The US National Academy of Sciences convened a space committee to study the scientific opportunities offered by the dawn of the space age, rockets, and satellites. There were physicists Philip Morrison and Giuseppi Cocconi who, although initially skeptical of UFOs, thought that radio astronomy could allow the detection of signals from intelligent civilizations beyond the confines of the Solar System .
A year later, Morrison and Cocconi published a technical article in the journal Nature entitled “Searching for Interstellar Communication.” The authors started from the ideas of Percival Lowell in the 19th century about the possibility of life on Mars but, this time, without limitations. The question was: are we alone in the universe?
The article posed the problem of determining what frequency should be observed to detect the possible signals that the aliens would use to communicate their existence. Since hydrogen is the most common element in the Universe , Cocconi and Morrison concluded that, surely, the extraterrestrials would use the emission frequency of the molecules of this element to communicate its existence to other civilizations .
Without a doubt, the publication in Nature was the turning point of the story. The US National Academy of Sciences funded a conference at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, Virginia to discuss the search for intelligent alien life . There they met Frank Drake, a young radio astronomer who had been looking for alien signals for some time, Otto Struve, director of the Observatory, Morrison and Carl Sagan, the astrophysicist who would later be the public face of the SETI ( Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence ) project. They were the members of the Order of the Dolphin.
In November 1960, SETI was born thanks to Struve, who decided to start an official project. However, it was in the 1970s that the idea grew that SETI had a reasonable chance of success – there was a boom in film and television about extraterrestrial-themed movies and shows – and SETI programs were established at the Research Center. Ames at NASA and at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Until now, the most famous moment in the search for life outside our planet has been in 1977, the date of the Wow! On August 15 of that year at 11:16 p.m., the Big Ear radio telescope, located at the Ohio State University, received a radio signal of unknown origin with a duration of 72 seconds, coming from the eastern part of the constellation Sagittarius. This signal corresponded to the emission frequency of the hydrogen molecules , as predicted by Morrison and Cocconi, and was 30 times stronger than the background noise that Big Ear used to record. It was the most intense anomaly ever detected by a radio telescope.
This signal has been the only message received to date that could have an extraterrestrial origin and have been emitted by intelligent beings
Image: Popsci
