Because I'm leaving for a week to actually go do some work, and because I
won't readily be able to post while I'm away, I'll have to make up for that
fact and put more than my share on the list this evening :-).

While there's still a great deal of enthusiasm for SETI work among the
general public, there's more than a bit of pessimism that's settling in among
the people that have been doing this kind of work for several decades now.
It's becoming increasingly obvious that if it were going to be easy finding
such extra-terrestrial civilizations, we'd probably have stumbled onto them
by now.

Indeed, most science is not much more than stumbling over the obvious. What
takes so long in discovering something is most normally not the search itself
but simply getting around to asking the right kinds of questions. Finding
truly subtle phenomena is surprisingly difficult. Finding the obvious is easy
-- if you've asked the right kind of questions and built the right kind of
instruments.

As to SETI, there is a quite reasonable review -- but representative of the
increasingly pessimistic view that is creeping into SETI work -- in the July
issue of Scientific American, written by Ian Crawford, a physicist-astronomer
at University College in London. The URL for the article is:

     http://sciam.com/2000/0700issue/0700crawford.html

It's worth reading. If you do read it, be sure to click on each of the images
accompanying the article. The images and their captions go a long ways
towards explaining the general thought behind his argument.

Wirt Atmar