NASA does not often crack jokes about aliens, but its recent announcement that a satellite camera had found “Martian Morse code” in the shape of sand dunes on the Red Planet’s surface inspired much mirth among space scientists.

Nathalie Cabrol, director of the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, which searches for alien messages, laughed out loud at the thought.

“Tell me about it,” she said sarcastically.

If only contact with aliens, if they exist, were so simple. This was just dirt shaped by wind, as NASA itself eventually conceded. Just as the wealthy American polymath astronomer Percival Lowell did not actually see canals on Mars in 1906, so too is this latest bit of Martian clickbait a figment of a rich human imagination, reflecting our desire to find patterns in chaos. But it is also revealing of a deep philosophical problem in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, an all-or-nothing scientific gamble that is now at a crisis point.

The problem, as Cabrol describes it in a provocative new research paper, is that human scientists have only ever looked for other versions of themselves.

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