Seth Shostak is Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute.

New technologies for use in the search for extraterrestrial biology suggest that, despite the continued dearth of hard evidence for life elsewhere or signals from other societies, there is good reason to expect that success might not be far off – that within a few decades we might find evidence of sophisticated civilizations.

Why this is so, what contact would tell us, and what such a discovery would mean, are the subject of this talk on the continuing efforts to establish our place in the universe of thinking beings.