Hunting for Aliens
Despite these incredible discoveries, Arecibo is probably most famous for its use in SETI—the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The observatory has been used by such groups as SETI@Home, the SETI team at the University of California, Berkeley, and the SETI Institute’s Project Phoenix. The dish was even featured in the 1997 film Contact. No radio signals from aliens have ever detected by Arecibo (nor by any other observatory, for that matter), which is, in and of itself, an interesting observation—one that’s forcing us to ask: Where is everybody?
