On any dark clear night, it's easy to gaze at the thousands of visible stars and imagine that there are other worlds orbiting those distant suns, and, perhaps, life on those other worlds. This is an ancient idea, but today we have the scientific tools that enable humans to ask more than speculative questions about the existence of life beyond the bounds of Earth. Biologists, geologists, astronomers, and planetary scientists pursue evidence of life "out there" using different methods and strategies. Seeing an opportunity for truly interdisciplinary research, NASA established the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) in 1998 as one element of its research program in astrobiology. Today, NAI is composed of 15 Lead Teams, which together represent over 700 investigators across the United States, and it has international partnerships with astrobiology research organizations around the world. As astrobiologists, these scientists are working at the frontier of our understanding of life. For example, teams study life in extreme environments on Earth, look for the molecular precursors for life in the interstellar ices and meteorites, participate in the exploration of Mars, and seek evidence of extrasolar planetary systems.

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The new Astrobiology Roadmap (November 2002) states, in goal 7, that "a strategy is needed for recognizing novel bio-signatures. This strategy ultimately should accommodate a diversity of habitable conditions, biota and technologies in the universe that probably exceeds the diversity observed on Earth " and goes on to say: "As more complex biological features eventually evolved, as evidenced by plants and animals, the associated biosignatures became easier to distinguish from the abiotic world. Human technology continues this trend, with the added benefit that it might be detected remotely. Thus, although technology is probably much more rare than life in the universe, its associated biosignatures perhaps enjoy a much higher "signal-to-noise" ratio. Accordingly, current methods should be further developed and novel methods should be identified for detecting electromagnetic radiation or other diagnostic artifacts that indicate remote technological civilizations." At the SETI Institute, our work encompasses the full range of astrobiology as defined by the new NASA Astrobiology Roadmap.

In 2000, the U. S. Congress called for an assessment of the astrobiology programs of NASA, other governmental and non-governmental programs by the Committee on the Origin and Evolution of Life (COEL) at National Research Council, National Academies. Published in 2003 as "Life in the Universe: An Assessment of U. S. and International Programs in Astrobiology" (COEL report), this review commends the youthful NAI programs, and recommends that the NAI led programs be allowed to mature to better assess the impact of the virtual 15-node institute, the interdisciplinary work, and the international cooperation that the NAI has engendered. The report also points toward the dominant participation of scientists from the life sciences, and to a lesser extent, geology, in contrast to the much lower level of participation from the astronomical research community. The COEL report recommends further collaboration within NASA especially with the astronomical research programs, as well as with other agencies such as National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health, and the US Dept. of Agriculture to develop multilateral programs in astrobiology in the US.

In the US, SETI has been conducted beyond the domain of government funded research for more than a decade. "Perhaps the most romantic venture in astrobiology is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). This effort has had a checkered reception by scientists and federal lawmakers, with the result that the current efforts are almost entirely privately funded." (COEL report, p. 6) This privately-funded SETI research is conducted by scientists at several US universities--University of California at Berkeley and Santa Cruz, Ohio State University, Harvard and Princeton Universities--at the SETI Institute, a private non-profit research organization, and by amateurs with small backyard dishes. Millions of people also contribute the idle time of their CPU's to process data via the SETI@home screen-saver program, the world's largest distributed computing program. SETI interests and engages the public in the search for life in the universe. That the SETI Institute has and continues to be a world-leader in this work is clearly acknowledged in the COEL report. "The SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, the nexus of such efforts in the United States, has accomplished in a spectacular way the founding of a science institute and the procurement of stable private funding to carry on the search. Because world-class scientists lead the SETI Institute, it is a carefully designed effort and worthy of notice by the scientific community and relevant federal agenciesThe leadership of the SETI institute has forged a unique endeavor out of private and public funds, maintained a high standard of scientific research through its peer-reviewed research activities, and articulated clearly and authoritatively the rationale for approaches to a comprehensive search for extraterrestrial intelligence." (COEL report, p. 6 and 46.)

In 2002, the Institute published "SETI 2020: A Roadmap for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence," a study that recommends a comprehensive research program for the future of SETI. The prime recommendations are to build a next-generation, low-cost telescope where SETI can be conducted 24-7 simultaneous (and without interfering) with radio astronomy, to develop new methods for SETI seeking signals in the optical portion of the spectrum, and to plan for the future when higher-speed computing will support a continuous all-sky survey. Even before SETI 2020 was published, optical SETI projects started at Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Harvard and Princeton. Ohio State University is working on prototypes for the all sky survey. And, today, we at the SETI Institute look forward to the construction of the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), the next generation radio telescope that will host radio astronomy and SETI observations simultaneously, all day, every day, 24-7. Working closely with the Radio Astronomy Laboratory at University of California at Berkeley and with major support for the R & D phase of the ATA provided by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, the Institute has developed and tested a 3-element prototype of the ATA. The next step is to build out the array, and enormously expand "the most romantic venture in astrobiology," the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.