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Status of the scientific search for an extraterrestrial life
Search for communicating civilisations : the SETI programme
Since the discovery of radio waves, human communicates with space. Technical progress have made it possible for us to listen to the universe for nearly 30 years. This very popular research (17,27, 28, 29) has a major drawback. It targets advanced civilizations that used the same processes as ours. Even if it seams vain to some people (29) technics evolve at a very low costs compared to other search items.
We can distinguish two sorts of searches:
- The professional one: Big radiotelescopes are pointed on very precise targets. They scan frequencies and then change to an other part of the sky.(18, 19, 20, 23, 24, 26).
The optical way has also been explored, by looking for pulsed or continous LASER beams in the optical or infrared spectrum (21,22).
- The amateur search: The most representative in this field is the Argus project, launched by the SETI League. His goal is to coordinate 5000 small amateur radiotelescopes in the world in order to have a continuous sky survey, in real time and covering all the sky in the radio spectrum. Other similar projects do exist (25,27,28,31,33,34). One has the same working principle but studies an other source. Optical radio telescopes being more common than small radio stations among amateurs, it's possible to adapt them to search through the optical spectrum (23).
New projects still appear by the professionnals and the amateurs. We can see the eclosion of ambitious projects that need international cooperation of simple individuals. Among all these projects, we have to mention one that gathers the scientific community and common people. The SETI@HOME (32) project proposes to have the signal collected by scientific people to be treated by personnal computers owned by individuals thanks to a screen saver and the Internet.
An other approach is now used to detect some indications of life by observation and detection of molecular signature.
Copyright © Feb. 1999 by The SETI League, Inc. & Michel Babin Homepage