“Please don’t leave me at this point. Refrain from dismissing this approach out of hand. Instead, call it a scientific game, with the rules changing to fit new evidence. The game is well worth playing. The payoff, even if the chance of contact with human-grade aliens or higher proves forever vanishingly small, is the building of a context within which a sharper image of our own species can be drawn.”

—Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence