The search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been going on for 60 years without success. Given the hurdles to interstellar communication, that’s just a blink of an eye
Life 17 November 2021
ESA/Hubble & NASA
IN 1960, astronomer Frank Drake began an experiment. With a radio telescope, he studied two nearby sun-like stars, hoping to find signals that could only have been generated by life on planets orbiting these stars. He came up blank. In the six decades since Drake started the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI), astronomers have kept listening, carefully and systematically. Still, we have heard nothing.
One possibility is that there simply are no aliens out there – that we truly are alone. But this seems unlikely, given …
