The Search For Intelligent Life There has been a lot of efforts over the years to find alien life. It is hard to say who was the first to search for other than human life, but it seems to me I would credit Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1877. While looking through a telescope Schiaparelli thought he saw man made canals or should I say intelligently made canals. I can’t really call them manmade if they were made by an alien race. We all know by now how that turned out. There were no canals and on top of that some say when he used the Italian word “canali” it may not have meant canal in English. Mars became the go to place to look for life and Percival Lowell hearing there were canals there used part of his fortune to build a private observatory so he might be able to study Mars more closely, which meant studying the canals more closely. He even wrote a book in 1906 titled “Mars and Its Canals.” Lowell was convinced the canals were built to irrigate the planet and he drew many pictures of canals which he claimed to see when looking at Mars. It seemed all eyes were on Mars and this probably prompted the writing of the book “War of the Worlds” by H.G. Wells. When the broadcast of the book was aired on the radio it scared the heck out of thousands of people who tuned in between warnings, because it was only a fictional story. Mars has been a popular place in the movies. We have such movies as Mars Attacks, Mars Needs Moms, My Favorite Martian, Invaders From Mars, John Carter, War of the Worlds, The Martian, and so many more. There was even a movie Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. The famous scientist Nikola Tesla claimed to have received a radio signal from Mars on his newly invented wireless. As an aside the courts after many years awarded Tesla the rights to the invention of the wireless and took it from Marconi. They ruled Marconi used some of Tesla’s patents without permission to create his wireless. The idea Tesla was receiving radio signals from Mars has been rebuffed by many scientists, but when you get right down to it there is no way of knowing where those signals came from. Keep in mind we are talking about 1901 and there were not many radio waves sources around. There have been rumors which state there may have been small programs which searched for intelligent life. It was probably by telescope, but none of them can be affirmed. There were suggestions by some scientists in the early 1900s that radio waves could be used in this search. They were made by such people as Marconi, Kelvin and Todd and at least one, Todd thought we could use the new invention of radio to contact the Martins. On August 21 to August 23, 1924 Mars was closer to earth than any of the eighty years before and a National Radio Silence Day was promoted. For five minutes on every hour there was to be radio silence. A radio receiver was sent up into the atmosphere on a dirigible and aimed at the planet Mars. A cryptographer was assigned to translate any messages from Mars. Guess what? There were no messages from Mars. It is said the first serious attempt to discover alien life took place when SETI went online. It wasn’t until 1960 when the scientist Frank Drake established Project Ozma and began a radio band search for alien life. The Soviets got interested in this search and they also performed many different searches for alien life. SETI kept getting new improved equipment and moved to a large plot of land in Delaware, Ohio. Their telescope was named the Big Ear. One signal which was received in 1977 excited the staff and has become known as the WOW signal. It was thought to be an alien transmission, but the rules of discovery for SETI were quite clear. If you received what you thought was an alien signal you were to turn the telescope away and then try and reacquire the signal. They couldn’t reacquire it. In the 1980s Harvard got into the SETI search and had equipment capable of searching 131,000 channels. They soon felt they needed a lot more channels. In 1992 the government funded the NASA Microwave Observing Program known as MOP and also the 1,000 foot radio telescope at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. One year later the congress said this was stupid and cancelled the program and SETI funding was cut off and they had to rely on civilian donations. SETI is a popular program and many people and companies are interested in finding out if there is intelligent life in the universe. Today there are programs which look at exoplanets and such which we didn’t even know existed years ago. They are using all different devices to check the atmospheres to see if the signs of industrialization or biology can be found. As we develop more sensitive instruments and faster engines to take us through space, our exploration efforts will improve as our means for the exploration of the earth did thousands of years ago. Today we have started to use machines to explore planets, asteroids and such. They crawl over the surface of an object at a very slow speed so you really need thousands of them to scour the surface of an object to get a true sense of what the planet, moon or asteroid is truly like and if there is any life on it. When we look at the rovers on Mars, they are doing a great job but are confined to a tiny area on the planet because of their slow speed. For all we know there are more rovers in more interesting places on Mars which we know nothing about. We have begun to send rovers to the moon and with only one or two we may miss a lot of interesting things on it unless the government already knows about everything there and is not talking about it. Let’s hope for more in-depth exploration of these places and not just eyewash. Today we have a lot of different ways to search for alien life and we are gaining more ways as time goes by, and because of this there no doubt will be a way in the future to discover alien life. Will this be a good thing or a bad thing? I guess it will at least be a risky thing.
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