My great aunt married a man who spent his entire life trying to send and receive audio messages to aliens in outer space. His observatory is covered with weeds and overgrown with thickets. Based upon an experience in the 
50s, he’s been convinced that there is life on other planets outside our galaxy. I don’t know why this surprises me. There are many people in this country who believe the same thing. But I didn’t know that we were financing their research. According to Phil Ryken, “…the University of Wyoming offers a class to teach its students how to communicate with aliens. ‘Interstellar Message Composition,’ the course is called, and it is sponsored by a grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). According to Wyoming’s Web site, it is ‘the first class to enlist creative writers in a potential cosmic conversation.’ ‘We’ve thought a lot about how we might communicate with other worlds,’ the professor says, ‘but we haven’t thought much about what we’d actually say.’”
Ryken goes on to report, “One of the first assignments the instructor gives his students is to summarize the human condition in ten words or less—a short, simple statement they could send as an S.O.S. to the universe. One English major completed the assignment in just nine words: ‘We are an adolescent species searching for our identity.’ If this is what passes for higher education in America these days, then it is hard to know whether to laugh or cry. But we should also respond with pity for what it tells us about the condition of fallen humanity. People are searching for meaning, calling in the darkness and hoping there is someone out there who can tell us who we are.”
I am reminded of Job’s question “can man find God by searching for Him?” the expected answer is an obvious “absolutely not!” The truth is we all want to discover the meaning of life. We all want to know our place in the universe and to figure out who we are and what we are doing here. It’s the same angst we find in Ecclesiastes 7:23-24. Solomon says “All this I have tested by wisdom. I said, ‘I will be wise’ but it was far from me. That which has been is far off, and deep, very deep; who can find it out?” Again the expected answer is “no one.” Knowing the limits of human wisdom and understanding is part of wisdom. If we are ever to discover the answer to these questions, God will have to reveal them to us. The Bible gives us these answers. As the author, God tells me that I am a human being and not an impersonal mechanism. My aspirations to know the truth about myself and the world and universe I live in spring from the fact that I am made in the image of God the creator. Sin has alienated me from God and the universe, but He so loved us that He sent Jesus to restore the broken relationship and to reveal to us the meaning of life, who we are, why we’re here and our ultimate destiny beyond the grave.