Right now, there could well be messages from the stars flying right through this room. Through you and me. And if we had the right receiver set up properly, we could detect them. I still get chills thinking about it.
While NASA talks about 'Are we alone?' as a number one question, they are putting zero money into searching for intelligent life. There's a big disconnect there.
The story seems to be that almost every star has a planetary system... and, also, the definition of 'habitable zone' has expanded. In our system, it used to be that only Mars and Earth were potentially habitable. Now we've got an ocean on Europa... Titan.
In 1957, I was studying the Pleiades star cluster at Harvard University's radio observatory. On one occasion, we saw an added feature in the data. It turned out to be an amateur radio enthusiast near the observatory, but at the time, I thought we had detected clear evidence of another civilisation.
