looking for life in all the wrong places

摘要

Since the 1970s, I've been pointing optical and radio telescopes at the sky to look for engineered signals from other planets-signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. In 1984,I broadened that search when I helped found the SETI Institute. At SETI, we built tools to look for signals we don't think nature can produce. One time, in 1997, at West Virginia's Green Bank Observatory, my team noticed a strange signal from a distant star. On a graph of frequencies overtime, it looked like a picket fence: spikes with equal spacing between each one.