LIFE ON MARS

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NASA's announcement also breathed new life into a worthy but largely unappreciated enterprise: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. SETI, as it is called, makes use of computer-monitored radio telescopes to scan the skies and frequency bands in the hope of picking up a message or signal from a distant civilization.

At SETI's offices in Mountain View, California, the first signs of extraterrestrial life arrived last week not by radio but by fax. When they got the news from NASA, says astronomer Frank Drake, the organization's president, workers abandoned their stations and gathered around a TV set to watch the press conference "hooting, hollering and cheering." And for good reason. If the evidence is validated, explains Drake, who launched the first seti-like program in 1960, "it confirms what we've always believed--that life arises wherever the conditions are right." And because the sun is just one star in a galaxy of 150 billion stars, in a universe of billions of galaxies, the universe may well be teeming with life, some of it intelligent. "We are just one iota among countless iotas in the universe," Drake insists. Someday, he hopes, SETI's radio telescopes will hear from the others.

At the Johnson Space Center, meanwhile, researchers are back at their instruments, gathering ammunition for what could be a long battle with their critics in the scientific community. "We feel we can already see a cell wall," says NASA's Gibson hopefully. NASA administrators were also busy, re-examining their scientific launch schedule, which includes two missions to Mars before the end of the year, and coyly suggesting that final confirmation may require sending rovers--and perhaps even people--to gather samples for closer analysis.

What remains largely unspoken is the lingering hope that such a mission might experience, somewhere beneath the desolate Martian surface, a close encounter with organisms that are alive today.

--Reported by Dan Cray/Los Angeles, S.C. Gwynne/Austin and Ainissa Ramirez/Washington, with other bureaus

For more information, see TIME ONLINE's Life on Mars Website at time.com/mars

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