Chances are that a lot more people in the world believe that God had some role in the creation of Humanity than the scientific version, which begins with the Big Bang.  As such, then, God is the most popular choice for First Contact, or interaction with an extraterrestrial.  Actually, he has no competition in this vote because no intelligent life form has yet ever made contact, as confirmed by any reliable source. This might well be my shortest posting, for what would be the point of confirming or refuting the title?  Well, this gives me another opportunity to compare religion with science. I start with  Global Religion 2023 , a 26-country Global Advisor survey by Ipsos. These countries were all reasonably developed, with 46% of the respondents believing in some form of Christianity.  Only 7% Buddhist, 6% Muslim, mostly Sunni, and 4% Hindu.  Interestingly enough, 29% with no religion or not religious. India, Turkey, Japan and Thailand were surveyed, but the...

Four years ago the  Smithsonian Channel  featured Steven Hawking on four space documentaries.  One was  Leaving Earth:  Or, How to Colonize a Planet .  He passed away in 2018 at the age of 76 before the program was completed.  I just watched this episode and it helped me synthesize variant thoughts in my mind about the ultimate fate of Humanity. In 1976 I spent a summer at NASA's Ames Research Center, joining a group of university faculty on Project Orion to  design the first device capable of detecting an extrasolar planet .  At that time, the planets of our solar system were the only ones ever seen.  After meeting Carl Sagan at Ames during that interval to view the first photo sent back by Viking 1, five years later when I was working for the U.S. Senate, I helped him convince the U.S. Congress to gain the initial funding for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Established was annual funding for 12 years, leading to the forma...