Throughout time man has wondered if there was other life in the Universe. Many belived there were creatures on Mars and Venus in the 1800's and created pictures of canals on Mars as seen in early telescopes. We do not search now the same way that our ancesters did however. Now instead of searching for life we search for things created by life. We search the sky for radio waves that could have been produced by an intelligent race. More importantly a signal that would prove some intelligence. There are a few ways that we do this. We use huge satellite dishes to scan the sky for signals. This will not be very effective soon however, considering most of what they pick up now is cell phones and our satellites. There are a few projects in effect right now to compensate for this. The newest project is a collection of several small dishes, arranged in an array which would create the effect of one huge radio telescope. Another project is to get a radio telescope in orbit to ignore human made signals. The ultimate radio telescope however would be a dish on the dark side of the moon.

Radio signals are what we use to look for intelligent life in the Universe. To look for life in our solarsystem we turn to silicon, or robots. There are many missions underway currently to look for life on other planets and moons, the most recent the mars lander. There are currently projects to send robots to Titan, Europa, and Mars. We hope that these will find bacterial life, or even more advanced life elsewhere in the solarsystem.

The final thing we are doing is searching for other planets in our galaxy. We do this by observing planets and detecting a wobble due to the gravitation of a nearby planets. Hopefully, we will soon have advanced enought telescope to optically observe these plaents to search for intelligent life.