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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."
None other than Paul Allen. Yep, of Microsoft fame. Boo, hiss, where are the groups of objectors now?
Not that I'm being a jerk about it, but it is only fair to note that without him, most of this would probably not be possible. Not only did he contribute millions to SETI, but also funded the Alien Telescope Array which the Slashdot blurb mentions.
A blog like any other.
Let's assume that there are no other life forms in existence and/or there are none that we may reach by radio signal. Is there anything else which can be gained from the SETI program? Is there other knowledge gained, perhaps a deeper understanding of radio communications...?
As far as I am concerned Paul Allen is the very best thing *ever* to come out of Microsoft.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
very very small, but its worth doing it. Just think of the impact in humanity if just one discovery was made...
its kinda like the big lottery, your chances are very small but you still play it, the prize is too much tempting.
I'm currently reading a pretty good book on the Fermi paradox that includes a big chunk of material on SETI: If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens... Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to Fermi's Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life by Stephen Webb.
A few years ago, when I was observing quasars at Lick Observatory, I got to have dinner with Frank Drake (of Project Ozma and Drake equation "fame"). He was there working on the start of an optical SETI program. It was cool!
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Th article is poorly written: "Just about everyone has peered through cheap binoculars having only a narrow field of view. They don't peer long." -- If I wanted a wide field of view, I wouldn't need binoculars, would I?
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
And yet the giant orange somethings in the sky won't register as a single bleep on these new shiny instruments...
Ahh, but they do. Each of those stars has a noise in the water hole frequency coming out of it, including our own sun, which has sufficient radio frequency power output that any satellite dish's rx signal meter is pegged while the dishes so called beam, crosses the sun. Every comm satellite we have out there suffers from this effect twice a year, for a few minutes each day for 5 to 10 days each spring and fall as the sun crosses the equatorial plane headed the other way. When the sun has many kilowatts of noise output, its a bit hard to pick out a 10 watt satellite signal trying to compete with that.
However, thats above the "water hole" by about 2.5GHZ. Because that frequency, near 1420MHZ is quite transparent, its a good place to listen, and most stars within 10000 light years will cause the noise level out of the receivers at Arecebo to rise, often with enough charactar to the noise that the star can be identified just from its noise signature.
There used to be a visualizer (ksetispy) for linux that could display that as the dish scanned across nearby stars, but it quit working with the 2.6 kernel advent.
I'm hoping we'll get a chance to handle some of the data coming from the Allen Array, and it sounds as if its going to be ready for "first light" before too much longer.
The lazer search is a bit more far-fetched, but then so was radio, in 1891. Each of these observation instruments we build will teach us how to do a better job with the next generation.
Cheers, Gene
This is the second best use of Microsoft revenue. The first one is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which helps people in Africa.
There is a conspiracy theory that their foundation is helping microsoft in africa more than it is helping the people of africa. The theory goes that the foundation will only pay for name brand AIDS drugs and that they actively work to discourage locally produced and orders of magnitude cheaper "clone" drugs.
The reasoning, or so the conspiracy theory posits, is that by supporting American-style intellectual-property rights in drug patents, they are helping American-style intellectual-property rights in copyrights (anti-piracy) and software patents (anti-OSS) in Africa too.
Make of it what you will.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
And Al Capone opened Chicago's first soup line during the Depression. Most monopolists end up giving money away after they run out of things to buy for themselves. It's good PR and it makes them feel better about themselves, so what?
Funny when ET or space research in general is mentioned there's always people who appear that want the resources put elsewhere.
What is is about this subject which brings out such people?
The day ETs are detected will be the most important day in human history.
Why should we move the already scant resources which go into SETI to other much better funded research?
Protien folders got their own government funded $300 million purpose built computer, SETI didn't.
NASA may get good resources but a lot of their research goes back to industry and often brings tangible benifits to the public at large.
It seems like the likelihood of finding an alien EM radiation broadcast is
Chance that they're close enough * chance that they're using that technology * chance that we're capable of identifying the signal as such
with laser light there's the added wrinkle that there could be a signal origin close enough to us, but it could simply be aimed in the wrong direction. the chances of a laser originating from a point any significant distance away from the solar system coming in our general direction is microscopically low, so it seems like we're banking on them knowingly signalling earth.
so we're banking now on aliens knowing we're here and actively trying to get in touch with us. my guess is that if they're advanced enough to do interstellar travel, and they felt like talking, they would come up with a method that's a little harder to miss.
of course i suppose they might have just done a survey of solar systems, worked out which ones are potentially habitable and left lasers counting off prime numbers pointed at each of them.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
When was the last time you gave 2% of your net worth to a genuine humanitarian charity? And is getting a tax break for it such a bad thing (remember, it is pretty much impossible for a tax break to equal the money spent on the donation - certainly at his scale).
What you are saying if I'm correct is you essentially can't "truly believe" in God or the teachings of the bible AND also "truly believe" that other life exists on other planets?
If that is what you are saying I think you are insane, or misguided in your thought process.
I believe, granted lately my faith was shaken but that was from personal events in my life, nonetheless I still believe. I also believe that other life exists. On basic common logic and the law of averages any rational being with any forethought or intellect would have to assume that in the billions upon billions of planets just in our galaxy alone (which takes 100,000 years for LIGHT to cross it) any planet or planets have to sustain intelligent life at our level of evolution or greater.
The fundamental belief from those who believe in God is that he created ALL things, not just of this Earth, but all worlds, etc.
Just because the bible doesn't mention other worlds specifically why does that discount the concept? Furthermore, WHY would the bible speak of other worlds -- it was interpretation about God's creation of a specific world (Earth), a specific race (Mankind/Humans) and the life and teachings of his son Jesus (and the stories related thereof).
*DISCLAIMER: No I'm not a religous nut job, I don't force religion down anyone's throats -- the only reason I wrote this stuff was because the parent post on this topic was so out of whack I had to respond.
True, but we sure as hell talk to dogs, monkeys, and dolphins - all of which we assume to be less intelligent than us - because they're obviously able to respond appropriately.
Objectively speaking, we're not stupid. We certainly don't have first-hand knowledge about the universe outside our little pocket, but we've learned the language of sub-atomic particle and relativity. Even if that doesn't qualify us for "Rookie Of The Galactic Year", it definitely puts us somewhat higher on the IQ spectrum than dust.
[...] or a delusional fantasy (similar to that our president is subjected to) that they would be sending us messages.
You resorted to an ad hominem in the opening salvo. Poor form from a purported "expert".
But the approaches the SETI Institute and the groups as Harvard and Berkeley tend to be misfounded on the basis that they are going to try and communicate with us. Any ass would see that the probability of detecting those civilizations out there who ARE NOT trying to communicate with us is higher than than any few who are trying to communicate with us.
Out of the thousands of ET civilizations we've found so far, how many of them were through intentional versus inadvertent means? What? You don't have a single data point to guide you? Guess that means that Harvard and the SETI Institute aren't the only asses.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?