Crichton has a silly rant about global warming here: http://www.s8int.com/crichton.html but it starts off with a rant on SETI.
Which reminds me of something that always seemed pretty obvious to me.
We know the universe is pretty damn big. Some of us think we evolved through the wonders of chaos starting somewhere near the cellular level. If that’s so, it stands to reason that this evolution could happen elsewhere. Given the size of the universe (bigger than we can imagine) it’s not too big a reach to imagine it happening elsewhere and at some point in time, past present or future, there is likely to be another intelligent species of some kind living on some kind of planet.
But given what science has also told us about time and space travel, and given what a uninteresting part of an uninteresting galaxy we live in, it is unlikely that anybody will ever find us. Or we them.
Which is probably a good thing.