gile environment must assume some fore knowledge of where to look and what to look for. To find other intelligent life in the universe we must proceed using means and methods that assume a common linkage between life forms.
The means of communication, assuming other life forms communicate as we do, may be the use of the electromagnetic spectrum. In 1959, Guiseppe Coccinni and Philip Morrison, two physicists at Cornell University, were considering the possibilities of using high frequency radio waves to communicate over the vast distances between star systems. The question then became, which frequency made the most sense? Again, the only information available on the subject had to come from their own knowledge and conjecture (Shostak, 1995, 1).
Coccinni and Morrison understood that microwave radiation effortlessly passed through most of the material that hung between the stars. Even so, which microwave frequency would make the most sense? Again, counting on other intelligences following a likely chain of assumptions, radio telescopes are usually tuned to a frequency of 1,420 megahertz (MHz) because this is the naturally occurring radio frequency of neutral hydrogen. Because hydrogen is the most common element in existence, its radio frequency profile would be well known to any intelligence with which we could communicate. Finding this frequency being broadcast in an artificially modulated manner would be an automatic giveaway that intelligence was at work (Shostak, 1995, 1).
Coccinni and Morrison's conjecture helped inspire the first SETI project (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) then named Project Ozma. For two months in the spring of 1960, Dr. Frank Drake, from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia, aimed the 26 meter NRAO radio telescope in the direction of two nearby stars, Epsilon Eridani and Tua Ceti (Thurber, 1995, 1).
In the intervening decades, many SETI project...