huge expenditure on SETI programs?

But there is another issue.  I already know that there IS intelligent life in the universe, apart from us human beings.  The Bible has many stories of angels; wonderful, intelligent beings, who are invisible to us but who have interacted with human beings down through history.  And not just in the dozen or so instances in the Bible either.

There is, for example, the story of a clergyman who was called out to attend to a dying man some way out of town.  It was back in the days before the motor car and the clergyman, rather than saddling up his horse, hopped on his bicycle and rode out to the farm where the man of the house was supposedly on his death-bed.  When he got there he found everyone healthy and well.  It was obviously a false alarm, so the pastor returned to the vicarage.  Quite a number of years later that preacher was called to visit another man on his death-bed.  The man said to the pastor, “I’m dying and I need to make my peace with God so I want to make a confession.”  He then asked the pastor if he recalled being called out to the farm that night long ago.  The pastor said that he remembered it clearly.  The dying man then told the pastor that he had resented the pastor’s work in the village and had been lying in wait that night to do him harm.  He added, “I would have done it too except that you brought someone else along with you that night and I was not prepared to take you both on.  The pastor insisted that he had gone alone that night and both men soon realised that God had sent an angel to keep his servant from harm.

We don’t need SETI to tell us that there is indeed other intelligent life in the universe.  And then I haven’t even mentioned the most intelligent being of all.  Why do we humans spend so much time and effort listening for signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe... when we have a Bible in which a highly intelligent God still speaks to humans today?

John Westendorp