I have a soft spot in my heart for the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. It's not just that Frank Drake started Project Ozma on the site in 1960, or that Benjamin Zuckerman and Patrick Palmer ran an Ozma follow-up there in the mid-1970s. I was tracking SETI closely by 1980 or so and knew of these observations, but it was my friend Mike Gingell whose yearly trips to Green Bank kept the place firmly in mind. Like me, Mike was a member of the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers, and unlike me, he was a highly qualified engineer. Mike died just last year and I went out to his house to look through a collection of old radio books his wife thought I might be interested in. There in the back yard were three radio dishes, all tuned not for television but for the radio astronomy work Mike was so engaged in. Seeing them already beginning to succumb to foliage -- Mike had been ill for some time and couldn't keep up with them -- reminded me strongly of some of J.G. Ballard's fiction, like...