Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2020

36 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2020 ASTROBIOLOGY contributed to the SETI initiatives, and these funders have not always given the necessary relevance to the scientific aspects of the re- search. The “spectacularization” of pri- vately-funded SETI projects, combined with the total absence of positive results, has un- doubtedly contributed to diverting public funding towards a new interdisciplinary sci- ence that has developed extraordinarily in recent decades: astrobiology. Instead of looking for improbable alien messages, as- trobiology investigates the origin, evolution and distribution of life in the solar system, in the Milky Way and beyond. Over time, this basic difference has produced a real di- chotomy between astrobiology and SETI, al- though the latter is actually an ultimate ramification of the former. Its greater prox- imity to alien issues has often made people perceive SETI as something closer to ufology than to astrobiology, and this has certainly when, in 1971, SETI benefited from NASA's first contribution, Project Cyclops, consisting of a network of large radio telescopes that, for a couple of years, looked for radio signals from stars up to 1,000 light-years away. NASA's last remarkable contribution was the expensive Microwave Observing Project, which reached its peak in the early 1990s, only to be canceled in late 1992. Since then, only private moneylenders have O n the left, the as- tronomer Carl Sagan, promoter of SETI and inspi- ration for the film Contact, starring Jodie Foster, of whom we see an iconic image below. [Cosmos/ Discovery] Above, the fa- mous 72-second “Wow signal” from 1977. For a long time, it was reputed to be a possible alien message. In 2017, astronomers de- termined that it was generated by hydrogen ex- pelled from a passing comet. [Big Ear Radio Observatory and North American AstroPhysical Observatory (NAAPO)]