20 Facts About SETI

In 1960, Cornell University astronomer Frank Drake performed the first modern SETI experiment, named "Project Ozma" after the Queen of Oz in L Frank Baum's fantasy books.

In 1978, the NASA SETI program had been heavily criticized by Senator William Proxmire, and funding for SETI research was removed from the NASA budget by Congress in 1981; however, funding was restored in 1982, after Carl Sagan talked with Proxmire and convinced him of the program's value.

SETI advocates continued without government funding, and in 1995 the nonprofit SETI Institute of Mountain View, California resurrected the MOP program under the name of Project "Phoenix", backed by private sources of funding.

Many international radio telescopes are currently being used for radio SETI searches, including the Low Frequency Array in Europe, the Murchison Widefield Array in Australia, and the Lovell Telescope in the United Kingdom.

The SETI Institute provided money for building the ATA while University of California, Berkeley designed the telescope and provided operational funding.

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SERENDIP is a SETI program launched in 1979 by the Berkeley SETI Research Center.

SETI@home was conceived by David Gedye along with Craig Kasnoff and is a popular volunteer distributed computing project that was launched by the Berkeley SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, in May 1999.

SETI Net started operation in the early 1980s as a way to learn about the science of the search, and has developed several software packages for the amateur SETI community.

Optical SETI supporters have conducted paper studies of the effectiveness of using contemporary high-energy lasers and a ten-meter diameter mirror as an interstellar beacon.

Harvard-Smithsonian SETI group led by Professor Paul Horowitz built a dedicated all-sky optical survey system along the lines of that described above, featuring a 1.

The other Berkeley optical SETI effort is being pursued by the Harvard-Smithsonian group and is being directed by Dan Werthimer of Berkeley, who built the laser detector for the Harvard-Smithsonian group.

SETI provides arguments for why future searches of SETI should target interstellar quantum communication networks.

Allen Tough in 1996, as a Web-based SETI experiment inviting such spacefaring probes to establish contact with humanity.

In October 2000 astronomers Ivan Almar and Jill Tarter presented a paper to The SETI Permanent Study Group in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil which proposed a scale which is an ordinal scale between zero and ten that quantifies the impact of any public announcement regarding evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence; the Rio scale has since inspired the 2005 San Marino Scale and the 2010 London Scale The Rio scale itself was revised in 2018.

The SETI Institute has publicly denied that the candidate signal Radio source SHGb02+14a is of extraterrestrial origin.

Active SETI, known as messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence, consists of sending signals into space in the hope that they will be picked up by an alien intelligence.

SETI's does think it is too soon for humans to attempt active SETI and that humans should be more advanced technologically first but keep listening in the meantime.

Richard Carrigan, a particle physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, Illinois, suggested that passive SETI could be dangerous and that a signal released onto the Internet could act as a computer virus.

On 13 February 2015, scientists at a convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, discussed Active SETI and whether transmitting a message to possible intelligent extraterrestrials in the Cosmos was a good idea; one result was a statement, signed by many, that a "worldwide scientific, political and humanitarian discussion must occur before any message is sent".

However, Nature added, "Nonetheless, a small SETI effort is well worth supporting, especially given the enormous implications if it did succeed" and that "happily, a handful of wealthy technologists and other private donors have proved willing to provide that support".