Posted by Davin Flateau on 9 Jun 2005 at 3:27 pm.
Filed under Astronomy.
Alan MacRobert at Sky and Telescope has written an excellent article detailing the different scientific searches for extraterrestrial intelligence going on today.
Several large searches for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) are currently scanning the stars, looking for both radio and laser transmissions from distant civilizations. Either type of signal could be sent across interstellar distances fairly economically, scientists are convinced.
Even though these projects are gaining momentum and expanding their searches, we have a long way to go before we can say for certain that there aren’t extraterrestrial signals that we can detect. We’ve only looked at a fraction of the sky in a fraction of ways that other civilizations might use to alert us to their presence. And it seems that we keep coming up with new ideas of how they might go about it.
Astronomers hope that sooner or later these two factors will meet, and we’ll see that signal - a spike in that magic radio frequency, or a flash of light in that CCD image, that will tell us that we’re not alone in the Universe.
