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."

Comments

Allen Telescope Array?

[deander2]

Am I the only one who read that as "Alien Telescope Array"? :P

I need more cafffeeeeeeennee...

Re:In some ways, the catalog is a waste of time.

[drgroove]

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 only differences being that, while human like, the aliens have blue skin and green afros. Oh, and if we were to visit the surface of their world, the lowest-ranking member of the party would always be turned into a rock, or eaten by a giant alien squid, or killed in hand-to-hand combat with their greatest warrior.

ATA search capabilities

[Pop n' Fresh]

"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?