Life Elsewhere in the Universe: When Did We First Consider the Possibility?

The SETI Institute — SETI standing for the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence — was established in 1984, but humans have been thinking about and searching for life outside of our planet for many decades. The astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake (famous for the Drake Equation) was one of the institute's founders, but he was busy looking for alien life long before that. Drake conducted the first SETI-style search in 1959. The idea was to scan the skies with radio telescopes, trying to pick up signals from alien civilizations. And the search is still going on. Some experts such as Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, have claimed that there’s a good chance we’ve already been visited by aliens.