ORGANIZATION
SETI
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — the scientific program Sagan championed for decades, now being accelerated by AI systems in ways that demonstrate the partnership the Sagan volume argues for.
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a scientific program devoted to detecting signals from non-human intelligences in the cosmos. Since the first systematic search — Project Ozma, conducted by Frank Drake in 1960 — SETI has combined radio telescope observation, signal processing, and statistical analysis to examine the sky for patterns suggesting the presence of other minds. Sagan was SETI's most visible public advocate for four decades, lobbying for funding, co-founding The Planetary Society to support private SETI research, and making the case that the question are we alone? is one of the most important questions human beings can ask. The Sagan volume treats recent AI-SETI integration as a demonstration that the framework Sagan spent his life articulating is now being extended, accelerated, and in some ways transformed by the machines whose epistemological challenges the same framework illuminates.
In The You On AI Field Guide
In November 2025, the Breakthrough Listen initiative, in partnership with NVIDIA, deployed an AI system on the Allen Telescope Array