NASA hasn't formally searched for technosignatures since 1993, when a Nevada Senator axed a $60 million program he derided as "Martian hunting season at the taxpayer's expense." Since then, the agency has focused on biosignatures, which include possible microbes on other solar system bodies or Earth-like planets orbiting other stars.

As a result, the private sector picked up the technosignature baton and carried it forward via groups like the SETI Institute, Berkeley's SETI Research Center, a SETI group at Harvard University, and The Planetary Society.

More recently, Breakthrough Listen began conducting SETI searches using giant telescopes like the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia and Parkes Observatory in Australia. Pete Worden, the executive director of Breakthrough Initiatives, said the group has surveyed about 1,000 stars thus far. With MeerKAT's 64, 13.5-meter-wide wide dishes, they expect that number to increase to about a million over the next 5 years, completing a goal to see if any nearby extraterrestrial societies have noticed Earth and are deliberately trying to get in touch.

"We really want to do a bang-up job on, 'Is anybody signaling us?' Worden said.

MeerKAT, which was built and is operated by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory, or SARAO, is the southern hemisphere's largest radio telescope array. It was finished in July 2018, and Worden said it should be fully operational around the end of the year. Berkeley engineers are installing new technology on the dishes that allows Breakthrough to "piggbyback" and collect SETI data during traditional science observations. That technology, in turn, can also be used by other observors.

"It's a win-win situation. We're not interfering with their main observing programs," said Worden. He did not have an exact estimate on the project cost, but said it was likely in the millions.

Groups like Breakthrough may soon get support from NASA, thanks to a pair of House of Representatives bills directing the agency to spend $20 million working with private organizations on the search for technosignatures.

A 2018 NASA Authorization bill introduced in June, which has not been acted upon by the full House, was the first to include that directive from Texas Rep. Lamar Smith. Smith, who chairs the House science committee and will not seek re-election this fall, has a long-held fascination with SETI, and has held several hearings on the topic.

"I have, over the years, I think, read every single book on the subject," said Smith in an introductory video played at the NASA technosignature workshop hosted by the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.

The technosignatures mandate showed up again in a House appropriations bill sponsored by Rep. John Culberson, another Texan interested in life beyond Earth. That bill passed the full House, but its Senate counterpart does not include the same language. A final, reconciled version of the bill is yet to be finalized.

Linda Billings, a consultant to NASA's astrobiology program and self-described "SETI skeptic," said she isn't sure how the science community at large feels about NASA's possible technosignatures directive. She said the SETI community itself, however, is certainly enthusiastic.

"From where I've stood, I've observed that the SETI community has been relentlessly pressing NASA to get back into the SETI game pretty much ever since Congress cancelled the program," said Billings.

To hear NASA tell it, that game never really ended. Michael New, NASA's deputy associate administrator for research, said at the technosignatures workshop that the agency has no outright ban on proposals for SETI technology development, though NASA has, until now, preferred to leave actual searches in the hands of the private sector, citing strong progress made there.

Several scientists at the workshop objected, saying NASA has not been welcoming of SETI proposals since the early 1990s. Worden, who is the former head of NASA's Ames Research Center, agreed with that assessment.

"It was clear to me that you weren't going to get funded if [SETI] was your primary purpose," he said.

New vowed that the agency would make it clear in future proposal calls that SETI is not a taboo subject, whether or not the technosignatures legislation survives the congressional budget process.

"Regardless of what happens with the appropriations bill, that language will get fixed," he said.