US Navy Was Ordered To Listen For Martian Broadcast

MarkWhittington writes "It seems that a SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) experiment happened decades before the Project Ozma occurred in 1960. The historians at the blog Letters of Note have uncovered a telegram sent in 1924 by then Chief of Naval Operations Edward W. Eberle instructing the United States Navy to listen for radio transmissions from the planet Mars."

This is good science

[JoshuaZ]

This is good science. In 1924 we didn't have any strong reasons to think that there wasn't intelligent life on Mars. If anything, the evidence seemed to favor the other direction. Moreover, simply having ships listen in wouldn't have cost that much money. So this was an experiment with potentially very high pay-off compared to the resources it took. This does lead to some interesting ideas for a scifi story in which they do find signals. NaNoWriMo anyone?

Re:This is good science

[retchdog]

Vernor Vinge does a lot of this. My favorite, where the "aliens" are two rival bands of humans visiting another planet and competing to establish first contact, is A Deepness in the Sky. I wish I could say more, but even describing the overall structure of the story would involve a spoiler. :-/ It's loosely a sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, but they can be read interchangably.

I would have sniffed at this kind of stuff before, but having read Deepness... I think it's worth spending some resources to keep an eye open.

(Yeah, I know; most likely, they could wipe us out without blinking an eye. But that wouldn't be very interesting. ;-)

Acronym mistake?

[Tablizer]

Maybe "MARS" is really an acronym for something like Marine Atmospheric Reflection Survey", but some dolt forgot it and did Mars instead.

Re:Transmission was heard...

[b4upoo]

Short wave operators have used moon bounce to reflect signals back to Earth. I suspect that the military might have had an interest in trying to use Mars as a reflector for radio messages. The idea being that it would take a very sensitive and specific antenna to recover a reflected message from such a distance. I don't know if it can be done but I'll bet they were trying to do it.

Re:This is good science

[ergean]

Offtopic:
"A Fire Upon the Deep" how should I say this... I hate this kind of books. Few good ideas... and a fucking big chunk of pages in between them. I've read it hoping against hope that it would have a good ending to save it.

Sorry had to say it, some of you could go and read it and bang their heads to the wall asking themselves: Why did I read this damn book to the end?