For the uninitiated, the name “SETI Institute” may conjure up sleek glass buildings, mammoth radio dishes, and creased-brow researchers rushing about waving enigmatic printouts. After all, SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—is one of the most far-reaching and controversial projects in science. The idea that the universe might contain civilizations other than our own probably helped get Giordano Bruno burned at the stake in 1600. It sparked a famous 19th-century newspaper hoax in which astronomers were said to have found a society of “man-bats” on the moon. It motivated Percival Lowell’s writings about canals on Mars at the turn of the last century, and it inspired Orson Welles’s infamous “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast in 1938, which sent hundreds of thousands of listeners into a panic over a fictional Martian invasion they thought was real.
As the culmination of that grand history, the SETI Institute deserves an equally grand location, but the reality is quite a bit more modest. The institute occupies a single floor in an office park across the street from a residential district in suburban Mountain View, California, not far from a printing company and a shop called Fun House Theatrical Costumes. “This is the biggest such operation in the world,” says Seth Shostak, a senior scientist with the institute, “and there are just 10 or 12 of us here doing SETI. It’s not legions of lab-coated scientists with clipboards. I wish it were.”
At first blush, the organization’s results might seem equally disappointing. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first modern SETI search: It was in April 1960 that astronomer Frank Drake pointed a radio telescope at the nearby star Tau Ceti and began listening for the telltale ping of an alien communication. Instead he just heard static, and in the half-century since, the silence has been complete.
