New Search For Alien Life

Astronomers have long asked whether or not we are alone, and now we’ve entered an exciting new era

- Mike Wall And David Crookes

For thousands of years humans have speculated that the cosmos is teeming with planets, many of which could support life. Our questioning has tapped into a long-held desire to know our place in the universe – a core human yearning that has preoccupied some of history’s greatest minds. But speculation is about as far as humans got until we invented telescopes and developed a proper understanding of the scientific method a few centuries ago. Now scientists are making considerable progress in the search for alien life, and the past decade has proven pivotal. Some big discoveries may be coming soon, but where has the hunt for a life taken us, and where is it heading?

One of the first modern searches for life took place in August 1924, when astronomer David Peck Todd and an inventor called Charles Jenkins wanted to listen for messages from Mars. They asked the US Army and Navy to turn off their stations so they could use their radio-photo message machine to carry out a search. Alas, they drew a blank. In 1960, however, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) intensified when Cornell University astronomer Frank Drake used a radio telescope in West Virginia to listen for interstellar radio waves coming from the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. Called Project Ozma, this effort incorporated ideas from a seminal 1959 paper by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison. But again it detected no recognisable signals.