Dr Chris French is a psychologist at Goldsmith's College, London. Dr French's specialisms include the psychology of the paranormal and he is interested in why we are so obsessed with the idea of alien civilisation.

What do you think the appeal of SETI is? The main appeal of programmes like SETI is simply to our innate curiosity. I mean, the reason we’re so successful as a species is because we are so curious. We want to know about our place in the universe, we want to know how special we are. At one extreme it may be that we’re very special, we may be the only advanced technological civilisation in the cosmos, on the other hand the cosmos may be teeming with life, and we just want to know what’s the answer. I think the idea that we’re not alone, that there are other exciting interesting places, possibly even one day to actually physically make contact with is something that has very deep appeal at a very deep emotional level, it is very reassuring to people. In addition to that it may well be that we could learn a lot from advanced alien civilisations.

Do you believe we’ve already had visits from aliens?
According to public opinion surveys a sizeable minority, and sometimes even a majority of the population believe that we’ve already had contacts with alien civilisations. Now, up until fairly recently this was based upon UFOs, things seen in the sky. The short answer is virtually all of those sightings can be explained in more mundane terms, those that can’t are probably the ones that we just don’t have enough information to explain them. More recently there’s been a spate of alien abduction claims. From a psychological point of view these are absolutely fascinating, but again there is no convincing evidence that there’s any reality to the experiences that are being reported.

Why would another civilisation bother contacting us?
There is the possibility that the Universe might actually be teeming with life and we might still never actually make contact. Basically, all these kinds of estimates of whether or not there is intelligent, advanced civilisations in the Universe depend upon Drake’s famous equation, which is basically guesswork. But even if we accept some of the more optimistic estimates and say that there might be up to one million advanced civilisations in our galaxy, that would still mean that only one star in 200 000 actually has such civilisation, and the average separation between them is about 300 light years. Now, the idea that these advanced civilisations might find us so fascinating that they’d come all that distance to make contact with us – it’s possible, but then again it’s possible that they’d see us as being about as interesting as ants on some beach on the other side of the world, and not make the effort.

So, is there intelligent life out there?
There’s always the possibility that there might be life elsewhere in the cosmos on lots of different planets, but that intelligent life hasn’t evolved. This raises the whole issue of what do we mean by intelligence anyway. I think according to most people who would adopt a Darwinian approach to this, the notion that an intelligent organism is going to survive better than the one that lacks intelligence would tend to put the pressure on intelligence developing. Another interesting question is whether or not the form of consciousness that may be manifest in that particular organism would be something that we would recognise as consciousness.

The problem is of course is that we just don’t understand even now what consciousness actually is, but one could envisage an advanced technological civilisation of automata, where there’s no kind of self-awareness in the sense that we’d have it, something we feel is very special and makes us human. That may be something in the realms of science fiction, maybe that kind of advanced intelligence always involves self-awareness and consciousness as we understand it, but the simple answer is we just don’t know.

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