For many years, radio telescopes have been scanning the heavens as part of a program known as SETI. SETI stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. They hope that one day they’ll stumble across a coded message—or information—from outer space. Then we’ll know for sure that there’s intelligent life ‘out there’, because only an intelligent being could have sent such a coded message. The irony is that SETI enthusiasts are inconsistent in the way they use this criterion. If they swapped their radio telescopes for a molecular biology lab and considered DNA, they’d discover encyclopedic quantities of coded information. Yet
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