SETI Support

The Planetary Society is one of the premier organizations that actively support the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The SETI Institute headquartered in Mountain View, California, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to scientific research, education and public outreach. The mission of the SETI Institute is to explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe.

The Planetary Society's commitment to SETI has been growing since the organization's founding in 1980. Today, the Society supports continuous searches from both the northern and southern hemispheres. SETI research involves several technologies, including using the world's largest telescopes to scrutinize the vicinities of nearby sun-like stars, monitoring of microwave frequency bands and searching radio signals for evidence of extraterrestrial signals. Although SETI is not sending signals, humans have unknowingly been sending radio, radar and television transmissions for more than 50 years. Although up to 1,000 nearby stars could have received our earliest television broadcasts by now, any alien viewers would have had to build a very large antenna to receive them.