On a spring morning in 1960, astronomer Frank Drake aimed the 85-foot radio telescope at Green Bank, West Virginia, at two nearby Sun-like stars and waited. He called the experiment Project Ozma, and it lasted only a few months. No signal arrived. What did arrive, however, was a question so durable that it has outlasted every technology used to pursue it: are we alone?

That question is the engine of reporter Brendan Byrne's podcast *When We Find Them*, which revisits the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — known almost universally by its acronym, SETI — not as science fiction but as live, ongoing science. Byrne traces the arc from Drake's solitary vigil in the Appalachian hills to today's multi-antenna arrays scanning millions of radio frequencies simultaneously across the sky. The series is less interested in whether contact will happen than in something thornier: what it would actually mean if it did. The implications stretch well beyond astronomy.

Protocols drafted by the International Academy of Astronautics specify who is permitted to respond to a confirmed alien signal — currently, no single government or individual holds that authority. Sociologists, theologians, and legal scholars have begun joining astrophysicists in working groups that are, in effect, planning for a diplomatic event with no historical precedent. Some researchers argue the mere confirmation of a signal, even an undeciphered one, would alter humanity's sense of its own significance more profoundly than any previous scientific discovery. Drake's 1960 telescope has long since been decommissioned, replaced by instruments of incomparably greater sensitivity.