You may or may not be interested to know that the development of ultra-sensitive light-reduction telescopes has confirmed the existence of some 1,000 planets in what is now known as the near extra-solar space. Stretching between roughly 50 and 500 million light years away, these confirmed star-orbiting planets have in turn increased the estimated number of stars with orbiting planets from one in five to one in one. In short, the star without planets is the rarity, not the rule.

So there must be – quite literally – trillions of planets out there just in our own Milky Way. And it would be inconsistent with probability theory if there were not at least ten million planets capable of supporting life. And yet this niggling question is still with me: why haven’t they been in touch?

One intriguing “reason” (although personally I don’t accept it) is that digital technology means we are far less radio-visible now than formerly, with digital television now carried by coaxial cable and optic fibres. But from the mid 1930s until around 1998, we were blasting out our existence to anyone with just one ear out of seven to the ground. Yet still there was no contact.

In 1961, the BBC produced a stunning sci-fi serial A for Andromeda, largely famous now for introducing us to Julie Christie as the artificial life form produced from radio signal instructions. This inspired many other productions, culminating in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But the anti-climatic reality is that, thus far, we haven’t heard so much as a peep from outer space.

This is surely very odd for anyone accepting that the things we see and observe at great distance do indeed exist, and are not merely part of what the Buddhists would call the illusion of Time. It’s colder than a moon of Saturn here tonight, and the sky is so crystal clear as to make eternal questions almost natural: what in God’s name is out there, and why can’t we pick up any signals from them?

I must return to Einstein at this point and remind us of his gradually fulfilled prophecy of a form of electro-magnetic “rope” which might lead us to anywhere instantly. If Albert E thought that sixty years ago, surely billions of beings have had the same thought (and then proved it) across the aeons of Time. So where are they? If they emerge as reality at the other end of the rope, why can’t we see them?

I have the oddest feeling tonight that, when this mystery is solved, the effect on our species will blow every futurologist’s prediction out of the water. For the answer will lie in an understanding of what is or isn’t “real”…and how the defined differential works.

But in the meantime, that ethereal Thing is yet to be discovered. And so sadly, yes, you will have to turn up to work tomorrow.