The year 2010 will mark the 50th anniversary of humanity's strangest scientific quest: the use of giant radiotelescope dishes to listen for radio messages from alien beings in space. So far, the search has been a complete bust. The radioastronomers keep listening, but the stars aren't talking to us -- not yet, anyway. Oddly, the failure of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, has been largely ignored by the general public, journalists and Hollywood filmmakers. They continue to be enchanted by (and, in Hollywood's case, to commercially exploit) the hope that intelligent life is sprinkled across the galaxy like...