The other, other London conference

If you follow international affairs, you probably know that there are two important conferences in London this week — one to coordinate the NATO effort in Afghanistan, and the other to develop a strategy to combat the resurgent terrorist threat in Yemen. But there’s a third London conference occurring this week that you may have missed, which grapples with a truly international issue: aliens.

This past Monday and Tuesday, Britain’s Royal Society held a conference, which included representatives from NASA, the European Space Agency, and the U.N. Office for Outer Space Affairs, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program. The scientists attending the conference set goals which were every bit as ambitious as stabilizing Afghanistan’s government or solving Yemen’s myriad problems: Professor Michael Mayor used his address to pledge that 2010 would be the year that astronomers would find the first Earth-like planet outside of our solar system.

The conference centered on where we might find extraterrestrial life — and whether, much like Wile E. Coyote chasing the Roadrunner, mankind would be fully prepared for the consequences of making "first contact." Dr. Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State University, suggested that we may not have to look to the stars to find alien lifeforms: He has advanced the theory that aliens might exist right under our noses. Davies has suggested that, as less than 1 percent of bacteria have been studied in-depth, we may already live alongside alien microbes that do not share an earthly origin.

In a week of conferences about war, it is good to hear that one, at least, raised the possibility of peaceful co-existence.

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