SETI Institute

Hello! We are the SETI Institute. That is a long name, so you can call us SETI. Our name tells you what we do. It stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. That means we are looking for friends who might live on other planets. We think that somewhere, far away in the big, dark sky, there might be others. Our job is to listen very carefully to the stars and see if we can hear them.

How do we listen to things that are so far away? We use special tools to help us. We have giant radio telescopes. A telescope helps you see things far away, but our radio telescopes help us hear things far away. They look like giant dishes pointing up to the sky. You can think of them as giant ears. We point our giant ears at the stars. We listen for any special sounds or messages that might be sent to us from another world. We have to be very quiet and listen very hard.

We started our work a long time ago, in 1984. We have been listening for many, many years. Have we heard any messages yet? No, not yet. But we do not stop searching. Space is very, very big, so it might take a long time to find an answer. Every day, we keep listening with our giant ears. We keep looking at the sky. We are always hoping that one day, we will hear a friendly hello from the stars. Our search continues today.