Listening to starlight: Our ongoing search for alien intelligence
National Radio Astronomy Observatory – Image: Education Images/UIG via Getty Images Between April and July of 1960, Drake recorded some 150 hours of tape speckled with radio noise. While no meaningful encoded signals or patterns emerged from those readings, Drake still earned himself a place in history for performing what would become the first scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the modern era. Since then, research organizations around the world have performed nearly 100 SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) experiments. Even NASA got in on the hunt, working with the SETI Institute between 1988 and 1993, when Sen. Richard Bryan (D – Nevada) introduced an amendment that cut the program’s government funding. “Senators kind of looked at this line item and said, ‘Hey wait a minute. Are we are we paying to search for little green men?'” explained Steve Croft, an assistant project astronomer at the UC Berkeley SETI Research Center and researcher with the...
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