"SETI is building a new radio telescope that will assist in finding technology from life elsewhere, Tarter said, similar to how the twin rovers are searching for microbes, or living organisms, on Mars. Before SETI's newest project, their researchers shared telescopes such as the Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico, sometimes giving them only weeks to work."
Ufologist Stanton Friedman quips that "SETI" stands for "Silly Effort to Investigate." I disagree; I think a vigorous search for ET radio/laser emissions is well worth our time. But daring to take the UFO phenomenon seriously and scanning the sky for intelligent signals are not mutually exclusive, as both sides of the dichotomy will typically have you believe. It's yet another symptom of Western society's addiction to binary thought, in which all eggs must necessarily be thrown into either one basket or the other.
An emerging thread in SETI discourse (as well as informed science fiction) is the notion of a postbiological cosmos. The majority of advanced aliens aren't likely to be flesh-and-blood; I suspect they'll be more like thoughtforms than anything familiar to terrestrial biologists. This catapults Arthur C. Clarke's maxim that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" to truly dizzy heights. In a cosmos populated by machine-based life, we are most definitely not alone; the Earth itself could be under siege by stealthy intruders. Even traveling at subrelativistic speeds, miniaturized probes designed to reproduce using raw materials encountered on their travels could overwhelm the galactic disk in "mere" billions of years.
Trends in electronics manufacturing strongly suggest that elements of the cosmic diaspora could be exceedingly small -- even microscopic. It's not inconceivable that we inhabit an airborne sea of alien machinery, a voracious "smart dust" taking up residence in our brains to understand how we think, or distributed throughout the oceans in order to track our planet's ecological plight. Of course, this assumes that the alien intelligence is interested in such things; perhaps by achieving machine-hood, ETI forfeits its stake in all matters biological. Carbon-based life might not be worthy of any special attention.
Some UFOs might be a manifestation of a machine-based alien presence. But this begs the question: If stealth is of the essence, why do so many UFOs and their ostensible "occupants" so often seek out our attention? The literature brims with credible cases of pilots closing in on uncorrelated targets -- only for them to scatter playfully in what seems to be a deliberate display of technological superiority. Maybe the alien intelligence is showing us something we can comprehend (i.e., humanoid aliens in metal spacecraft) in a gradual scheme designed to bring us up to speed.
A postbiological ET intelligence might be god-like but still yearn for companionship. So it's not unthinkable that our own evolution has been bootstrapped -- psychosocially as well as genetically -- in order to accelerate our own transition into machines. A version of this scenario can be glimpsed in the writings of Whitley Strieber, whose book "Confirmation" posits that UFO technology is ours for the taking -- but only if we're able to wrestle with its technical and political implications.
Like a lofty Olympian god, the UFO intelligence seems content to simply let us gape in wonder. But at the same time it must surely know that we're furiously trying to duplicate the bizarre physics seen in our skies.
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