The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence 2024 [Microwave Surfing]

Regular readers of the column will recall my long-standing fascination with the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Last year, I wrote about the American astrophysicist Frank Drake (1930–2022), who kickstarted SETI in 1960 with his Project Ozma
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and whose eponymous Drake equation
[3]
has been used to estimate the number of observable civilizations in our galaxy. Recently, I browsed through a new crop of books devoted to SETI. They included
Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars

[1]
by the Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb;
Alien Earths

[4]
by Lisa Kaltenegger, the director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell; and
The Little Book of Aliens

[5]
by the physicist Adam Frank of the University of Rochester. Even a cursory perusal of these books makes one thing very clear. Not only are scientists going beyond Drake’s original vision of searching for “radio waves sent forth by other intelligent civilizations”
[2]
, but the current SETI discourse also employs many terms unfamiliar to the wider public. Here are a few of them to bring you up to speed.