Free George's Cosmic Treasure Hunt by Lucy Hawking Page B

land here and be like huge scary machines who stamp us into the ground, just like we do with ants.”
    â€œOr,” said Annie, her eyes shining in the light from the flashlight, “they might be teeny-weeny, like little wriggly bacteria under a microscope. Only they don’t realize how large we are and so we don’t even notice when they arrive.”
    â€œThey might have fourteen heads and dribble slime,” said George ghoulishly. “We’d notice that!”
    They heard a creaking noise, followed by footsteps on the stairs. A bleary-eyed Eric came out onto the veranda.
    â€œWhat’s going on here?” he asked.
    â€œGeorge couldn’t sleep,” said Annie quickly. “Because of the jet lag. So I was just, um, getting him a glass of water.”
    â€œHmm,” said Eric, his hair sticking up all over the place. “Upstairs with you both now.”
    George sneaked into the room he shared with Emmett and hopped back into bed, but not before he’d taken Annie’s flashlight from her. He was wide awake now, so he got out his copy of The User’s Guide and turned to the chapter, “Getting in Touch with Aliens.”

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    THE USER’S GUIDE TO THE UNIVERSE
    GETTING IN TOUCH WITH ALIENS
    If aliens are really out there, will we ever get to meet them?
    The distances between the stars are staggeringly great, so we still can’t be sure that a face-to-face encounter will someday take place (assuming the aliens have faces!). But even if extraterrestrials never visit our planet or receive a visit from us, we might still get to know one another. We might still be able to talk.
    One way this could happen is by radio. Unlike sound, radio waves can move through the empty spaces between the stars. And they move as fast as anything can move—at the speed of light.
    Almost fifty years ago some scientists worked out what it would take to send a signal from one star system to another. It surprised them to learn that interstellar conversation wouldn’t require superadvanced technology like you often see in science-fiction movies. It’s possible to send radio signals from one solar system to another with the type of radio equipment we could build today. So the scientists stood back from their chalkboards and said to themselves: If this is so easy, then no matter what aliens might be doing, they’d surely be using radio to communicate over large distances. The scientists realized that it would be a perfectly logical idea to turn some of our big antennae to the skies to see if we could pick up extraterrestrial signals. After all, finding an alien broadcast would instantly prove that there’s someone out there, without the expense ofsending rockets to distant star systems in the hope of discovering a populated planet.
    Unfortunately, this alien eavesdropping experiment, called SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), has so far failed to find a single, sure peep from the skies. The radio bands have been discouragingly quiet wherever we’ve looked, aside from the natural static caused by such objects as quasars (the churning, high-energy centers of some galaxies) or pulsars (rapidly spinning neutron stars).
    Does that mean that intelligent aliens, able to build radio transmitters, don’t exist? That would be an astounding discovery, because there are surely at least a million million planets in our Milky Way Galaxy—and there are one hundred thousand million other galaxies! If no one is out there, we are stupendously special—and dreadfully alone.
    Well, as SETI researchers will tell you, it’s entirely too soon to conclude that we have no company among the stars. After all, if you’re going to listen for alien radio broadcasts, not only do you have to point your antenna in the right direction, but you also need to tune to the right spot on the dial, have a sensitive enough receiver, and be listening at the right time. SETI