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It was a project that started thousands of interstellar dreams.

Fifty years ago, NASA published a thick 253-page book entitled “Project Cyclops.” He summarized the results of a NASA workshop on how to detect alien civilizations. The assembled group of astronomers, engineers and biologists concluded that what was needed was the Cyclops, a large array of radio telescopes with thousands of antennas 100 meters in diameter. At that time, the project would cost $10 billion. Astronomers said they could detect alien signals as far away as 1,000 light-years.

The report began with a quote. astronomer Frank Drakenow professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz:

At this very moment, radio waves sent by other intelligent civilizations fall to earth with almost absolute certainty. A telescope pointed at the right place and tuned to the right frequency can detect these waves. Someday, from somewhere among the stars, answers will come to many of the oldest, most important, and most exciting questions humanity has ever asked.

Cyclops report, long out of print but available onlineIt would be a bible for a generation of astronomers drawn to the dream that science could answer existential questions.

“For the first time, we have technology that we can experiment with instead of asking priests and philosophers,” said Jill Tarter, who read the report as a graduate student and devoted her life to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. said an interview ten years ago.

This week I remembered Cyclops and the work it inspired. the word shone around the world That Chinese astronomers detected a radio signal with the characteristics of being from an extraterrestrial civilization – that is, with a frequency of 140,604 MHz, had a very narrow bandwidth, a sensitive nature often cannot achieve on its own.

They made the detection using a giant new telescope called the Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical radio Telescope, or FAST. The telescope was pointed at an exoplanet called Kepler 438 b, a rocky planet about 1.5 times the size of Earth and orbiting in the so-called habitable zone of Kepler 438, a red dwarf star hundreds of light-years away. constellation Lyra. Its estimated surface temperature is 37 degrees Fahrenheit, making it a candidate to host life.

However, an article in the state-run “Science and Technology Daily” reporting the discovery soon disappeared. And Chinese astronomers were pouring cold water over the result.

Zhang Tong-jie, chief scientist of China ET Civilization Research Group, Andrew Jones, a journalist “The suspicious signal is also very likely to be some kind of radio interference and needs further confirmation or exclusion. It could be a long process,” said Chinese space and astronomy developments.

“These signals are from radio interference; It’s caused by radio pollution from earthlings, not ET,” he wrote in an email.

It has become a familiar story. For half a century, SETI, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, has been a game of hitting the mole, finding promising signals before tracking them down to orbiting satellites, microwave ovens, and other earthly sources. Dr. Drake pointed a radio telescope at a double star in 1960 and soon thought he had struck gold, but realized that the signal was a stray radar.

More recently, it tracked a signal that appeared to come from the direction of the sun’s closest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri. Radio interference in Australia.

It will be a modest investment, according to NASA’s announcement last week. scientific study of unidentified flying objects It was intended to bring rigor and practicality to what many criticize as wishful thinking, as was the agency’s Cyclops workshop, which was held at Stanford for three months in 1971. The conference was organized by John Billingham and Bernard Oliver, an astrobiologist. Hewlett-Packard’s head of research. The men also edited the conference’s report.

In the introduction, Dr. Oliver wrote that if anything comes of the Cyclops, he will consider this year the most important of his life.

“The Cyclops was, in fact, a milestone in bringing together a largely coherent SETI strategy and the clear computations and engineering design that followed,” said Paul Horowitz, professor of physics at Harvard, who continues to design and listen to himself. A campaign called Project Meta, funded by the Planetary Society. Film director Steven Spielberg (“ET” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”) attended the official opening at the Harvard-Smithsonian Agassiz Station in Harvard, Massachusetts in 1985.

“SETI was real!” Horowitz added it.

However, Dr. What Oliver initially received was just a “Golden Fleece” award from Wisconsin Democratic Senator William Proxmire, who fought against what he saw as a waste of government.

“I think this project should be delayed by a few million light years” said.

On Columbus Day 1992, NASA launched a limited search; A year later, Congress annulled it, at the behest of Nevada Democratic Senator Richard Bryan. The SETI initiative, which has since been denied federal support, has limped, supported by donations to a nonprofit, the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Groundbreaking Listen. Dr. Horowitz and others have expanded the search to what they call the “Optical SETI,” which watches the sky for laser flashes from distant civilizations.

Cyclops was never built, which is just as good, said Dr. Horowitz “because it would be an expensive burly beast by today’s standards.” Technological advances such as radio receivers that can simultaneously listen to billions of radio frequencies have changed the game.

China’s big new FAST telescopeAlso called “Sky Eye”, it was built in 2016 in part with SETI in mind. Its antenna covers a sinkhole in Guizhou, Southwest China. The antenna’s size dwarfs the iconic Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Cruelly crashed in December 2020.

Now FAST and its observers have experienced their own experiment with a false alarm. SETI astronomers say there will be much more to come.

Those who endure from there say that they should not be discouraged, as the Great Silence has been called. They say they’re always looking for the long-term.

Dr. “The Great Silence is hardly unexpected,” Horowitz said, including that only one percent of the 200 million stars in the Milky Way have been studied. No one said detecting the alien shower of radio signals would be easy.

Dr. “It may not be in my lifetime, but it will be,” Werthimer said.

Dr. “All the signals detected by SETI researchers so far were made by our own civilization, not another civilization,” Werthimer grumbled in a series of emails and phone calls. Earthlings, he said, may have to build a telescope on the back of the moon To escape the increasing radio pollution in the world and interference from orbiting satellite constellations.

He said the present could be a unique window for tracking SETI from Earth.

“A hundred years ago the sky was clear but we didn’t know what to do,” he said. “A hundred years from now there will be no skies.”