Within NASA, Dr. Lowman is known as "the moon guy." That's really quite a statement when you stop and think about it.

Dr. Paul Lowman is a geophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where he has worked for nearly 50 years. He has a wealth of stories to share about our country's space program, from its infancy to the present, as well as where we are headed in the future.

He joined the agency fresh from his doctorial studies in 1959, and during these past 50 years he has held a variety of positions of scientific responsibility within NASA. He has been involved with Projects Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, and with many of the unmanned probes of the Solar System. (He was actually the guy who told the original astronauts to point their cameras back at Mother Earth.)

But that's not what he wants to talk about.

For the past two years, he has been working and polishing a serious scientific paper entitled, Are We The First? It takes a long, hard look at SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), and what we have, and have not, learned. The paper is nearly ready for publication. But before it is submitted, Dr. Lowman wants to run it past us to see what we think.