Finally, we return to the SETI of Cocconi and Morrison's 1959 theory. While most astrobiologists study the origins of life and peer through telescopes at wobbling stars, there remains a dedicated core who continue to search the skies for the elusive ET beacon. Now, finally, they have a home in the Allen Telescope Array—more reliable than the piggybacking they used to cobble together. A joint project of the University of California, Berkeley and the SETI Institute, the Array is currently 42 20-foot diameter dishes (of an eventual 350 to be completed in the next three years). Upon completion, it will be unprecedented in its research capabilities, able to conduct complicated radio astronomy and SETI analysis simultaneously. The project came out of a series of workshops held by the SETI Institute and UC Berkeley in the late 1990s as frustration mounted over having to use other institutions' antennas for research. What the team quickly discovered—and what made the project feasible—was that the cost of the receiver electronics has dropped by a factor of 100 over the previous twenty years. That put very sophisticated technology into an affordable price point and the Allen Array was born. Whether the Allen Array will be the telescope to catch the first ET signal is, of course, anybody's guess. It will certainly be one of the most powerful when it is completed, able to capture much larger pieces of the sky at one time than previous technologies. It's an unfathomably large universe out there and we're only ever talking about searching our own galaxy, one of an estimated 100 billion. As the original 1971 Project Cyclops report suggested, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is not one that can be completed overnight: "The search will almost certainly take years, perhaps decades and possibly centuries. This . . . requires faith. Faith that the quest is worth the effort, faith that man will survive to reap the benefits of success, and faith that other races are, and have been, equally curious and determined to expand their horizons. We are almost certainly not the first intelligent species to undertake the search. The first races to do so undoubtedly followed their listening phase with long transmission epochs, and so have later races to enter the search. Their perseverance will be our greatest asset in our beginning listening phase." So let us believe.

SETI