Making Another Pass for E.T.

The eyes on the skies are going back for more.

Astronomers in a host of countries are turning their telescopes once again to swathes of the sky first surveyed during the early days of the Cold War, an attempt to find the E.T. in the night sky haystack.

Efforts in Argentina, Australia, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, and the United States to find evidence of extraterrestrial life will go back to the drawing board, looking once again for something they missed on the first pass across nearly impossibly wide sky. Among the targets will be Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti, two of the most famous early stars surveyed, because of their (very) relative proximity to the Northern Hemisphere.

The needle in a haystack metaphor is quite a good one because the very possibility of detecting a noticeable communication from an alien species is complicated exponentially by myriad factors, including:

• that the alien life is transmitting information in a form and/or frequency recognizable to humans


• that the information, even if it was transmitted, lasted long enough to be picked up by our instruments


• that the alien life is transmitting anything at all.

Other factors further complicate our efforts to discover whether we are, in fact, not alone in the universe.

The new project is titled Project Dorothy, an homage to the original project, which was titled Project Ozma, after a character in the popular Oz series of books by L. Frank Baum. Dorothy, the namesake of this latest project, is Dorothy Gale, the main character of The Wizard of Oz. Perhaps a random space cyclone will put us on the yellow brick road to finding E.T. One thing is probably for sure: Any alien life we find will not probably have heard of Facebook or Twitter. Such modern electronic conveniences would certainly be alien to those who launched Project Ozma all those years ago.