Harvard Searches for Intelligence, Doesn’t Bother to Look at Yale

For more than two decades, a handful of Harvard researchers has been trying to make a cosmic connection.

Led by Harvard Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering Paul Horowitz and comprised of two graduate students, one post-doctoral student, and an undergraduate, the Harvard SETI—short for “search for extra-terrestrial intelligence”—project does just that.

Andrew W. Howard, who received his Ph.D. in astrophysics in the spring, explains their mission: “In general, we look for usually intentional signals from other civilizations from planets around stars that are thousands of light years away,” says Howard. “We look for signals that we expect and hope they might be sending towards us to announce their presence and perhaps initiate communication.”

Though they haven’t had word from beings from beyond, Horowitz explains that it’s likely that extra-terrestrial life exists.

“There’s certainly other life in the universe and our galaxy alone. There are 400 billion stars in our galaxy, and many stars probably have planets,” Horowitz says. “Many of these [stars] had the same starting materials and conditions as our solar system.”

But waiting for a call from something that looks like a nasty Ridley Scott creation from outer space doesn’t necessarily attract big government bucks—as such the program relies mostly on private funding.

Despite the muted activity of the project, there have been close calls.

“We saw a really strong ‘something’ signal and it had the right shape in terms of how it drifted through our antenna, but it was fishy in the radio frequency spectrum,” Horowitz says. “Turns out we had discovered the sun.”

It’s not something out of E.T., but it’s at least a start.