What is SETI and it's history

SETI is an organisation which was established in early 1960 as an association of radio-astronomers, who looked for the signs of life elsewhere in space.<br>

The question "Are we alone?" has been among us ever since we found aout, that those little light spots in the night sky are other suns. Only now, in the 20th century is our technology developed enaugh to help as answer that old question.<br>

As a begining we can mention the article by Morisson and Cocconi in 1959 with the title "Searching for Interstellar Communications". The subject of the article was listening to the closer, sun-like stars by using the microwave radiations.<br>

In that time, the radio-astronomer Frank Drake was getting ready to make an experiment, which Morisson and Cocconi described. The experiment was called Project Ozma and has lasted few weks on only one frequency and it did not catcha any extraterestrial signals. Despite that Project Ozma became a model to a lot of other SETI projects.<br>

The first international SETI meeting was in the year 1961 in Green Bank WV. The theme of conversations was setteled by Drake - it was his equasion to calculate the number of possible comunication technilogies in the Space. This equasion has become knopwn as the Drake's equasion. Radio-astronomers stil use it today, when they calculate the posibility of their succes at searching. The equasion includes seven scienties: cosmology, planetology, atmospherical sience, evolutionar theory, psychology, technology and sociology. One can see by this that SETI is one of the most interdisciplinary organisations.<br>

In the last 50 years has a question "Are we alone" turned from sience fiction to scientific reallity. Today, even though gonvermen't found for SETI virtually does not exist, there are more projects with better equipment then evr before in the human history.<br>

SOURCE: http://seti1.setileague.org/general/whatseti.html

WRITTEN BY: ANDREJ KRPIC