The tantalizing announcement from NASA’s astrobiology department last week may have obliterated our understanding of life, but it didn’t mean we found the aliens, as many Agent Mulder fans hoped it might. But the Kepler planet hunt aside, NASA hasn’t been actively searching for aliens since 1994, when the space agency’s alien-hunting program was killed by a ridiculing Congress just a year after it started.Enter the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, a non-profit organization that launched in 1995. Last year, Motherboard guest correspondent, the 11-year-old prodigy and overachiever Adora Svitak, traveled to the SETI Institute to meet the queen of extraterrestrial questing, Jill Tarter, and find out why we haven’t made extra-terrestrial contact yet.
