Matt Kilty

How tragic would it be if in all these trillions of galaxies that each have billions of stars, that each have umpteen planets, if nowhere in there was there a single friendly face or tentacle or whatever else there might be?

The cosmic loneliness is just too much to bear.

It's like we're all a toddler wandering alone at night in the middle of the Sahara.

When I got my first laptop,

In high school, it was a hand-me-down from my mom.

It was like thick as a brick.

And one of the first things that I did was I installed this program called SETI at Home.

Has anybody heard of this?

Does anybody know what I'm talking about?

Yeah?

Okay, a few people.

All right.

So SETI is this decades-old research organization.

They're funded in part by NASA.

It's a highly respectable thing.

And the idea is in the title.

It's SETI, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

The reason I heard of it as a high school kid was I watched the movie Contact like four times in theaters in one week.

And I was just obsessed.

And this program, what was so cool about it was it let you be Jodie Foster on the hood of her car with the headphones on listening for alien signals.