Research

Alien shocker: Congress wants to spend millions searching for ET
A climate denier may be the reason the S-word is back in vogue in Congress. Oh yeah, not that S-word, the other one: SETI.

That's right, Congress is talking about spending a bunch of money on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (or SETI) for the first time in 25 years.

In 1992, a huge NASA SETI initiative was launched with the construction of two radio telescopes (one in Puerto Rico and the other in California) to comb the cosmos for signals from alien civilizations. Just a year later, however, Nevada Sen. Richard Bryan shut it down, and "SETI" became an unmentionable. [Greetings, Earthlings! 8 Ways Aliens Could Contact Us]

"[Bryan] made it clear to the administration that if they came back with SETI in their budget again, it wouldn't be good for the NASA budget," renowned astronomer Jill Tarter told Marina Koren of The Atlantic. "So, we instantly became the four-letter S-word that you couldn't say at headquarters anymore, and that has stuck for quite a while."

(Tarter was the director of the SETI Institute for 35 years before stepping down in 2012.)

Now, the U.S. House of Representatives has proposed a bill that includes $10 million in NASA funding for the next two years "to search for technosignatures, such as radio transmissions, in order to meet the NASA objective to search for life's origin, evolution, distribution, and future in the universe." Such technosignatures would come in the form of radio waves that have the telltale features of being produced by TV- or radio-type technologies. An intelligent civilization could also produce those signals intentionally to communicate with other civilizations like ours.