Today, life on the moon. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity As I sit
down to type, I first have to turn off my SETI screensaver. My
PC computes fast Fourier transforms in the background while I
work -- analyzing radio signals from space. Many people sign up
to do that. I don't really expect to find an alien message
saying, "Take me to your leader," but the screen-saver is fun.
The larger question, "Is there life out there?" has been around
for a long time. It began demanding our attention after Galileo
turned his new telescope on the moon in 1609. Up to then, the
moon had been a celestial crystalline sphere. Now it became
craggy, pitted and imperfect -- like earth itself. If the moon
and the planets were like earth, then mightn't they, too,
support sentient Five years after Galileo's telescope had sent
shock waves through seventeenth-century astronomy, John Wilkins
was born in England. By the