Around the turn of the century, 3.8 million people banded together in a real-time search for aliens — with screensavers. It was a big moment in a century-long concerted search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So far, alien life hasn't been found. But for people like astronomer James Davenport, that doesn't mean the hunt is worthless — or should be given up. No, according to James, the search is only getting more exciting as new technology opens up a whole new landscape of possibilities. So today on the show: The evolving hunt for alien life.Want more space content? Let your opinion be heard by dropping us a line at [email protected]! Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. When I was a teenager in the late 90s, I downloaded a special screensaver. It had lots of pretty colors and graphs, but that's not why I wanted it. My goal was to humbly contribute to humankind's search for intelligent life in the universe, a.k.a. aliens. This effort is officially called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI.
The screensaver I downloaded, called SETI at Home, was part of a large-scale community project to use people's everyday PCs to comb through radio signals that hit Earth from space, mostly from stars. These signals have particular patterns. So if astronomers find a signal that doesn't quite fit those patterns, it could mean some intelligent life is sending them.
Within a few years, the SETI at Home project recruited 3.8 million people.
I hijacked my parents' little Gateway 2000, and I absolutely cooked it trying to contribute. So it seemed like the thing, right? It seemed like the one opportunity living in the middle of nowhere and sort of like rural eastern Washington, like, oh, I can be part of this journey that humankind is on. It was amazing.
That's my friend James Davenport. He's an astronomer at the University of Washington, and his focus is on stars. And I talked to him recently because, importantly for this episode, he's a collaborator with the SETI Institute, a nonprofit research organization that combs through astronomical data in search of signs of life outside of Earth.
It's a search that goes way back, way before James and I took control of our family's computers, to 1924. when many researchers were excited about Mars, and Mars' orbit was close to Earth, making it a prime time to listen to signals from the planet. And so an unconventional astronomer named David Todd convinced multiple radio stations in the U.S. and one in South America to go silent.
So for five minutes on the hour for several days, they would black out all radio transmissions in the U.S., and they would listen. They would point the radio telescopes or the radio transmitters they had at Mars, and they would listen for signs of, You know, Martian NPR.
David Todd even convinced the U.S. Army and Navy to listen for anything unusual in radio signals.
Spoiler, they didn't find anything. There was no Martian NPR.
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