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Allen Telescope Array In Action

Posted by Zonk on from the anybody-out-there dept.

DIY News writes "36 of an eventual herd of 350 dishes are now operational in a remote area 250 miles northeast of San Francisco. These antennas, 20 feet in diameter and the height of a football goal post, are the first installment of the Allen Telescope Array, and they are ideal for short SETI projects while the array is being built." From the articel: "The young ATA's first foray into SETI will be known by the straightforward (if not overly galvanic) name of Inner Galactic Plane Survey. The word 'survey' may surprise many who are familiar with this telescope's design. After all, it's being finely tuned to speedily examine large numbers of star systems in a so-called "targeted search". The completed array will be exceptionally nimble at such individual scrutiny, and will leave previous targeted searches in the data dust."

6 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. Has Anyone Considered... by spudwiser · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That SETI, rather than looking in the wrong places... is looking in the wrong ways? ETs aren't going to let us see them until we know how to look at ourselves.

    --
    .cig - what you do after winning a good flame war
    1. Re:Has Anyone Considered... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful
      SETI's search parameters are based on some really well though out assumptions about how ET civilizations might try communicating.


      What saddens me is that we have a lot of intelligent life here on earth in the form of other species such as whales, elephants, gorillas, chimpanzees, and rhinos. The animals have no way of communicating to other civilizations, but that doesn't make them any less special or less intelligent. Imagine if we ventured to another world and found similar types of animals? That would be the kind of "other life in the galaxy" that would thrill the SETI people.

      Yet the human species has butchered the animals we have on earth, sometimes to the brink of extinction. While the U2 singer Bono goes around trying to erase Africa's debt (what happened to those stolen billions of dollars?), the poachers in the Congo are slaughtering mountain gorillas and eating them as "bushmeat". Asian countries (and I'm of Chinese extraction myself) butcher the rhino for the "magical powers" of its horn; shark populations are decimated for shark fin soup; tigers are killed as aphrodesiacs.

      If new alien species are found, will they be butchered and hunted in a similar fashion? If they cannot communicate in a way we find "conventional", will we assume that they are nothing more than livestock or "varmints"? Will we reserve respect only for the alien lifeforms that are similar to ourselves?

      I hope that if we can respect alien lifeforms, we can also respect the other species we have here on earth...before it's too late and we lose them forever.

    2. Re:Has Anyone Considered... by deglr6328 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I think what spudwiser may have been getting at is that while yes, the physics of interstellar radio transmission have been taken into account in the search for ETI, the fact that we simply can't know what we don't understand yet has not been taken into account. And it by definition CAN'T be taken into account yet because we are still to primitive to know of it!

      Put it this way, there are still tribes of native people in South America which are mostly closed off from the outside world and which communicate to neighboring tribes on nearby hills using, for instance, smoke signals. It's all they have, and it probably works fairly well. However, they are completely unaware of the gigabits of information streaming through thier world (and even right through them!) every second of every day in the form of signals carried on electromagnetic radiation from radio towers, satellites and whatever else. With thier limited understanding of nature, they simply cannot conceive of such a phenomenon. Similarly, in our currently limited and incomplete understanding of physics, WE are that tribe right now too. WE think EM radiation is the most effective/only means of communication over vast distances. There is no ultimate physical law saying this must be absolutely true however, and until we fully understand how the universe works, we will remain in the dark, communicating with our primitive radio signals while perhaps simultaneously awash in the information of creatures posessing a higher intelligence.

      --
      - "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
    3. Re:Has Anyone Considered... by Belial6 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      But! If these tribesmen see smoke from our coal burning power plants, they would very likely figure out that there are people making the smoke. The parent isn't saying that advanced alien civilizatons wouldn't use tech we don't understand. He is just saying that we would likely see something that we could recognize as artificial, and thus intellegent in origin. The trick isn't in understanding alien transmissions right away. The first step is finding out if they even exist. If you can do that, THEN you spend the extra time and money figuring out if they have anything interesting to say.

  2. Prove it by Rhinobird · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Show us exactly where the aliens are. Then we can figure out if they're close enough communicate with. Although even if they were at Alpha Centauri, it would still be too far to go.

    --
    If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
  3. Goalposts, now? by Myself · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It just wouldn't do to say how many feet tall the telescopes are, since nobody knows how big a foot is. No, we have to specify height in relation to a goalpost, since obviously everyone reading Slashdot is intimately familiar with football goalposts (is that american football, or soccer?) and how to convert them into other common measurements.