“Are we alone in the universe?”



Humans have been pondering this question since medieval times, and probably long before. But for most of history, people had little more than low-tech telescopes and highly active imaginations with which to explore the idea that there’s life out there in the cosmos. Not anymore.

“After a millennia of asking the priests and philosophers what we should believe about life somewhere else, we suddenly have the tools,” Jill Tarter told Popular Mechanics. “We can explore instead of believe.”

As the former director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute, Tarter has led the painstaking search for life beyond Earth. Even though such a discovery would deeply transform society as we know it, SETI operates on a shoestring budget.

"It has had this... 'giggle factor,’” says Stephen Garber, a policy analyst in the NASA History Division and author of several reports about NASA’s decades-long flirtation with SETI. “It [gained] this bad reputation...It was...an uphill battle for members of Congress to think it was a worthwhile science."

Of course, great scientists throughout history have been ignored, disregarded, and laughed at while trying to find answers to humanity's greatest questions. Will SETI scientists find their vindication?

The Search Begins

Astronomer and SETI founder Frank Drake (middle) at the National Radio Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. Michael Rougier/The LIFE Picture Collection Getty Images

In 1960, 29-year-old radio astronomer Frank Drake at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, lead humanity’s first organized search for interstellar radio transmissions. Fulfilling a dream he had since he was an eight-year-old living in Chicago, Drake pointed the observatory’s 85-foot radio telescope at two far-flung stars—Tau Ceti in the constellation Cetus and Epsilon Eridani in the constellation Eridanus. These stars are some 66 trillion miles away from Earth and about the same age as our sun. He called it Project Ozma, in honor of the fictional queen of Oz.



For six hours a day over the next two months, Drake and his team listened on a single frequency (1420 MHz) for signs of intelligent life. The hope was to hear a succession of uniform pulses or perhaps a numbering system, like a series of prime numbers. And, early on, they did.

For six hours a day and over the next two months on a single frequency, Drake and his team listened for signs of intelligent life.

The team stumbled across a strong, periodic, pulsating signal. Excited, they investigated further, but discovered that the signal was actually Earth-based, but at an altitude thought impossible for modern aircraft to reach. Soon the rest of the world discovered what Drake and his team had heard—a U-2 spy plane had been shot down by the Soviet Union.

Undeterred, Drake still pondered the otherworldly. Using this first experiment and a few other calculations, Drake conjured a formula for figuring out the likelihood of intelligent extraterrestrial life contacting Earth. He called it the Drake Equation.

Drake's famous formula takes the number of stars born per year in the Milky Way that could conceivably host life-sustaining worlds, and multiples that by variety of factors including the fraction of stars that could have planets, the conditions for life, and the probability that the society is advanced enough to communicate beyond its own planet. Finally, that number is multiplied by a predicted average lifetime of advanced societies.

Drake’s equation. Univesity of Rochester

Drake admitted later that he was amazed that the equation became “one of the great icons of science because it didn’t take any deep intellectual effort or insight on my part.” His intention was simply to take a big idea and boil it down so that even beginners could understand what’s required to create advanced lifeforms.

Nonetheless, Drake concluded that more than 10,000 societies brimmed with intelligent life and were capable of reaching out to Earth. “[Drake’s estimate] of 10,000 galactic communicative societies is just as good today as it was in 1961,” says Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute and author of the book . “We still can’t make an [exact] calculation, [but it’s] an informed guess.”

NASA Joins the Hunt

The Australian Parkes telescope, an instrumental telescope during the NASA Apollo 11 mission. SETI Institute

Around the same time, Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison from Cornell University theorized that aliens would contact us via electromagnetic waves and over the frequency of 1420 MHz. The reason: That is the emission frequency of hydrogen, which, as any advanced species would know, is the most abundant element in the universe. The hydrogen hypothesis was just the beginning of a flood of ideas about how to find E.T.

In 1966, astrophysicist Carl Sagan speculated in his book that perhaps extraterrestrials had already come to Earth at some point in the planet’s history. Then five years later, during the apex of Apollo mania, NASA published the fateful Project Cyclops report.



Led by John Billingham and Bernard Oliver, the report laid out a bold and ambitious plan about how public funding could greatly enhance the search for intelligent life in the cosmos. One of the most prominent recommendations was doing away with big, self-contained radio telescopes and replacing with an array of radio telescopes in order to increase the total collecting area and thereby improve the sensitivity. A large number of small antennas not only cost less than one big one, but could be configured to look at many different spots in the sky simultaneously.

The report also offered that while 1420 MHz was perhaps the most likely frequency to meet our cosmic neighbors, it wasn’t the only place that a signal could be heard. It suggested stretching the search from 1000 MHz to 10,000 MHz with particular attention being paid to 1420 MHz to 1666 MHz, where the neutral form of hydroxyl radiates. This area on the dial that was coined the “water hole” due to the abundance of hydrogen and hydroxl—which together make water.

In the end, Project Cyclops never came to be. While the report did recommend starting with “minimum systems” and making additions until making contact or “until a new and superior technology was discovered,” the grand ambitions and the hefty price tag—with estimates reaching between $6 to $10 billion—were too much for Congress to approve.

“Here was an old question that humanity had been asking forever and I was in the right place and had the right skills.”

The report admits that there needed to be immense buy-in to make the project worthwhile, “to justify such an effort, which may require billions of dollars and decades of time, we must truly believe that other intelligent life exists and that contact with it would be enormously stimulating and beneficial to mankind.”

Regardless of its demise, Project Cyclops became a sacred text for those who truly believed in SETI. Tarter read the report while she was a graduate student at Berkeley. She was a computer programmer at the time and was the only one who knew how to program the PDP-8, the outdated computer that analyzed voltage signals from Berkeley's telescope at Hat Creek, a telescope in search for anything that’s particularly non-human.

Reading the report would change her life.

“Here was an old question that humanity had been asking forever and I was in the right place and had the right skills,” says Tarter, who also got her PhD in astrophysics, “this was a big question I could work on... and maybe help find an answer, too.”

SETI as Science

Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico. SETI Institute

While denied billions of dollars to extend humanity's search in the galaxy, Project Cyclops showed that there was an appetite for government-funded SETI research. By the late 1970s, NASA’s Ames Research Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena both had established SETI programs. Tarter worked on these programs and but the Cold War UFO craze made things difficult.

“Our early years... were dedicated to distancing ourselves from that pseudoscience,” says Tarter, “and showing that this was a rigorous scientific exploration.” They did this by simply approaching it the way it would have for any other science: writing lots of papers, proposals, giving presentations, and lobbying to be in prestigious reports.

This included the 1977 “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” report, written by many who were involved in Project Cyclops, in which it attempts to persuade the world that SETI was timely, feasible, prudent, and could be done at a lower cost (though it never proposes even an estimated dollar amount). The report even threw in some red terror by highlighting the advances the Soviets were making in the field, a powerful political motivator at the time.

Jill Tarter, project scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, stands on the Arecibo Complex in Puerto Rico, 1992. Acey Harper Getty Images

NASA reports also advocated for “the search for extraterrestrial intelligence [to] be supported and continued at a modest level as a long-term NASA research program.” While not government supported, much attention was paid to Sagan and Drake's 1974 collaborative effort to send out a binary message to our possible cosmic pals using the Arecibo Observatory telescope in Puerto Rico, at the time the world's largest single-aperture telescope.

Tarter says it took awhile, but due to these projects they eventually had enough support from outside of the government to establish the non-profit SETI Institute in late 1984 with Tarter was one of its founders.

“Suddenly, all of this money was freed up to actually do science, build instruments, and figure out how to observe,” says Tarter. At the same time, the Planetary Society, co-founded by Carl Sagan, also began listening to the sky, not to mention many other teams doing the same across the world.

In 1988, NASA headquarters formally endorsed SETI research and, with an increase in federal funding, started building out needed hardware and training. It culminated in the 1992 Columbus Day announcement of a ten-year, $100-million SETI program called “High-Resolution Microwave Survey," which would focus on targeted searching and all-sky surveying.

While this was certainly a win for scientists, Congress wasn’t so happy. During the 1991 budget debate, Congressmen Silvio Conte made the case for all of those who didn’t want to believe. “We cannot spend money on curiosity today when we have a deficit,” the Congressman said, saying one could spend “75 cents to buy a tabloid [with reports of aliens] at the local supermarket.”

“We cannot spend money on curiosity today when we have a deficit.”

Two years later, Congress cut off federal funding of SETI. On September 22, 1993, Senator Richard Bryan proposed a last-minute amendment to kill the agreed-upon $100 million program, saying SETI had not yet found any evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence and there was no guarantee they ever would. The money, he believed, was being wasted, and the majority of the Senate agreed.

This was all during a time of immense budget cuts measures and SETI wasn’t the only scientific project shut down or deeply defunded. Earlier that year, funding was cut for a NASA-led space station and, in October 1993, Congress shelved plans for a Texas-based particle accelerator, which could have discovered the Higgs particle years earlier.

“We’ve been able to be more aggressive and bold than we might have been,” says Tarter, relating how the cuts affected SETI. “[But] if we have had level and sustained funding over that period, we would have been able to attract the best and brightest of the younger generation.

"We might have had some breakthroughs that we haven’t.”

Narrowing the Search

Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at SETI. NASA/David C. Bowman

In the two plus decades since the split, privately-funded SETI programs have popped up across the country. While few in number, the SETI Institute, Harvard and Berkeley all have well-known programs. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen funded the Allen Telescope Array at California's Hat Creek Radio Observatory, which went online in 2007, and internationally, China is also searching the skies.

“It’s actually a better way to do science so you all are not duplicating the same ideas others have,” says Shostak.

The biggest technological changes over the past few decades were faster equipment, more sensitive receivers, the increased importance of optical searching, and the ability to monitor millions of channels at once.

Shostak says SETI monitors about 70 million channels all at once, so if our extraterrestrial friends want to reach out, we have a better chance of hearing them.

"I bet everybody...that we would find intelligent life within two dozen years...Not microbes. I’m talking about aliens."

It’s thanks to this improved tech as well as NASA’s help that we now know more about our potential cosmic neighbors. Although in an unofficial capacity, NASA has helped SETI discover more about our potential cosmic neighbors in the past 25 years. Although expected to run out of fuel in the next few months, the nine-year-old Kepler Mission successfully confirmed over 2,300 previously unknown planets in our galaxy. Thirty of those planets are potentially in the habitable zone, meaning they are similar size and in a temperature region where liquid water could pool on the surface.

In other words, those 30 planets could be candidates for intelligent life and are perfect targets for SETI’s radio telescopes. “These are all candidates,” says Shostak, “They are like lottery tickets. Most are bad, but maybe not all.” NASA’s newly launched TESS will continue where Kepler left off in an ongoing search for “Goldilocks” planets.

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“I bet everybody...that we would find intelligent life within two dozen years," Shostak says. "Not microbes. I’m talking about aliens.”

But what exactly would first contact look like? Shostak says it would be nothing like what we see in the movies.

It would probably be in the form of a radio bleep or a narrow band signal coming from a star system. Anti-climatically, it would takes hours, if not days, for numerous tests to be run to confirm it was in fact legitimate. If the signal was determined to be extraterrestrial, we would probably immediately start looking for more.

The entire world would likely get involved, pooling equipment, expertise, and money to help with the search. NASA would get back into the SETI game overnight, and we would try to figure out if it was a message.

“It would be the biggest astronomical research project of all time,” he says.

For now, we appear to be alone in the universe, but the nature of scientific reason would suggest otherwise.

“If we are alone, then we are a miracle,” says Shostak. “That’s usually a bad assumption in science.”

AMC's Visionaries: James Cameron's Story of Science Fiction premieres Monday April 30 at 10/9c on AMC.

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