Just as space travel is becoming democratized as private companies gain the ability to reach outer space the search for extra terrestrial intelligence is also leaving the venue of government and moving into the private sector and at the forefront of that movement is the SETI league who was created in response to the cutting of the funding of SETI.
The SETI league is a nonprofit research and education corporation that allows individuals to join the search for messages from outer space. You can join the search in multiple ways. As the truly dedicated member you can build a armature radio telescope in your backyard that would join the search along with others from across the world, using the software developed by the league to search the data you gather.
On the surface it may seem a futile effort. The SETI Institute is a centralized organization that is more powerful in nearly every sense of the word. Their satellites are bigger, the budget is gigantic, their computers super and their scientists trained, but as anyone at SETI would willingly tell you all of that power is lost in the vastness of the space. The universe is vast and no one person or organization is going to search it all and every telescope and megahertz that joins the search is another set of eyes looking out into the vastness of the universe. Alone those eyes may be weak combined they can begin to crowd source one of the most important questions of all time. Are we alone in the universe?
The SETI league relies on membership dues and donations to continue its research and this is the second and easier way for those of us without the room for even a small radio telescope to become involved. In addition members of SETI give speeches, and educating the public.
Thanks to groups like The SETI institute and the SETI league humans continue to search the skies for the most important discover of all time. They look out towards the sky with little more than hope that someone there is trying to contact us searching for any signal that doesn’t match what we know about the universe and while that search may on occasion feel hopeless we must remember the words of J.F. Kennedy when we begin to ask if it is too hard. He said “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
If someday a message is discovered that comes from another world it will change everything. Our knowledge of the universe, our view of ourselves, and the most important questions we have ever had will be changed and it will be because of groups like the SETI league who continued a seemingly impossible search.
