New and Improved SETI

nomrniceguy writes "The new year is sure to be memorable for SETI, as glossy new instruments come on-line. At Harvard University, a survey telescope designed to sweep massive swaths of the sky in a hunt for extraterrestrial laser flashes is becoming a reality. In Puerto Rico, the famed Arecibo telescope is getting a new feed that will speed up searches by seven times. And in California, the SETI Institute and Berkeley's Radio Astronomy Lab will soon be scanning the star-clotted realms of the inner Milky Way with the first-stage implementation of the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) and will eventually boast 350 antennas, each 20 feet in diameter. This impressive antenna farm will be spread over about a half square-mile of terrain."

Comments

Direct Link

[RobertTaylor]

Direct link to seti.org press release without all the crapola popups etc.

Re:How'd they get the funding?

[dlleigh]

As interesting as the SETI project is, I just wonder how they manage to find the funding to build massive Laser detection devices.

The all-sky optical SETI system at Harvard receives its funding from The Planetary Society and the Bosack-Kruger Charitable Foundation.

Folding at Home

[gustgr]

In my opinion the http://folding.stanford.edu/ project is more important and perhaps more interesting than SETI. If you can help, I ask you to contribute with it.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[metlin]

Well, Paul Allen funds a lot of good research.

I was part of Project Halo/Digital Aristotle, an AI project which aims to learn (and solve) conceptual problems in physics which was funded by Vulcan ventures.

In fact, Vulcan Capital funds a lot of really cool stuff.

In my opinion, Bill Gates and Paul Allen are doing the world a favour - they are businessmen who make money off one industry, but help in the progress of several others. When was the last time any of the CEOs of Walmart or Oil Magnates helped fund such things as research and the like?

And not to mention the fact that places like MSR do a lot of awesome research in and of themselves.

Re:'Extraterrestrial laser flashes'?

[SeaDour]

From the Harvard Optical SETI web site:

"A high-intensity pulsed laser, teamed with a moderate sized telescope, forms an efficient interstellar beacon. Using only "Earth 2000" technology, we could build such a laser transmitter. To a distant observer in the direction of its slender beam, it would appear (during its brief pulse) a thousand times brighter than our sun."

Simply put, a targeted laser pulse would be exponentially more efficient than using a power-hungry radio antenna.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[Will_Malverson]

Also, don't forget that SpaceShipOne was also "A Paul G. Allen Project".

folding@home seti@home

[leprkan]

OR instead of wasting our computer time searching for aliens that most likely aren't out there or won't be able to return our signals, we could make use out of our computer time by folding cells to possibly find a cure for cancer and other diseases. http://folding.stanford.edu/ I urge ALL of you to switch from seti@home to folding@home

Re:A book recommendation and a name drop

[starburst]

Drakes formula allows some kind of estimate as to the number of intelligent societies there might be "out there".

The following is from a great book by A.K. Dewdney: Yes, We Have no Neutrons.

The formula is N = R* x Fp x Ne x Fl x Fi x Fc x L

For which:
R* = number of new stars that form in our galaxy each year
Fp = fraction of stars having planetary systems
Ne = average number of life-supporting planets per star
Fl = fraction of those planets on which life develops
Fi = fraction of life forms that become intelligent
Fc = fraction of intelligent beings that develop radio
L = average lifetime of a communicating society

The formula has appeared in several popular science magazines with the values set to:

N = 10 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 0.01 x 0.1 x L

So, N = 0.01 x L

The only numbers in the formula which anything other than a guess can be made are R* and L. Based on current observations most set R* at 10. Everything else in the formula would be a wild guess, except for L. More is known about L than any other part of the formula, since we are a communication society. Since we receive more and more of our communication from satellites, cable, and the internet, we are broadcasting less and less away from the earth. In the near future we will likely go dark as a significant source of radio/broadcast signals capable of being detected from space. If we say that our source of signals is about 100 years, drop the 100 back into the formula and you get 1. That must be us.

Hat Creek Radio Observatory in NE California

[ikluft]

The new radio observatory that the article mentions in California is located at UC Berkeley's Hat Creek Radio Observatory. That's in far-northeastern California southeast of the town of Burney and north of Lassen Volcanic National Park.

Some links about the site...

• Topographic Mapping at the SETI Radio Telescope Observatory (UC Berkeley)
• Topographic map of site (Topozone.com)
• "The big idea in SETI: Think small" (MSNBC, Feb 8, 2004)

Trivia: the Hat Creek Valley where the observatory is located was already known to many Northern Californians for being inundated by muflows from the May 20, 1915 eruption of nearby Mount Lassen. Anyone who has climbed Lassen has looked down from the peak on the path of the Hat Creek and Lost Creek mudflows.