I’m not disappointed. I understand how little searching we’ve done so far, and I’m excited about how much we will do in the future. Now it is time for me to shift from looking for extraterrestrial intelligence to looking for intelligent benefactors to help support that quest. I’ve done this before, but now I have to do it with gusto. Now I’m retired.

The existence of life beyond Earth is an ancient human concern. Over the years, however, attempts to understand humanity’s place in the cosmos through science often got hijacked by wishful thinking or fabricated tales. Of particular note, the New York Sun hoaxed its eager readers in 1835 with stories about a splendid civilization of moon-men that had supposedly been revealed by observations made with a 20-foot optical telescope in South Africa. Percival Lowell opened the 20th century with a popular, but false, interpretation of canals built by thirsty Martians to save their planet.