From a planet.......let me get out of here....stay where you are....

Humanoid aliens have been good business in the 20th century. B moviemakers in particular have found a winning formula in showing semi-human space creatures with their fanatical urge to conquer earth.

This is bent on conquering the world...Ah..

I don't think it's very likely that the earth has been visited by intelligent aliens. In fact, the whole business of travel from one star system to another, physical travel, I think it's really rather fantastic, it's much easier to send messages and communicate with your friendly aliens next door than physically get in a spacecraft and go and visit.

We don't yet have the know-how to detect them, let alone travel to them if they exist. It’s clear that only a technologically superior race could visit us, in the meantime, we strain to pick up unfamiliar radio signals and scan the heavens for clues. In almost 40 years, there has been only 4 possible messages, all of them false alarms. An alien signal heading for earth could come from any direction. To speed up the search, a SETI program called Project Phoenix has made some choices.

Project Phoenix has a fairly straightforward philosophy. We point our telescope in the direction of nearby sun-like stars, stars that are cousins of our own sun. Those are the ones (who), we think, are most likely to have planets somewhat similar to earth around them and maybe with an, an advanced civilization on one of those planets.

No star in the search is farther away than 150 light years and like our sun, each one is over 3 billion years old, plenty of time for intelligent life to have developed radio technology. The president of the SETI Institute, Frank Drake pioneered the techniques used in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He doesn't rule out the idea that someone is tuned in to us.

The space around Earth is full of radio signals, and particularly television signals, which we have transmitted over roughly the last 50 years. In fact, there is a shell around the earth, 50 light years in radius, full of our signals, and in that shell there are about 1,500 stars which are now receiving our signals, and if anyone is there, they are able to find out all about us by watching our television.

Quick, quick, brand in Richard Hudnut whole family...quick, quick.. cut your winding time in half...Hey, cut the effort...your cresol lotion ...quick quick quick and quick

Can SETI transmit powerful radio signals of its own? Hoping for a response? Some people think that Project Phoenix actually broadcasts inquiries into space and we wait for replies from the aliens. Well, we don't do that, and the reason is quite simple. Say, say the nearest extraterrestrial is 100 light years away, well, our question would take 100 years to get there and if they deigned to reply, it will be another 100 years before their answer gets back to us. 200 years have gone by, you've probably lost interest and surely your funding is gone away.

There may well be a communication's technology that we don't know about yet, as we were unaware of radio waves only a century ago. Technology is definitely on the move. After a walk on our own moon, we began exploring new worlds by remote control, using more and more advanced spacecraft, among the most successful missions, was Voyager II.

humanoid: a machine or creature with the appearance and qualities of a human有人的特點的

know-how: practical knowledge and ability:實際知識, 技術秘訣, 訣竅

straightforward: easy to understand or simple:簡單的, 易懂的

rule out: to decide or state that something is impossible or will not happen劃去, 排除, 取消

deign to do sth: to do something unwillingly and in a way that shows that you think you are too important to do it:屈尊降貴做某事