As a part of it’s Sunday noon @ Planee programme: The Amateur Astronomers Association in collaboration with the Nehru Planetarium and the American Embassy, New Delhi is organizing an interaction with NASA scientist Dr. Kumar Krishen.
Venue: Nehru Planetarium, Teen Murti House, ND-110011
Date: June 5th, 2011
Time: 12 noon onwards
We invite School Students, College Students, and all the people interested in Astronomy to come and attend the interaction. It will be a great insight into NASA
But I guess I’d say if it is just us… seems like an awful waste of space.
-Ted Arroway (Contact:1997)
It has been mankind’s oldest musings. One of the most important questions that has been ever asked. Are we alone in this universe, or are there other worlds out there with life? Would there be a race of beings out there capable of what we understand as “intelligence”. Scientists have been trying long and hard to look for intelligent life out there.
In 1960, a first formal attempt at SETI or the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence was performed by an American astronomer named Frank Drake. Drake pointed a 85 m dish antenna to two sun like stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eradinus and tuned into the 1.42 GHz band. This is the frequency astronomers study to detect emissions from hyperfine transitions in neutral hydrogen. The probability of such emissions is typically very low. Only atom in 100 trillion similar atoms will emit a photon in this frequency. We certainly cannot hope to do this in a lab, but since the universe has vast amounts of hydrogen in it, it is routinely seen as cosmic radiation coming from stars and especially the galactic center.
Drake thought that this frequency might be a natural hailing frequency an alien intelligence may use to signal their presence.
Although Drake never found any little green men (LGMs) but he paved the way for many other sophisticated attempts to listen for ET signals.