“Scientists have been searching for aliens for 50 years, scanning the skies with an ever-more sophisticated array of radio telescopes and computers. Known as SETI, the search marks its half-century this month. Jennifer Armstrong and Andrew Johnson examine its close and not so close encounters,” reports The Independent.
Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is the collective name for a number of activities people undertake to search for extraterrestrial life. SETI projects use scientific methods to search for electromagnetic transmissions from civilizations on distant planets. The United States government contributed to earlier SETI projects, but recent work has been primarily funded by private sources.
There are great challenges in searching across the sky for a first transmission that could be characterized as intelligent, since its direction, spectrum and method of communication are all unknown beforehand. SETI projects necessarily make assumptions to narrow the search, and thus no exhaustive search has been conducted so far.
“Scientists have been searching for aliens for 50 years, scanning the skies with an ever-more sophisticated array of radio telescopes and computers. Known as SETI, the search marks its half-century this month. Jennifer Armstrong and Andrew Johnson examine its close and not so close encounters,” reports The Independent.
Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is the collective name for a number of activities people undertake to search for extraterrestrial life. SETI projects use scientific methods to search for electromagnetic transmissions from civilizations on distant planets. The United States government contributed to earlier SETI projects, but recent work has been primarily funded by private sources.
There are great challenges in searching across the sky for a first transmission that could be characterized as intelligent, since its direction, spectrum and method of communication are all unknown beforehand. SETI projects necessarily make assumptions to narrow the search, and thus no exhaustive search has been conducted so far.
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http://parasearcher.blogspot.com/2009/09/seti-search-for-extraterrestrial.html