UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Since before the dawn of history, humans have looked up at the sky in wonder. With the invention of the optical telescope in the early 1600s, we began our quest to bridge the heavens and the Earth. And all the while, we have wondered whether we are, in fact, alone in the universe.
The birth of radio astronomy, in the early 1930s, opened a new window on the cosmos. In 1959, the first scientific paper on SETI — the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — was published in the journal Nature, and less than a year later, at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, the field of SETI research was born.
But since the 1960s, funding battles have hindered SETI scientists' efforts to advance this research. In 1993, following a tumultuous congressional tug-of-war, federal funding for SETI was cut, and the field has since had to survive on sporadic private funding.
"Because the government doesn't fund SETI, our model for how we train scientists in this field is broken," said Jason Wright, associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State. "Almost no one's being trained to do this work. As a result, until recently there have been very few people with any training in SETI at all — and by 'very few' I mean a couple dozen in the world."
For his part, at least, Wright aims to remedy that. In the spring of 2018, he launched Penn State's first graduate-level course in SETI — one of only two in the country, and the only one that is part of an astrobiology doctoral program. The University's astrobiology program is, itself, one of the few in the world.
"By having a graduate course where we teach students SETI," said Wright, "we are significantly increasing the number of people with expertise in the field.”
Wright's efforts coincide with a significant shift in the SETI landscape. In July 2015, billionaire tech investor Yuri Milner and a number of prominent scientists, among them Frank Drake — the Cornell University astronomer who is regarded as the father of SETI — and the late luminary physicist Stephen Hawking, announced the largest and most comprehensive search to date: Milner's 10-year, $100-million Breakthrough Listen Initiative, established at the University of California, Berkeley, at the Berkeley SETI Research Center. In 2017, Wright took a sabbatical there, and some of the researchers he worked with agreed to participate as guest faculty in his soon-to-be-launched SETI course.