Third Pod From The Sun

If you were an ant living in an anthill in the Serengeti and you wanted to know whether an intelligent species lived on planet Earth, how could you tell? A particularly clever ant might pick up a radio signal and deduce that humanity exists, but how about subtler, indirect clues that, nevertheless, are a result of technological development? This thought experiment, posed by astrophysicist Jason Wright in a recent interview, is a good introduction to the type of out-of-the-box thinking that scientists need if they’re going to join the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Wright, a professor at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, is a leader in the effort to reimagine SETI research and modernize it as a fully developed scientific discipline. Despite its prominent place in popular culture, SETI science has long been on the fringes of the space science community, partly because of a lack of support from funding agencies. Wright and other SETI scientists have been working to change that a