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The first serious attempt to listen for possible radio signals from other civilizations was carried out at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Greenbank, West Virginia, in 1959 and 1960. It was organized by Frank Drake, now at Cornel University, and was called Project Ozma, after the princess of the Land of Oz, a place very exotic, very distant and very difficult to reach. Drake examined two nearby stars for a few weeks with negative results. Positive results would have been astonishing because as we have seen, even rather optimistic estimates of the number of technical civilizations in the Galaxy imply that several hundred thousand stars must be examined in order to achieve success by random stellar selection.
首次正式嘗試收聽別的文明社會可能發出的無線電訊號，是1959年到1960年間，在西弗吉尼亞州格林班克國家射電天文觀察臺進行的。這項工作由現在康奈爾大學的弗蘭克·德雷克主持，被稱作奧茲瑪工程。它系用奧茲國——一個富于異國情調、十分遙遠、極難抵達的地方——的公主的名字命名的。德雷克用數周時間探測了附近的兩顆恒星，未有結果。倘若能有發現，倒是會令人大為震驚，因為，正如我們所知，即使對銀河系中的技術文明社會的數目作相當樂觀的估計，若要未經選擇便能搜尋成功，那非得對數十萬顆恒星進行探測不可。
Since Project Ozma, there have been six or eight other such programs, all at a rather modest level, in the United States, Canada and the Soviet Union. All results have been negative. The total number of individual stars examined to date in this way is less than a thousand. We have performed something like one tenth of one percent of the required effort.
從奧茲瑪工程起，已有六個或八個類似的項目在美國、加拿大和蘇聯進行過，規模均有限。其結果也是一無所獲。至今像這樣探測過的星球不到一千，相當于需要探測的星球總數的百分之一中的十分之一。
