Search for Extraterrestrial Life

Ever since ancient times, man has wondered about the existence of intelligent life on other planets. Speculation about what that life might be like has fueled the entire science fiction literary genre, as well as a substantial number of movies, some of them excellent. Now, in the 21st Century, the search for extraterrestrial life has moved from the realm of science fiction into the realm of real science. New discoveries, new tools, and cutting edge technologies have made the search for extraterrestrial life systematic, scholarly, and intense.

One of the most prominent efforts dealing with this search is the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project launched in May of 1999. SETI's mission as recorded on the home page of its web site is "to explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe (1)." SETI's primary focus is on searching for radio signal fluctuations collected by the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico (the world's largest radio telescope) that may indicate a sign of intelligent life from space. When first launched, the project received more data every day than its computers could process, so the project directors solved the problem using a unique approach. They created a screensaver called SETI@home that could perform chunks of the analysis on home computers, then made the software available for download so that volunteers could allow the project to use the idle processi

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t the universe generates radio noise from all kinds of naturally occurring phenomena, so the unimportant ones must be filtered out from those that have potential to reveal extraterrestrial life. This is done through the selection of proper frequencies in the radio spectrum, where the unimportant "background noise" is not as prominent. This occurs mainly in the 1- to 10-gigahertz range of frequencies, also known as the "water hole" (Freudenrich, 5). SETI uses these frequencies to search and broadcast, in the belief that any extraterrestrial life would probably be aware of them and be selecting them also. In addition, many SETI projects also use large, multichannel-bandwidth signal processors that can scan millions or billions of frequencies at the same time. Another drawback of SETI's work is that its dependence on radio telescopes limits its efforts. There are only a few radio telescopes in the world, and SETI has to take its turn to use them, renting its share of the time, along with other scientists. Although it could build some radio telescopes just dedicated to the SETI project, this would be extremely expensive. Other options include using radio data that other radio astronomers have collected and trying to repurpose

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