ET PHONE HOME YOUR MOM WANTS TO TALK TO YOU.

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has been listening to the “nearby” universe for decades for any sign of intelligent life elsewhere. Funding comes and goes with interest and enthusiasm and to some extent with popular movies like ET and CONTACT. But, except in science fiction, nobody has called earth yet – as far as anyone at this end of the line knows. Nevertheless devotees are trying to raise $50 million to erect an array of radio telescopes in far northern California’s Shasta County.

A light year is 5,865,696,000,000 (trillion) miles and since radio waves travel at the same speed the problem is simply the vast distances and consequently time involved. The fastest manmade object was the Helios solar probes in the mid-1970s that reached 150,000 MILE per hour. In comparison the space shuttle orbits the Earth at about 27,000 miles per hour – 5 miles per second.

Voyager 2 flew past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune and is headed out of the solar system toward Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, and will pass near it in only about 160,000 years.

Statisticians argue the expansive vastness and age of the universe makes it virtually a certainty life has come and gone elsewhere any number of times and some of it would have achieved high intelligence. But, it must be a tenuous process fraught with uncertainties.

Now comes an extensive genetic study that suggests human beings may have had a brush with extinction 70,000 years ago. The report notes that a separate study by researchers at Stanford University estimated the number of early humans may have shrunk as low as 2,000 before numbers began to expand again in the early Stone Age. “ An epic drama, written in our DNA, ” says Spencer Wells, National Geographic Society explorer in residence.

Previous studies using mitochondrial DNA — which is passed down through mothers — have shown that all modern humans share one female ancestor (out of thousands), the “mitochondrial Eve,” who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago well before the near extinction.

Scientists at Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel and Saharon Rosset of IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and Tel Aviv University, concluded that humans separated into small populations prior to the Stone Age. About 60,000 they came back together and began to increase in numbers and spread to other areas. Today more than 6.6 billion people inhabit the globe. But , only in the last few thousand years have humans had the luxury to study and think abstractly, and only in the last 100 or so found ways to broadcast communicate.

For much of that time it is almost certain humans pondered the night sky; wondered at the twinkling stars, and just now started to listen for other intelligent life and taking the first baby steps to explore.

Hello, is anybody listening?