People have scanned the skies for centuries worlds These stories have been People have long looked at the sky and wondered what's up there written ever since Aliens have been featured in many books movies and The ancient Greeks imagined other planets held different life forms In the 1600s people wrote television shows stories about what it would Scientists began to see planets in be like to visit other Italian more detail as telescopes advanced An Scientist Galileo Galilei made many discoveries about the solar system using early telescopes astronomer in 1894 believed he saw canals on Mars The idea that there is intelligent THE WAR OF THE WORLDS In 1938 a radio version of The War of the Worlds aired The story is not real Aliens from Mars invade Earth in the story Many people did not know the program was not real Radio stations received many calls from scared listeners NATIONALD illu Ar
Roswell New Mexico is home to the International UFO Museum and Research Center 6 743 life on other planets continues to excite people today Technology has advanced to allow scientists to see farther and farther One major incident that got people interested in aliens took place in 1947 An unidentified object crashed near Roswell New Mexico UFO sightings in the United States in 2015 according to the National UFO Reporting Center People have thought about life on other planets for thousands of years Aliens have been a part of popular culture since the 1600s Early telescopes allowed people to see other planets and to wonder what is on them A mysterious crash in New Mexico in 1947 excited people about the chance of alien People thought they had seen an alien spacecraft The US Air Force assured people it was just a balloon used for observing the weather But the event started a new wave of curiosity People continue to report seeing unidentified flying objects UFOs in the skies
SETI Starts the Search for Intelligent Life For a long time astronomers were planets It also considers how many able to see other planets but had no of these might hold life way to see whether anything lived Solving the Drake Equation would on them That changed in 1959 Two give humans an estimate of how men came up with a different way many other civilizations in our galaxy of looking for life Giuseppe Cocconi might be able to communicate and Philip Morrison wrote about through space But the Drake using radio waves to communicate across space An astronomer named Frank Drake tried this method in 1960 160 billion Drake turned an 85 foot 26 m antenna toward two stars approximately the size of the sun The antenna did not pick up a signal Estimated number of planets in the Milky Way galaxy but his method inspired others The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence SET was born SETI began in 1959 Two men came up with the idea of using radio waves to search for life Drake created the Drake Equation in 1961 It is used to estimate how many planets in the Milky Way galaxy might hold intelligent life The equation considers the number in space Frank Drake did the first SETI experiment in 1960 Drake also created the Drake Equation It outlines the conditions necessary for intelligent life of stars likely to have orbiting
IND Frank Drake used the Howard E Tatel Radio Telescope in West Virginia to scan for signals IN SETI HOME Equation is not yet solvable We do not know enough about our galaxy to solve it The equation outlines the conditions needed for life It currently helps SETI scientists know what to search for With SETI home anyone can be a part of the search for life in space This program uses people's home computers when people are not using them Scientists at the University of California use that extra power Having more computers means they can search more parts of space A bunch of computers together equals one supercomputer It increases SETI s ability to search for life The SETI Institute was founded in 1984 It now has more than 130 employees searching for life in space The institute has worked with many organizations including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
