Slashdot Mirror
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.
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!
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)
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
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.
The point is not to see a randomly pointed laser - that would be silly. Think about it; if an intelligent alien civilization wanted to find other intelligent life, how would they do it? They would look for potentially life-bearing star systems, and try to send a message to them - by, for example, shining a laser that's tight and powerful enough to be detected from the target, and encoding data in the frequency or amplitude of that laser.
It's extremely unlikely that we'll find anyone who isn't trying to contact us, so the goal is to look for something that's trying to make itself stick out. We aren't looking for things that are randomly pointed.
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?