The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is the collective name for a number of activities people undertake to search for intelligent extraterrestrial life. Some of the most well known projects are run by Harvard University, the University of California, Berkeley and the SETI Institute. SETI projects use scientific methods to search for intelligent life on other planets. For example, electromagnetic radiation is monitored for signs of transmissions from civilizations on other worlds. The United States government contributed to early SETI projects, but recent work has been primarily funded by private sources.
There are great challenges in searching across the cosmos for a first transmission that could be characterized as intelligent, since its direction, spectrum and method of communication are all unknown beforehand. SETI projects necessarily make assumptions to narrow the search, the foremost being that electromagnetic radiation would be a medium of communication for advanced extraterrestrial life.
Read more about Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Radio Experiments, Optical Experiments, Gamma-ray Bursts, Probe SETI and SETA Experiments, Search For Visible Signs of Activity and Megascale Engineering Projects, Fermi Paradox, Post Detection Disclosure Protocol, Criticism, Results of Extraterrestrial Contact For Humanity
Famous quotes containing the words search for, search and/or intelligence:
“The search for conspiracy only increases the elements of morbidity and paranoia and fantasy in this country. It romanticizes crimes that are terrible because of their lack of purpose. It obscures our necessary understanding, all of us, that in this life there is often tragedy without reason.”
—Anthony Lewis (b. 1927)
“So often has my judgment deceived me in my life, that I always suspect it, right or wrong,—at least I am seldom hot upon cold subjects. For all this, I reverence truth as much as any body; and ... if a man will but take me by the hand, and go quietly and search for it ... I’ll go to the world’s end with him:MBut I hate disputes.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“Really to succeed, we must give; of our souls to the soulless, of our love to the lonely, of our intelligence to the dull. Business is quite as much a process of giving as it is of getting.”
—Alice Foote MacDougall (1867–1945)