We live in a ninety two billion-light-year-wide universe. Earth is the only planet known to harbor biological species. In 2007 astronomers in Australia picked up the first fast radio burst from outer space. Since then more have been picked up, the most recent on May 15, 2014. Bursts emerge from an unknown source and are bright flashes of radio waves that emit as much energy in a few milliseconds that the sun emits in one whole day. Radio telescopes pick up on repeating signals that could have no natural explanation. E.T. may be real after all.
Over the years, humans have sent many greetings to “alien life”. In 1974, astronomers sent a coded message to globular star cluster M13 about 25,000 light-years away. This included a graphic, life-size figure of the average man. In 1977, the twin Voyagers one and two spacecraft’s both were launched with a gold-plated copper disk each containing sounds and images that represented life on Earth. In 2005, Deep Space Communications Network sent over 100,000 Craigslist postings to an area in space with no known satellites, about 1 to 3 light-years away. In 2008, NASA broadcasted the Beatles song, “Across the Universe”, 431 light-years away, in the direction of the star Polaris. And finally, in 2012, National Geographic, together with Arecibo Observatory, transmitted 10,000 Twitter messages and videos of celebrities into space. Three of these transmissions were sent to stars from 41 to 150 light-years away. This was in response to the Wow! signal, an electromagnetic spike that was detected in 1977 by Jerry R. Ehman using the Big Ear radio telescope of Ohio State University. Ehman took a red marker to write “Wow!” next to the alphanumeric code “6EQUJ5.
The Wow! signal frequency matches closely with the hydrogen line frequency. This is significant because hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, therefore, extraterrestrials might use this frequency to transmit a strong signal. Could there be other intelligent life in the universe?
Paul Davies, theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, author of 2010 book, Eerie Silence stated, “We know there is plenty of real estate, plenty of places that could harbor life if it were brought there.” So what exactly are these bursts? Emily Petroff, a doctoral student from Melbourne’s Swinburne University of Technology explained that, “The two most promising theories at the moment are that these bursts could be produced either by a star producing a highly energetic flare, or from a neutron star collapsing to make a black hole. Both of these things would come from sources in far-away galaxies just reaching us from billions of light years away.” Catching the bursts as soon as they occur is the key to detecting their original sources. However, there has not been success yet. So what is the next step?
On July 20, in a press conference in London, Russian Billionaire, Yuri Milner promoted two initiatives. Milner announced that he is giving about one hundred million dollars towards enlisting the most powerful radio telescopes to scan the universe for regular and repeating signals that do not have natural explanations. Secondly, Milner created a competition called Breakthrough Message. He is promising to award one million dollars to the person who creates the best message to be sent to alien life once we find out any such life exists. Milner is working as a part of Breakthrough Listen. Breakthrough Listen is hoping to do even better than SETI (Search Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) studying ten times as much sky with fifty times the sensitivity at one hundred times the processing speed. This is the biggest scientific search that has ever been organized to search for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. Milner pledges that if nothing is found in the first decade he will fund this project for another run, and then another.