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"There was a time when one old eccentric guy with a notebook could do something important to science. Now even the resources of a major university are often not enough."
- Jerry Pournelle
 |
| Communicate with Extraterrestrials | ||
| Early plan to communicate with life on planets removed from the earth. |
This effort preceded SETI by over a century. As far as I know, this is the first proposal to communicate with life not of this earth.
| I
am bound to add that some practical geniuses have attempted to
establish actual communication with her. Thus, a few days ago,
a German geometrician proposed to send a scientific expedition
to the steppes of Siberia. There, on those vast plains, they
were to describe enormous geometric figures, drawn in characters
of reflecting luminosity, among which was the proposition
regarding the `square of the hypotenuse,' commonly called the
`Ass's Bridge' by the French.
`Every intelligent being,' said the geometrician, `must understand the scientific meaning of that figure. The Selenites, do they exist, will respond by a similar figure; and, a communication being thus once established, it will be easy to form an alphabet which shall enable us to converse with the inhabitants of the moon.' So spoke the German geometrician; but his project was never put into practice, and up to the present day there is no bond in existence between the Earth and her satellite. It is reserved for the practical genius of Americans to establish a communication with the sidereal world. |
| From From the Earth to the Moon,
by Jules Verne. Published by Various in 1867 Additional resources -
|
How prophetic can you be? It was indeed reserved for Americans to establish communication with other bodies in the solar system.
Frank Drake - a young radio astronomer working in West Virginia - independently fashioned an experiment to search for signals from extraterrestrial intelligence. On April 8, 1960, he aimed a 26-meter radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank at two nearby stars. Sweeping his single-channel receiver up and down the microwave band, Drake spent several weeks listening for extraterrestrial signals. Known as Project Ozma, this was the first modern SETI search.
It's possible that this method was suggested by Carl Fredrich Gauss (1777-1855) who apparently suggested drawing an enormous pythagorean triangle on the Siberian tundra.
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