It's been 70 years since physicist Enrico Fermi asked his famous question: "Where is everybody?" And yet, the tyranny of the Fermi Paradox is still with us and will continue to be until definitive evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) is found. In the meantime, scientists are forced to speculate as to why we haven't found any yet and, more importantly, what we should be looking for. By focusing their search efforts, researchers hope to determine whether we are alone in the universe.

In a recent study, two researchers from the University of Liège and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recommend that we look for evidence of transmissions from our solar system.

A system designed to provide data from the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) for analysis in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has successfully acquired data from a VLA antenna. The system—dubbed COSMIC: the Commensal Open Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster—is designed to receive data from a newly-developed parallel Ethernet interface to the VLA, using the same data stream used for other research but analyzed in parallel by COSMIC.

"As soon as the cabling was physically connected, our interface locked on to the VLA data streams and we were able to grab some preliminary data," said Dr.