Calling all Aliens

Having witnessed close encounters of the third kind such as "E.T.", serious scientists have taken up the hunt for real aliens. Since 1977, a golden gramophone record has been travelling through space. The Voyager record contains greetings in 55 languages and music from Mother Earth. 30 years later, some researchers even want to load human DNA on a rocket. But this plan is causing trouble. In a worst case scenario, we are inviting hostile invaders to take control over the earth. Do we really want to give away our most important secret to everybody? The documentary shows us a world where science and fantasy mingle, and where fictions inspire real research. CALLING ALL ALIENS shows the desperate yet hopeful believers behind their monstrous telescopes. In 2007, their search will reach a new dimension. With 350 satellite dishes, each one measuring six meters in diameter, the world's most gigantic telescope array ever built will be tuned in to detect the message that could change the world. For fifty years, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence has been scanning the galaxy for a message from an alien civilisation. So far to no avail, but a recent breakthrough suggests they may one day succeed. Horizon joins the planet hunters who’ve discovered a new world called Gliese 581 c. It is the most Earth-like planet yet found around another star and may have habitats capable of supporting life. NASA too hopes to find fifty more Earth-like planets by the end of the decade, all of which dramatically increases the chance that alien life has begun elsewhere in the galaxy. Alone, in all that space? Not likely. Just do the numbers: Several hundred billion stars in our galaxy, hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe, and 150 planets spied already in the immediate neighborhood of the sun. That should make for plenty of warm, scummy little ponds where life could come together to begin billions of years of evolution toward technology-wielding creatures like ourselves. No, the really big question is when, if ever, we'll have the technological wherewithal to reach out and touch such intelligence. With a bit of luck, it could be in the next 25 years. Workers in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) would have needed more than a little luck in the first 45 years of the modern hunt for like-minded colleagues out there. Radio astronomer Frank Drake's landmark Project Ozma was certainly a triumph of hope over daunting odds. In 1960, Drake pointed a 26-meter radio telescope dish in Green Bank, West Virginia, at two stars for a few days each. Given the vacuum-tube technology of the time, he could scan across 0.4 megahertz of the microwave spectrum one channel at a time. Almost 45 years later, the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, completed its 10-year-long Project Phoenix. Often using the 350-meter antenna at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, Phoenix researchers searched 710 star systems at 28 million channels simultaneously across an 1800-megahertz range. All in all, the Phoenix search was 100 trillion times more effective than Ozma was. Besides stunning advances in search power, the first 45 years of modern SETI have also seen a diversification of search strategies. The Search for Extraterrestrial Radio Emissions from Nearby Developed Intelligent Populations (SERENDIP) has scanned billions of radio sources in the Milky Way by piggybacking receivers on antennas in use by observational astronomers, including Arecibo. And other groups are turning modest-sized optical telescopes to searching for nanosecond flashes from alien lasers. (Coverage from BBC - 2008)

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