November 20 - SETI Institute is founded

On this day in engineering history the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute is founded. The SETI Institute is a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to scientific research, education, and public outreach. The mission of the SETI Institute is to explore, understand, and explain the origin, nature, and prevalence of life in the universe. The general approach of SETI projects is to survey the sky to detect the existence of transmissions from civilizations on distant planets.

Although the Institute wasn't officially founded until 1984, various SETI programs were in existence as early as 1960. For example, in 1960 Cornell University astronomer Frank Drake performed the first modern SETI experiment. Drake used a 25-meter-diameter radio telescope at Green Bank, West Virginia to examine the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. A 400 kilohertz band was scanned around the marker frequency of 1.420 gigahertz, using a single-channel receiver with a bandwidth of 100 hertz. The search resulted in nothing of great interest.

The most famous SETI incident to date occurred on August 15, 1977 when Dr. Jerry R. Ehman, a project volunteer, witnessed a startlingly strong signal received by the telescope. He quickly circled the indication on a printout and scribbled the phrase "Wow!" in the margin. This signal, dubbed the "Wow! signal", is considered by some to be the most likely candidate from an artificial, extraterrestrial source ever discovered, but it has not been detected again in several additional searches. These sort of signals do not appear today as the ability to verify if signals represent man-made objects have been improved. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that the "WOW!" signal was of Alien origin.

There are great challenges in searching across the sky for a first transmission that could be characterized as intelligent; this is especially difficult because its direction, spectrum, and method of communication are all unknown beforehand. SETI projects necessarily make assumptions to narrow the search and thus, no exhaustive search has been conducted so far. The Institute today employs over 100 scientists, educators, and support staff.

Resources:

http://www.seti.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI

http://www.setileague.org/