It
was on this date in 1960 that the first search for alien radio
signals commenced. Working at the Green Bank Radio Observatory, a
then-29 year old Frank Drake was inspired to point a radio telescope
at Sun-like stars after reading a paper in the journal Nature that
speculated that radio signals from an alien civilization could be
detected with radio telescopes on Earth. For his project, Drake
pointed an 85-foot radio dish at two stars for 6 hours a day from
April to July, 1960, with no results. While modest, this first search
for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) would lead to much bigger,
more ambitious searches that continue to the present.
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