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The Association of Space Explorers (ASE) is an international nonprofit professional and educational organization of over 300 individuals from 29 nations who have flown in space.

Carl Sagan From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Carl Edward Sagan (November 9, 1934 December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer and highly successful science popularizer. He pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI). He is world-famous for his popular science books and the award-winning television series Cosmos, which he co-wrote and presented. He also wrote the novel Contact, upon which the 1997 film of the same name starring Jodie Foster was based. In his works, he frequently advocated the scientific method.

SETI@home Classic: In Memoriam Today (15 December 2005) we turned off the server of SETI@home Classic, ending the largest computation in history. SETI@home wasn't the first volunteer computing project - it was preceded by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) and Distributed.net - but it captured the public's imagination and achieved tremendous popularity, laying the groundwork for Folding@home, Climateprediction.net, and the explosion of other projects. The following is a brief history of SETI@home Classic, and a list (undoubtedly incomplete) of the key contributors. The idea for SETI@home originated in a conversation between David Gedye and Craig Kasnov late in 1994 in Seattle. Gedye ran with it, and contacted UW astronomy professor Woody Sullivan, who led him to Dan Werthimer from the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab (SSL), whose SERENDIP SETI project provided a potential source of data from the Arecibo Observatory. Gedye also contacted Berkeley computer scientist David Anderson, a specialist in distributed computing. Click this text to read the entire article.

The following, "Drake Equation" was copied from a story by, Ron Hipschman on the Project SERENDIP site that you can get to by clicking on this text. Astronomer Frank Drake came up with a simple equation, now called the Drake Equation and is shown below:

Our sun is only a single star in a collection of over 400 billion we call the Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way is only 1 of billions of galaxies in the universe. Seems like there should be lots of life out there! Can we make an initial estimate? The first to do so was the astronomer Frank Drake. He came up with a simple equation, now called the Drake Equation, that maps out the possibilities. The equation is quite easy to understand, so don't tune out, even if arithmetic isn't your strong suit! Here it is:

N = R * f(p) * n(e) * f(l) * f(i) * f(c) * L
"N" here represents the number of communicating civilizations in our Milky Way galaxy. This number depends on several factors. "R" is the rate of star formation in the galaxy. "f(p)" is the fraction of stars that have planets. "n(e)" is the number of these planets around any star within the suitable ecosphere of the star. An "ecosphere" is a shell that surrounds a star within which the conditions are suitable for life to form. Too close and it's too hot; too far and it's too cold. "f(l)" is the fraction of those planets within the ecosphere on which life actually evolves. "f(i)" is the fraction of those planets on which intelligent life evolves. "f(c)" is the fraction of those planets where intelligent life develops a technology and attempts communication. The last factor, "L," is the length of time that an intelligent, communicating civilization lasts. Let's briefly look at each of these factors separately and try to put some reasonable numbers to them.

History of
SETI
 
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SETI: The Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence


Since the beginning of civilization, people have wondered if we are alone in the universe or whether there is intelligent life somewhere else. In the late twentieth century, scientists converged upon the basic idea of scanning the sky and "listening" for non-random patterns of electromagnetic emissions such as radio or television waves in order to detect another possible civilization somewhere else in the universe. In late 1959 and early 1960, the modern SETI era began when Frank Drake conducted the first such SETI search at approximately the same time that Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison published a key journal article suggesting this approach.

NASA joined in SETI efforts at a low-level in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some of these SETI-related efforts included Project Orion, the Microwave Observing Project, the High Resolution Microwave Survey, and Toward Other Planetary Systems. On Columbus Day in 1992, NASA initiated a formal, more intensive, SETI program. Less than a year later, however, Congress canceled the program.

For more background on SETI history and the cancellation of NASA's SETI program, you may want to read an article from the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. Part of the cancelled program was picked up by the private, non-profit SETI Institute, and part by the non-profit, grassroots SETI League. NASA is still very much interested in astrobiology and the question of whether or not we are alone has been adopted by the NASA Origins program. For a comprehensive look at current SETI issues, Sky & Telescope magazine's SETI Section contains regularly updated articles and resources.

We also have several related full-length books now on-line. You may want to view the full text and images of The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (NASA SP-419, 1977), which was edited by Philip Morrison, John Billingham, and John Wolfe. The Web version of Project Orion: A Design Study of a System for Detecting Extrasolar Planets (NASA SP-436, 1980) is now available on-line. A third SETI-related volume that is now on-line is Life in the Universe (NASA CP-2156, 1981). Special thanks to Chris Gamble for preparing these volumes for the Web.

SETI@home has been changed and includes BOINC(Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), at Berkeley University. This new venture will enable our home computers to be able to do research in scientific projects like the study of cancer, diabetes and other diseases and help find cures for these and other diseases. Weather is another topic that will be studied, too, as well as Black Holes in Space and other scientific projects. Join with us, to learn and enjoy.