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The search for extraterrestrial intelligence: the 40-year search for extraterrestrial intelligence continues to evolve. What will the next 40 years bring?

Article Excerpt
We were the only game in town- the sole sentient species in the cosmos. Or so the mainstream scientific community thought in 1959. That perception wouldn't hold for long, however. Less than half a century later, scientific evidence would suggest that our civilization could be but one among many.

In 1959, young radio astronomer Frank Drake was fresh out of graduate school when he hit upon a seemingly ludicrous idea. Why not use his employer's radio telescope to search for intelligently generated signals from the stars? He cautioned himself to do so quietly; this science-fiction search might well be professional suicide. So he set to work, quietly assembling a crude, one-channel listening station to train on two nearby, sunlike stars.

Then, the 1959 Cocconi and Morrison article came out. In a brief paper in the scientific journal Nature, two Cornell professors, Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, proposed the very search that Drake was setting out to perform. This is a prime example of what I call the Parenthood

Principle: When a great idea is ready to be born, it goes out in search of a parent. Sometimes, it finds more than one. Now Schrodinger's cat was out of the bag, and Drake had to go public. But discretion still ruled the day. Even his first detection, of a classified military aircraft, was of necessity held close to the chest.

Today, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has emerged out of the fringes into the scientific mainstream. In 40 years, researchers have developed technologies the likes of which young Drake could scarcely have dreamed. As Drake grayed into the elder statesman of an established scientific discipline, thousands of people have conducted hundreds of searches for our cosmic companions, scanning billions of microwave and optical channels and spending millions of dollars in...