It’s late on a clear night. You’re driving down a winding county highway—no headlights for miles—and you steer the car over to the shoulder. You get out, wait for the dome light to blink off, and actually look up at that sky for the first time in a while. The stars shine down in patterns humans have tried to make sense of for millennia. There are so many of them, each a slightly or much bigger or smaller version of the sun, burning very far away.

Whoa, you think.

Around most of them, planets orbit, slightly or much bigger or smaller versions of those in our solar system.

Also whoa, you think.

And then, weirded out, you think some more. “Is anybody out there?” you shout, like you might if you suspect someone’s inside your house, but this time you’re yelling at the speckled darkness.

You’re being ridiculous: Nobody’s going to answer you tonight. But Science might answer your question someday. Researchers are trying to find evidence of smart aliens, and have been trying for around 60 years. Still, the work they’ve done so far barely registers on the cosmic scale. Space is very big—the stars you can see are a tiny fraction of the ones just in our own galaxy. And intelligent aliens, if they exist, could be sending a message, or spewing inadvertent signals, on any frequency. Or they could be using gravitational waves, or neutrinos, or dark matter, or some phenomenon humans haven’t discovered yet to get our attention or communicate with each other. Who knows!

Astronomers recently revised the estimate of their progress in scouring the universe for fingerprints of alien technology (including just the search for radio waves). They’ve sampled a portion of the galaxy equivalent to a hot tub’s worth of ocean water. Congratulations, SETI!

But since it would take 166,875,000,000,000,000 hot tubs to fill the ocean, you might wonder why SETI scientists even bother.

Well, the thing is that, if smart extraterrestrials are out there, and if humans ever find them, it’s statistically likely their civilization will be a lot older than ours. And given that extra time in existence, they’ll probably have much radder innovations, ones we would barely be able to fathom (wormhole borers, consciousness stored on silicon, social media companies with consciences). Those inventions might fall under science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology may be indistinguishable from magic.”

SETI is, in that way, the scientific version of the search for a god. What is a god, after all, if not a powerful, superior being who represents the best version of us, and inhabits a plane of existence we could ascend to given enough time and trials? The aliengods, according to many SETI scientists’ logic, would not be like the bickering, petty, vengeful deities of the ancient-Greek variety: If they have lived long enough to both grow old and maintain technological prowess, they must have figured out how to use their resources sustainably, not throw their planet’s climate out of whack, avoid nuclear annihilation, and generally deescalate whatever counts as an alien conflict. They give us hope that we could invent their technology. We could learn to get along. We could learn to steward a planet. We could grow up to be them.

If we could find them, we could end our history-long loneliness, and we could imagine—through the example of their very existence—that we, too, could make it to some kind of higher, more heavenly reality.

That is not quite how scientists tend to frame their work. And they do not tend to say that it requires faith, either. An outside observer might think that SETI scientists believe in ET—otherwise, why would they spend years searching? But most actually reserve judgment, and maintain at least outward agnosticism. What keeps most motivated is not belief, or dogmatic pursuit of a foregone conclusion, but the importance of the potential discovery: There’s a low probability any given scientist in any given era will succeed in finding alien life, but—if they do—the consequences are significant. You know, like transforming our conception of life, the universe, and everything.