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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."
hehehe... I just read it as "Alien Transport Array".
Damn... Too much coffee....
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.
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!
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
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
Excerpt:
Money for nothing, pix for free
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?
SETI@Home and the SETI Institute are two separate efforts.
.@.
I won't claim that there is hard science or good dialog behind the star wars films, but in the case of Han Solo and the Kessel run comment I would say his comment can be forgiven. Since the "kessel run" goes past a series of black holes, the closer you are to the black holes, the faster you'd need to go in order to avoid certain death. If you take a shorter path as Han suggests he did, you also must be going faster.
Here's to the willing suspension of disbelief in the name of entertainment.
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.
"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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First off, the USA is not the largest country in area, but it is in the top 4. The only larger ones are Russia, China, and Canada. India is smaller. It should also be pointed out that Canada is contiguous with the US along a very long border, creating in effect one very large block.
Secondly, anyone smart enough to travel that distance despite the physics problems involved would probably also be smart enough to land in the place putting out the most energy (assuming they want to find "our leader"). That would be the US, hands down.
Just a simple look at artificial lighting at night would lead one to conclude that "leaders" would most likely be found on the NE corridor in the US, or in the Belium-Netherlands area in europe. Japan's an outside possibility. But Russia, China, and India are about the last places you'd go.
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.
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.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
carbon is the only good choice for rich biochemistry.
This is based on the analysis of one single biosphere. Again, generalizations based on a sample set of one.
Chemical interactions are understood fairly well. Carbon is the only element that is capable of a hugely diverse set of molecules, owing to its relatively small mass and its ability to bond with a large number of other elements. This complexity makes it uniquely suitable for complex chemical reactions, which are needed to develop life.
Other primary elements (like Silicon) achieve a similar degree of freedom in their bondings, but their mass is greater and bonds proportionally weaker, making them less flexible in the long run.
Lots of study has gone into what other forms life might be able to take. Lots of imagination and toying with elements in a variety of environments, and we haven't come up with anything as flexible as carbon-based life.
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.
Without a surface of liquid water, it's very difficult to get even single-celled life to catch hold. If all of your water is in the form of vapor in the atmosphere, in what medium do you plan on getting different chemicals and acids together in just the right way? In order for your rudimentary forms of life to progress, they have to be able to propel themselves through the air in order to "feed" off of other chemicals and raw material. You really need a fairly viscous medium for organisms to push themselves against in order to move around, and to carry nutrients. It's unlikely that this viscous medium will be anything other than water if water is present in any form.
So no, water vapor is not likely to do the job as well. But I suppose it's possible. I don't exactly have a xenobiology degree either.
Further, a planet must exist long enough for evolution to occur.
This is an even wilder assumption (unwarranted generalization).
I disagree, but I suspect that's because I disagree with your other points. If I bought into the suggestion that forms of life are equally likely to take other, non-carbon, non-liquid-water-originating forms, this assumption might not necessarily be accurate.
But still, how long do you think is "long enough"? Do you think a spacefaring species can evolve in 100 years? 1000? 100,000? 100 million? As the article says, it took about 800 million years for us to evolve, but single-celled organisms still needed a few billion years to come about first. Granted, this is a single data point, as you note, but can you suggest a better one, based on the data we have?
If you are looking for intelligent life out there, throwing a dart at a star chart while blindfolded makes as much sense.
I completely disagree here. You are deliberately ignoring the one data point we do have. What the researchers here are doing is saying, "OK, we probably have a whole spectrum of environments and situations where life can evolve. Let's eliminate the conditions that make it completely unlikely that any form of life can take hold and put the rest on a probability function with our situation at its peak."
Absolutely this is making an assumption that life will evolve elsewhere that is similar to life on earth. But what you fail to acknowledge is that there is no evidence to suggest life can evolve in any other way. In fact, we've been collecting a lot of evidence lately that suggests many other "alternative" families of chemicals do not give rise to conditions that may make life possible. That's why those conditions are excluded. We aren't being closed-minded, we're filtering the data set based on the data we do have.
shouldn't the goal be too look for life, rather than just a much more limited and unlikely type of life?
Your argument seems to come back to this th
This is based on the analysis of one single biosphere. Again, generalizations based on a sample set of one.
No, it is based on the analysis of every chemical in the universe, most likely. This is confirmed by astrospectroscopy.
The possible chemical interactions of these elements are well understood. Only carbon permits sufficiently complex molecules, with other important attributes like flexibility. Silicon, a closely related element, is the nearest in suitability, but it is much more limited.
And you have excluded planets that are really no less likely to have "life" than the ones you are keeping in your list.
I disagree.
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.
The Earth existed for around 1.5-2 billion years before it was remotely suitable for life. These are mostly straightforward physical processes such as cooling and atmosphere formation.
Many of the brighter stars you can see in the night sky have total lifespans before extinction of less than one billion years. Others are so variable as to produce very unsuitable conditions for carbon based lifeforms. Others are in multiple star systems where stable planetary orbits are impossible.
These are largely the types of systems that have been eliminated from the initial search (emphasis mine).
The best candidate stars will be from the F, G, K, and M classes of stars. See the Hertzsprung-Russel Chart
If you are looking for intelligent life out there, throwing a dart at a star chart while blindfolded makes as much sense.
Nope. See above.
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.
It'll be very interesting how close alien "DNA" is to terrestrial DNA. It is quite a stretch to think that carbon-based, intelligent aliens would even be bipedal, much less humanoid. I'd suggest that the variety of life on Earth argues otherwise, and that the octopus is arguably the second best design for intelligent life on this planet (other than the Great Apes).
Think how different life on Earth might be if the some of the early extinction events hadn't occurred here. For instance, the Permo-Triassic Extinction. A brief quote:
"Over a span of 5-10 million years, it is estimated that between 75 and 90 percent of all preexisting species were lost, including 80-96% of all marine species and approximately 57% of all marine families."
However, shouldn't the goal be too look for life, rather than just a much more limited and unlikely type of life?
All the evidence suggests that other types of life are likely to be "more limited and unlikely". That is exactly the point.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
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