![]() In 1974, a simple message was transmitted from Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. In addition to accidental broadcasts, Earth has sent a handful of messages into space. If an advanced civilization exists on a (yet-unseen) planet around the star, it would take over eight years for a signal to travel from Earth to that world and back. The closest star, Alpha Centauri, is only 4.3 light-years away. That's because it can take years for a signal to travel from one planet to the other. It is unlikely that Earth and an advanced civilization far from the sun will engage in much communication. Having found the signal, the institute envisions that enthusiasm on Earth will spur humans to build larger dishes more capable of receiving weak signals. "We'll be aware that we're neither alone nor the smartest thing in the universe." "But even though this information is limited, the detection of an alien intelligence will be an enormously big story," the SETI Institute said on its website. Scientists will be able to pinpoint its origination, and changes can help determine how the planet is rotating and moving. However, if the message is accidentally broadcast or is a message for another world, it is possible that scientists will never be able to decode it.Īccording to the SETI Institute, the signal will reveal a few things about the civilization producing it. If a civilization is deliberately beaming a message into space, they may seek to distill it to its simplest form. Whether or not humans would be capable of understanding the message is another story. More recently, the SETI hunt has begun to look for communications between two worlds along Earth's line of sight messages beamed toward a planet or moon in the system could continue on toward Earth. SETI searches also look for intentional messages transmitted into space. Earth has been broadcasting signals since World War II, when radio communications became more common. Messages from other worlds could be deliberately beamed or they could be accidental. These hunts involve looking for very brief flashes of light that last only nanoseconds. Scientists also focus on optical searches for advanced civilizations. ![]() Natural objects blanket the spectrum with signals, so finding a signal that only dominated a small region would be suggestive of an artificial source. Most SETI searches focus on radio signals, and most of these hunt for narrow-band signals, radio emissions that cover only a small portion of the radio spectrum. "That's what SETI does," Shostak said in a broadcast. The third is to search for signals that could indicate intelligence. The second is by studying light from the planet to investigate its atmosphere, currently under way with instruments like NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The first is to go and look, a process only feasible within the solar system. The wealth of planets revealed by NASA's Kepler space telescope have produced a slew of potentially habitable worlds for SETI scientists to target.Īccording to SETI Institute astronomer Seth Shostak, there are three ways to find life on other worlds. With billions of stars in the galaxy, each thought to host at least one planet, there are numerous opportunities for life to evolve. Most SETI searches focus on the hunt for radio or optical signals that can signify highly evolved alien life.īecause life on Earth arose within 100 million years after the planet was habitable, many scientists think that life should evolve on planets with the right characteristics. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence looks beyond this broad category in an effort to find advanced civilizations. However, many scientists continue to investigate atmospheres and other characteristics of worlds both in and out of the solar system as part of the search for life beyond our planet. Without civilization and technology, life cannot produce the advanced signals that travel across the galaxy. The first is the broad classification of life itself, a process that includes microbial and other simple forms. Hunting for advanced lifeĮxtraterrestrial life can be roughly grouped into two categories. According to the SETI Institute, the array should allow scientists to examine as many as 1 million nearby stars in the next two decades. The Allen Telescope Array, named for benefactor Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft), began observations in 2007. ![]() In a joint project with the University of California, Berkeley, the Institute built 42 individual telescopes that function as a single massive instrument.
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