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Jill Tarter and the Allen Telescope Array
An anonymous reader writes "Today's interview with Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute (and Carl Sagan's inspiration for the main character of his novel Contact), outlines the forthcoming search capabilities of the large Allen Telescope Array. Their thousand-fold expanded search must find promising places to point 350 radio dishes. Outside San Francisco, the array spans an equivalent 8 football fields. Their new catalog, called HabCat, identifies all potentially habitable hosts for complex life within 450 light-years from Earth. Of the billions of places to point in the sky, their A-list total: 17,129. Start at Vega."
Imagine our embarrassment when They finally arrive and want to be taken to our leader and we realize we have to let them meet George W. It's going to be Mars Attacks all over again...
Money for nothing, pix for free
How soon before we hear about suspicious noisy thumping sounds from a point in outer space, which turn out to be encoded plans for a strange device?
...
hehehe... I just read it as "Alien Transport Array".
Damn... Too much coffee....
now we can watch the aliens take showers
hehe takes peeping tom to a new level
Is this proof that not everything that comes out of Microsoft is evil, or is it just a way to expand the market for Windows? :-)
Why would we want to catalog habitable places within 450 light years, when our current space exploration can't get past our moon!?
Also, can anyone explain the difference between a parsec and a light year???? I know its something about the arcsecond of the something and the whatchamagigger but yeah, thats about that...
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
I thought that the baseline of a telescope array was more important than the collecting area - or is that just when you work in the visible wavelenghts? Can anyone set me straight on that?
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
The guesses at inhabitable worlds sure fits in with assumptions of Trekkies. It assumes that other life on other planets would be humanlike and thus need a similar environment.
The usefulness of looking for Earthlike worlds to find life is marginal at best: it is based on generalizations from a sample set of one. Yes, just one.
I would guess that if we ever find "life" out there, it is going to be like nothing we expected in a place we never expected it. But that is just my guess, as after all we have no idea.
3800+ units and going strong. 4 years now. seti@home ow3ns my systems all your work units are belong to us
Hard work often pays off in time, but laziness always pays off right now.
Is it really true? After decades of spying on their closest allies, the USA is now trying to eavesdrop on their closest aliens.
What next? Will the Betelgeuse Recording Artists Association demand rights for anything that is recorded. Oh, right, that would be over-reacting to a few unathorised file transfers.
What does any one know about the Wow signal? Is it on the list? Has it ever been repeated? I met the guy who first heard that and the work they are doing is very interesting.
Come the revolution, the Bourgeois, Capitalistic, "A PARKING STICKER HOLDERS", will be first against the wall!
If someone discovers that there are rebroadcasts of 40's baseball games with encoded secret plans,
will the DMCA sue the aliens for rights violations? Shut E.T. down, Napster-style?
one two three four five ?!! That's the combination on my luggage!
In Star Wars, Han Solo made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs. It must be a measurement of time.
Just as the micron is really something many kilimeters in length, according to Battlestar Galactica.
Wouldn't it be much more likely that a society advanced enough to be detectable across the vast reaches of interstellar space would find humans based upon primitive radio frequency transmissions? We might be able to just kick back and hope for our sake they don't take any of those hitler or vietnam broadcasts too seriously...
While the possibility of extra-terrestrial life is a fascinating one, aren't there a lot more equally fascinating yet infinitely more practical aspects of space exploration to spend tons of money on?
-bcollier06
"Jill Tarter and the Allen Telescope Array" sounds like an awesome 80's progressive rock band. Hello Cleveland!! Are you ready to rock?! Give it up for Jill Tarter and the Allen Telescope Array!!!
-Dipster
is what she said in an interview in discover magazine. I can't remember which month but it was some time recently. She said she had asked Carl about this and he said the inspiration was himself.
Am I the only one who read that as "Alien Telescope Array"?
I need more cafffeeeeeeennee...
http://kered.org
Especially considering we did find a habitable planet 450 light years away, and started travelling NOW, and travelled at the speed of light, we'd still arrive 450 years from now.
Nope, not at all. Google search Time Dilation for the reason why.
Would you consider yourself a determined believer that extra-terrestrials exist? If (for the sake of discussion) you were to determine that we were, without a doubt the only life in the Universe, how would that impact any religious beliefs you may hold?
I personally believe that if we were to be the only life in the Universe that this would be divine intervention simply because of the statistics, would you agree?
While I am a huge SETI fan, I immediately noticed the menu system at the top of the Astrobiology Magazine website. It gives the user of the site the ability to email the story, fax it, download it in Word, Acrobat or PalmDoc, or make it printer friendly. Among other options, it also will translate to Spanish, and read the article to you in MP3.
A lot of work, I think kudos should be given to the web dev team that put this site together. Very cool site!
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
Actually, there are more assumptions made than that. They are assuming that the lifeforms have developed radio technology as a form of communication, which could also be seen as an evolution of the ears/mouth that we have.
Really, though, what it comes down to is this - the universe is REALLY, REALLY, REALLY big. And the amount of time they have to scan it is REALLY, REALLY, REALLY small. So what they're doing is deciding which planets to scan first. Since we have no idea what other platforms that life could have evolved on, the safest bet is to use that short amount of time is to scan those which are similar to our own. The idea being that we DO know what kind of variables were able to sustain life here.
In the future, I think you'll see they'll expand their searching, as technology improves and our understanding increases.
WTF is wrong with you people. This is the only intelligent question posted!
"Today's interview with Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute (and Carl Sagan's inspiration for the main character of his novel Contact), outlines the forthcoming search capabilities of the large Allen Telescope Array.
It's going to take them forever using ATA, wouldn't SCSI be able to handle many more simultaneous searches?
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Mod this up. You may not agree, but it IS an intelligent question to ask here.
There's no place for any hint of faith here, in the Rodina! God does not exist, GET OVER IT! It's been scientificially proven!!!!!!!#$@$@$
After the events of the last few months, I am not so sure I want to be visited by an alien civilization - which is sure to have radically different notions of what behavior is justifiable - and that is sure to have unimaginable military superiority - and upon whom we can make no demands but have to accept their definition and conditions of our relationship.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I find the fascination with Extra-Terrestrials quite interesting. Is there some need for us to seek for someone outside of ourselves? Has the search for God been replaced by the search for ET? Are we looking for a God replacement?
The reason I bring this up is that there is a very remote chance that an ET signal will ever be found and an even more remote chance that we will be able to communicate with them (impossible in the foreseeable future). So why spend money when the odds are so very low? What is this fascination?
We need a department of the Search for Terrestrial Intelligence. ;(
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
How many LoCs of data does the 8 football fields of dishes generate, and what's the BogoMIPS rating on their obligatory Beowulf cluster?
Has this array identified San Francisco as a potentially habitable host?
If it has then we are in trouble.
Cuiusvis hominis est errare; nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare.
...at least we don't have to worry about them wanting to eat us!
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
Looks like female geeks are just an unattractive as male geeks. Makes me simultaneously proud and disappointed at the same time.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
As Harvard professor Steven Pinker says in his best-seller "The Language Instinct"- humans are compulsive communicators. So when we have the ability to communicate with E.T.'s (or dolphins) we will try to do so.
This is based on the analysis of one single biosphere. Again, generalizations based on a sample set of one.
"For carbon life to develop, liquid water appears necessary.
What of water vapor? Consider this, and your wild guesses could at least include those Jovian planets. You have to get past such provincial thinking.
So, you have narrowed the search volume considerably by only considering stars that would likely have a planet in the "liquid water" sweet spot
And you have excluded planets that are really no less likely to have "life" than the ones you are keeping in your list.
Further, a planet must exist long enough for evolution to occur.
This is an even wilder assumption (unwarranted generalization). To attempt to apply the number of years that something took place on Earth to other planets and other systems we know nothing about.
If you are looking for intelligent life out there, throwing a dart at a star chart while blindfolded makes as much sense.
What you are doing might make sense if you are looking for the Trekkie "class M" planet with the afro alien chicks with go-go boots. However, shouldn't the goal be too look for life, rather than just a much more limited and unlikely type of life?
OMG!!
The parent of this post was so funny that I had to go to the fridge, get a full glass of milk, and spit it up through my nose!
-- Terry
"No offense to you personally, but I trust the biologists and astrophysicists with PhD's a little more about what types of life might be out there than most Slashdot couch scientists.
Little more? It is a difference between knowning diddly-squat and double-diddly-iddly-squat. Which is nothing.
[insert witty comment here]
We need it in Volkswagons.... everything astronomical that is less than moon sized is measured in Volkswagons
It was determined that the odds of SETI succeeding were much better, and so the funds were diverted.
George Lucas is not renowned for his intelligent dialogue. Han Solo was merely trying to be funny, as in "I can run the Cooper test in 12 minutes!".
An anti-US (government) comment would be, "They could land, of course, if they made the right "campain donations" first.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
If anyone would like to see the actual article (published in Astrophysical Journal), the preprint pdf file is available at
0 67 5.pdf
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0210/021
The article describes how the authors selected binary and triple star systems, stars with known planets, stars in the galactic disk/halo, stars with high metallicity, etc, etc. For the actual (nicer looking) reprint, though, you need a subscription to the journal or access to a library with a subscription.
There should be *no spaces* in that address--slashdot is posting it strangely.