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San Jose hosted the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the most prestigious scientific organizations in the world. Amazingly, the proceedings included a forum for SETI, involving a debate over whether or not SETI efforts should progress from listening for alien signals to an attempt to alert possible alien civilizations about our own existence. And this came from a movement that has not confirmed even one alien signal in those 55 years.

Before Drake started work in 1960, the idea of conversing across space had a very poor reputation. During 1899-1924, the inventors Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi, plus the astronomer David Todd, all made themselves look foolish through talk of communications with Mars or beyond.

In fact, up to the 1920s, the problem was that nobody back then had even a vague understanding of the electromagnetic environment of space. They were just fiddling with radios. That changed in 1931. Karl Jansky, a radio engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, made an accidental discovery while working on the problem of radio interference. He found that some of the interference came from the direction of the centre of the Milky Way, the galaxy in which Earth resides. This was a natural phenomenon, not alien communications.

In 1937, a radio engineer and amateur astronomer in Illinois, Grote Reber, put Jansky’s finding to the test by building the first true receiver for radio astronomy. He started mapping the heavens as they appeared through the radio portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, as opposed to the optical part. In 1940, he presented his data to the Astrophysical Journal, then edited by a Russian exile named Otto Struve. Struve reportedly was confounded by this new technique but printed Reber’s results anyway, thus granting recognition to radio astronomy.