In 1959 a young astronomer called Frank Drake was working at the Green Bank radio observatory in West Virginia. Thinking about the capabilities of the 26-metre dish under construction there, he realised that, if it were used to transmit radio waves rather than to receive them, it would produce a signal that a similar telescope on a planet orbiting another star would be able to pick up. For the first time, human beings had a technology for communicating with other solar systems—an idea which led immediately to the speculation that, if there were any aliens out there, they might already be doing something similar.
Dr Drake put his idea to three colleagues over burgers at a nearby diner. Two were distinctly unimpressed. The third, a physicist of far-reaching interests called Lloyd Berkner, was enthusiastic. And since Berkner—who had a reputation as an “optimistic gambler”, Dr Drake recalled in his memoirs—was the one who controlled the money, Dr Drake got to carry out his search. In 1960 he spent 150 hours pointing the Green Bank telescope at two nearby stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, and scanning for signals. Thus began the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI.
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