We have different ways of doing that.

And in my case, teams that I've worked with look for technosignatures; so we write software that's looking for those particular patterns.

I've had the privilege of being in at the beginning.

My first year in graduate school, UC Berkeley acquired the first real desktop computer that had ever been manufactured, the PDP-8/S.

And it had no language, you had to program the 11 things that it could do by setting all the ones and zeros.

As I was finally getting ready to finish my graduate degree, that piece of equipment, that computer was obsolete, and it was given to an X-ray astronomer by the name of Stuart Bowyer.

He figured out a way that we could take the data and we could analyze it looking for signals that were engineered.

And so he came and recruited me to work on his SETI project at Hat Creek Observatory, and I programmed that PDP-8 to be the processing engine for that search.

You have to be very careful in this kind of work about deciding whether or not what you have detected, what shows up in your data, is actually real, coming from the sky, or whether what you're finding in your data is coming from your own equipment, noise that you generate.

And so we have this problem of deciding whether what we've detected is us or them.

Over time, that gets to be more and more problematic as there are more satellites orbiting.

And so we've had to try and get clever, and we certainly spend a good half of our computing resources trying to discriminate between us and them.

And now, we're on a threshold where we can begin to think about using artificial intelligence to help us with this search, to look at the data in a bias-free way, and say, 'Not is there this pattern, but is there any pattern?'

I think that's going to open up a lot of new channels for SETI research in the future.

For me, the fun part was getting started with this.

This idea of working on something that might not succeed during your career is a little dicey, and it takes a certain kind of personality to be eager to do that.

The real reason to work on this question is to know whether it's possible for us to have a long future.

There are so many challenges on this planet today.

Maybe our future is not very long because of mistakes that we have made in terms of living on this planet in a sustainable manner.

So a successful detection means that it's possible to have a long future as a technological civilization.

I don't expect them to solve our problems but I do expect, if we succeed, to be inspired by knowing that somebody else made it through this technological adolescence, and we can too, we simply have to find the way.

This is a really large search, and our tools for doing the search are getting better all the time, and now, exponentially faster.

It makes me mad to be old because I'm not going to be around long enough to see the end of that story or the beginning of the next phase of our searching.

Now, in my cheerleading role, I'd like to work on establishing an endowment so that this kind of activity, this scientific exploration can be funded stably into the future because that's what it's probably gonna take.