New and Improved SETI

Posted by michael on Sunday January 2, 2005 @06:07AM from the is-there-anybody-out-there dept.

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."

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Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th by metlin · 2005-01-02 06:25 · Score: 5, Informative

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.