Intelligent aliens? Yes, of course. But there are many lines of evidence which makes it extraordinarily unlikely and almost no one is looking for little green m

Intelligent aliens? Yes, of course. But there are many lines of evidence which makes it extraordinarily unlikely and almost no one is looking for little green men out there. What people are searching for, and orienting our exploration programmes around, is the possibility of a second genesis and non-intelligent, probably microbial life on other worlds. That, frankly, is uninteresting to me as both a humanist and a scientist, compared with what we could be working on instead. It’s a gigantic, PR driven self-perpetuating hype machine that eats up budget and resources that could have been put to better uses.