New nasa news about alien life how to#

It would also be nice if the signal recurs, so it can be studied repeatedly and in detail. So, astronomers in the field generally look for signals that appear weird and artificial, something coming from deep space that isn't produced by any known natural astrophysical phenomenon. SETI scientists have to keep an open mind after all, we don't know what sorts of messages an advanced alien civilization might beam out. Initially, they focused almost exclusively on radio signals, but flashes of light are in play now as well these are the targets of increasingly common 'optical SETI' efforts. Scientists have been scanning the heavens for ' technosignatures' ever since then. Called Project Ozma, this effort incorporated ideas from a seminal 1959 paper by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison. In that year, Cornell University astronomer Frank Drake used a radio telescope in West Virginia to listen for signals coming from the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. One of the first actual life-searching projects took place in August 1924, when a team of scientists led by astronomer David Peck Todd used an airship to loft a radio receiver several miles above the ground - a good spot, it was thought, to listen for messages from creatures on Mars, which was making a particularly close approach to Earth at the time.īut the concerted search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) didn't really kick off until 1960. Related: 13 ways to search for intelligent aliens But a century later, scientists did start putting some of this alien-hunting talk into action. These particular ideas were never carried out. The kerosene would then be lit, producing a fiery signal that would hopefully catch the eye of any aliens keeping tabs on Earth.

New nasa news about alien life how to#

In the early 1800s, Gauss proposed carving huge geometric shapes into the Siberian forest to show 'lunarians' living on the moon that we're here and know how to do some math.Īt the same time, Austrian astronomer Joseph Johann von Littrow suggested digging giant trenches in the Sahara Desert, filling the ditches with water and topping that liquid layer with kerosene. One of the pioneers in this nascent field of messaging extraterrestrial intelligence (METI) was the famed German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss. (Herschel thought the sun was a giant planet.)Īround this same time, scientists began thinking about how to communicate with our putative cosmic neighbors.

And in the waning years of the 18th century, William Herschel, who discovered both Uranus and the existence of infrared light, postulated that life was widespread throughout the solar system - including on the surface of the sun. In the 17th century, for example, Czech astronomer Anton Schyrleus considered what creatures on Jupiter might look like. That momentum built as intellectual giants like Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton continued fleshing out how our solar system works, efforts that reached a near fever pitch during the Enlightenment.

'Once it was realized that all the planets go around the sun, it was not hard to imagine that the other planets could be like Earth,' then-NASA Chief Historian Steven Dick told writer Michael Schirber back in 2009. The pendulum began swinging back the other way in the 16th century with the dawn of the Copernican Revolution. So, for a very long time, it was considered strange and was often downright dangerous to hypothesize the existence of life-supporting worlds beyond our own.

This latter view aligned nicely with the Christian doctrine that came to dominate Europe throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. The 'cosmic pluralism' theory espoused by Anaximander, Epicurus and their followers didn't take off, unfortunately it was quashed by the ideas of heavyweights like Plato and Aristotle, who held that Earth is unique.