Dear Aliens

Dear Aliens (or Highly Evolved Space Faring Extraterrestrials, if you prefer),

You guys sure are making yourselves hard to find.  We understand.  We have that social dynamic among our own species, sometimes even between people who are good friends or closely related.  Sometimes you just don’t want to pick up the phone.

Mos Eisley Cantina. With millions of inhabited planets in the galaxy, the reality is probably far more complex than anything portrayed in our fiction

The good folks at SETI, (that’s the earth scientists who are trying to make contact with you) however, have been calling for years, with nary a peep from your end.  You don’t actually need to come for a visit or get into a conversation  with us (which you might find pretty tedious, being literally light years more advanced than we are) but maybe a nice little recorded message to say “Yes, we’re here, we’re just ignoring you” would be nice.

They now reckon that probably only about 1 in a million solar systems have intelligent life.  How they arrived at that figure, when we’ve only sent signals to a few of them, fewer than a hundred, I don’t know.  The good news for us is that even if there is intelligent life in only one in a million solar systems, that still leaves millions of intelligent (and wildly different) species out there.

As I believe I’ve mentioned before, you should watch Star Trek.  I imagine you’d get a good laugh at how we, in our naivete, have over simplified the galaxy, with 4 or 5 intelligent species.  I imagine even Deep Space Nine or the Mos Eisley Cantina fall somewhat short of the reality.  There’s only so much our human minds can absorb in a piece of entertainment that’s an hour or two long.

Anyway, we’ll keep trying to call you, and hope that some day you answer.