For over 100 years, scientists have been hell-bent on talking to aliens, and new technology could give that hunt a boost.
For centuries, humans have obsessed over the prospect of advanced civilizations beyond our pale blue dot. Long before we came close to space exploration, people were pondering whether we’re truly alone. But it wasn’t until the 20th century that scientists took the natural next step: trying to listen and talk to aliens. Thanks to the burgeoning field of radio astronomy, which wields massive antennas on telescopes to collect and send radio waves to and from space, we made our first attempts to communicate with extraterrestrials. In 1924, the U.S. Navy ordered the public to periodically switch off their radios for a few days so that they could listen for messages from Martians. But the search came up empty.
Three decades later, physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison at Cornell University created an official alien communications protocol. They proposed a method for seeking signals around some of the nearest sun-like stars while tuned to the 1,420-megahertz radio frequency associated with the 21-centimeter waves emitted by neutral hydrogen atoms in interstellar space. This frequency has minimal background noise, and it was assumed that other civilizations out there would pick up on the frequency.
This suggestion kicked off an ongoing, collective effort among a diverse coalition of researchers—including astronomers, astrobiologists, and planetary scientists—known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The privately-funded SETI Institute is not just looking for any sign of life, but life that’s as advanced as ours—or perhaps even smarter. And ideally, they’d like to exchange some ideas.
The first modern SETI experiment, spearheaded by astronomer Frank Drake in 1960, pointed an 85-foot-diameter radio telescope toward two stars about 64 trillion miles from Earth. Both have around the same brightness as the sun, and were thought to have planets. For four months, the antenna’s receiver remained tuned to the frequency suggested by Cocconi and Morrison. No noteworthy signals bounced back to Earth.
Decades later, we’re still getting ghosted by extraterrestrials. We have had a close call, though. The most promising interstellar message to this day arrived in 1977, when a high-intensity transmission right around the 1,420-megahertz frequency hit the Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio State University. This was dubbed the Wow! signal thanks to astronomer Jerry Ehman’s candid response to the data a few days later, which didn’t initially appear to have any natural explanation.
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