West Virginia. It is 6 am on an April morning in 1960 and Frank Drake is freezing cold. He peers up towards the focal point of the radio telescope. He mounts a flimsy ladder to the top and climbs into a space about the size of a garbage can. For the next 45 minutes, he tunes the receiver inside, which feels like starting an old car. He climbs back down and begins to listen.
Drake and colleagues were conducting a seminal experiment: the first modern search for extraterrestrial life. For four months, the researchers used the Tatel Telescope in Green Bank to listen for any intelligent signals from the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani that might be hidden on the same wavelength as radiation emitted naturally by hydrogen. Drake named the effort Project Ozma after the princess in the 0z books by Frank Baum, who wrote that he used a radio to learn of events there.
April 2010 will mark the 50th anniversary of the start of Project Ozma, and those involved in the search for extraterrestrial life, or SETI, will be raising a glass. Not only did the experiment inspire countless people to continue the search, it brought alien-hunting into the mainstream and arguably seeded the science of astrobiology.
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Half a century on, SETI is a multi-pronged project, from the spectacular Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to the Allen Telescope Array in California, which features around 40 small dishes working together as one mega-telescope. The ATA is only partly built and the SETI Institute will next year seek fresh cash to take it up to full strength, with 350 dishes sifting through huge tranches of the sky.
Researchers are also now looking for other forms of alien communication, such as brief pulses of light. This 鈥�optical SETI鈥� approach was . Drake, now in his late seventies, plans next year to start up the most sensitive search yet for an alien laser beacon. It will use an unprecedented seven light detectors simultaneously. This will distinguish much weaker signals from starlight, and is largely immune to the false alarms that have plagued other experiments.
Frank Drake is still listening. Now he鈥檚 watching too.
