Hello?

    Although there are forty-nine other perfectly good states out there, I think West Virginia is a good place to start a search for extra-terrestrial life. In fact, I can't think of any other reason why a group of scientists would choose to hold a conference there.
    The conference--on the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, or SETI--was held at the Green Bank Radio Astronomy Observatory. It's true that there are better observatories in California and Hawaii, but it's possible  the SETI conference was held in West Virginia to avoid any distractions. Like fun. I've been to West Virginia and this seems to me entirely plausible. I don't know whether it's possible to drive or fly to West Virginia; I walked across the border from Virginia, on a detour from the Appalachian Trail. I have a story about that trip that involves a still, a forty-four caliber pistol, and a guy named Rusty, but I can't think of any good reason to tell it here.
    I read about the conference in an interesting book by James Trefil called 101 Things You Don't Know About Science and No One Else Does Either. I bought the book because it was cheap. While I seldom buy an interesting book if it isn't cheap, I often buy cheap books in the hope that they are interesting. The title is misleading (there were at least fifty-four things I already knew, and I'm only an English major), but the book was fifty per cent off, so I figure Trefil and I are square. Trefil announces his intention to devote only three pages--not two, not four--to each "thing," so to say that his treatment of each topic is superficial is not inaccurate, nor, I would suggest, even insulting. The 101 things, by the way, are all questions, so I assume it's the answers we don't know. One chapter, for instance, asks "Is Anybody Out There?," which neatly brings us back to West Virginia.

    In the end, the conference came up with little except (1) the possibility that there may once have been a primitive form of life in Wheeling, West Virginia, which the scientists chose to call "Senator Joseph McCarthy"; (2) the observation that even as they talked there were life forms right outside the building, many wearing feed caps; and (3) a promising formula for their purposes called the Drake Equation (after Sir Francis Drake, the explorer and cupcake salesman whose ship discovered West Virginia in 1574 when it was still part of Africa):N=RxPxExLxIxT. Promising, that is, until one of the attendees pointed out, "Hey, that equation doesn't have any numbers in it!"
    So the search goes on. The SETI people are still looking for what they call a "continuously habitable zone"--either outside the solar system or inside the Beltway.