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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."

61 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. Damn it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Got my hopes up, i thought i had read "Alien Telescope Array In Action." Drunk and bored, *sigh*

    1. Re:Damn it by Tablizer · · Score: 2, Funny

      Got my hopes up, i thought i had read "Alien Telescope Array In Action." Drunk and bored, *sigh*

      Perhaps we need a new set of moderation tags for drunk trolls, eh?

      I originally read it as "Allen Telescopes Alien in Action", as if this Allen dude is a space-born porn filmer.

      Long days are a substitute for LSD it seems.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    2. Re:Damn it by Alien+Being · · Score: 3, Funny

      "as if this Allen dude is a space-born porn filmer."

      Up Your Asteroid
      Mission to Uranus
      A Star is Porn
      Rock-It Ship
      Moondingo
      The Legend of Victor Thrust
      Rock-It Ship 2 - Re-entry
      Challenger: O-Ring Blowout (sorry)
      Roving Luna: How to Get Your Rocks Off
      Snow Blow and the Seven White Dwarves

    3. Re:Damn it by clambake · · Score: 1

      The alien from "Independence Day" and [duh!] ALIEN, making hot sweet love with a bald midget shemale with pink hair and no nipples! I really need to stop drinking!


      How disturbing is it that I think I know the porn star you're talking about...

  2. I left my normalness back east by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Funny

    In the patchwork of dry, cow-fouled ranch lands 250 miles northeast of San Francisco, an unusual crop [antennae] is poking above the dusty shrubbery.

    Unusual crops and alien life (SETI responders) would not stand out near SF.

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
    1. Re:I left my normalness back east by mcrbids · · Score: 3, Informative

      Unusual crops and alien life (SETI responders) would not stand out near SF. /sidenote: Damn, this CSS for /. SUCKS on IE! //sidenote

      San Fransicso is very liberal. But, this is on the OTHER side of California's Central Valley, which is VERY conservative, consisting of lots of rice/wheat/nut farmers who are as republican as any.

      (Sigh) If you think 250 miles from SF is "near" SF, you don't know your butt from a hole in the ground... or at least, you don't know California.

      --
      I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
    2. Re:I left my normalness back east by GIL_Dude · · Score: 1

      That area is nowhere near San Francisco; it's a 5 hour drive north. Happens to be my favorite vacation area right there at Lassen Volcanic National Park http://www.nps.gov/lavo/lassen_volcanic_national_p ark_home.htm, one of the more beautiful areas around (and not 'cow-fouled'). While there I had taken a side trip to the radio telescopes there in the past. They used to be bigger ones owned by one of the universitys. They were removed to make way for this project. Anyway, the area is a nice place to visit and Hat Creek is awesome.

    3. Re:I left my normalness back east by abirdman · · Score: 1

      Uh oh, now you've not only told the aliens where the telescopes are, but gave them a little travel brochure about why else they might want to visit (the main reason, of course, being to take out the nosy radio telescopes). I'm thinking the "cow-fouled" part was deliberately put in the article to throw them off.

      --
      Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
    4. Re:I left my normalness back east by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 1
      University of California runs the Hat Creek observatory. I've been there too, after camping in Lassen. Lassen is like Yosemite without the crowds. And it has showers. I can camp forever as long as there's a shower. Hat Creek observatory is worth a visit. Go on to Burney Falls afterward.

      Bruce

      --
      Bruce Perens.
  3. 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 bmechtley · · Score: 1

      And robots will never replace human beings, because they cannot Love.

    2. Re:Has Anyone Considered... by Graymalkin · · Score: 4, Informative

      SETI's search parameters are based on some really well though out assumptions about how ET civilizations might try communicating. In a technological society where eletromagnetic radition is reasonably well understood it shouldn't take too long to figure out that the radio portion of the EM spectrum is really useful, especially if their physiology remotely resembles anything on Earth. We can't naturally detect radio waves so we don't hear a buzzing sound when talking on cell phones and we can't see it so we're not blinded by an FM reparter on a hilltop. Radio travels quite far in all sorts of media and can be generated and detected with relatively simple electronics. Lower frequencies are also much easier to broadcast omnidirectionally so multiple receivers can pick up a signal simulteneously. Suffice to say that radio is something a technological civilization is probably going to make good use of. Because of radio's propogation characteristics it is possible to detect signals at extreme distances.

      Because of this our solar system is surrounded by a bubble of radio chatter about a hundred light years in diameter, expanding a bit farther every year. A technological civilization within this bubble of radio noise is quite likely to see us. A thousand years from now a technological civilization within a two thousand light year bubble could potentially see us. Therefore it is assumed that we could see another civilization's radio noise. This is SETI's general search criteria, evidense of a technological civilization outside of our solar system.

      Now if a technological civilization were deliberately trying to send us a message. Maybe not us specifically but anyone out in the galaxy who might be able to find such a signal. How might that civilization send out a signal? There's lots of different ways but there's a really good chance they would send it via radio. As mentioned, it has excellent propogation characteristics. Radio signals reach us from the edges of the visible universe, it wouldn't be terribly difficult to get a signal a few hundred or thousand lightyears. It is also something the universe is teeming with. There's radio sources all over the place yet also quite a few empty bands. A civilization that figures out how radio works and happens to point an antenna at the sky will find this out quickly.

      Now it is possible advanced civilizations might communicate via some extremely high tech means. SETI's notion is twofold, we will be able to see random noise generated by a civilization or we'll get a deliberate signal from one. Under premise one we might see radio traffic of some super technological civilization, they might be broadcasting gravity wave signals but we might be able to see their radar. Under the second premise a civilization wanting to be seen by others would attempt to communicate in the most fundamental way possible. Radio waves are pretty fundamental. It takes a modest command of physics and electronics to detect them and understand what you're actually seeing.

      So yes it has been considered.

      --
      I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
    3. Re:Has Anyone Considered... by m50d · · Score: 1
      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.

      We know anyone looking at this planet would see us shining like a beacon in the radio spectrum. Or are you trying to make some mystical point?

      --
      I am trolling
    4. 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.

    5. Re:Has Anyone Considered... by rtb61 · · Score: 1
      I thought that the ability to look at ourselves was an inherent part of sapient intelligence, it is just ignored by the majority because there is no profit in it and the segment of society that is driven by nothing but profit insist that we look at them.

      As long as Paul doesn't point the array at his ex's in redmond there is always hope of finding intelligence ;-).

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
    6. 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!"
    7. Re:Has Anyone Considered... by waveclaw · · Score: 1

      SETI's search parameters are based on some really well though out assumptions about how ET civilizations might try communicating.

      You wish. There are two groups that dominate the public arguments for passive SETI: those who directly anthropomorphize alien civilizations and those that use a thought-out logic that is still steeped in assumptions of human-like intelligence. While this may be reasonable both are really large asumptions that limit our search. The anthro's are screwed becuase any signals using channels of the EM spetrum that we like will have to compete with cellphones, radios random electronics - even those in the detector.

      The reasonable logic fellows, such as Carl Sagan, simply look at what parts of the radio spectrum that has no significant natural sources of interference. This is the dominate method in current projects. However, there are many of these dead spots. The most prominate quiet channel to a human being the channels surrounding the frequency of hydrogen's spectrum (aka the 'watering hole.') It is in this streach of frequencies that projects like SETI@home are looking for signals.

      The deafing silence of this area should be telling: there seems to be Nothing - natural or artificial - at those frequencies. Like looking for lost keys by researching the same empty spots, SETI carefully combs these small streaches frequencies for any possible signal. This technique is not problematic becuase of focusing on parts of the Electromatnetic (EM) spectrum that humans find economicaly and technically useful but becuase the eschew those spans of spectrum on purpose. Instead of assuming human-like intellegence, the watering-hole gazers are assuming a (still) human-like intellegence acting in the opposite fashion that a human would.

      In a technological society where eletromagnetic radition is reasonably well understood it shouldn't take too long to figure out that the radio portion of the EM spectrum is really useful, especially if their physiology remotely resembles anything on Earth.

      Considering that if the anthropomorphism above is plausible then they would use similar channels that we use. Not the 'water hole' or other quiet parts of the EM spectrum, but transmissions in area that we find usefull. In the end, we may be getting detectably strong ET signals right now. But, we cannot hear them for the chatter of our own civilization which prefers to use the same channel for repeating Brittney Spears' 3 top selling songs.

      Either purposfully sent of just radio chatter, any signal is so attenuated at stellar distances that you must search for the precise signal used in the transmission. Both group assumes that a society would setup and transmit for thousands if not millions of years a steady and powerfull signal or set of targets signals. There is a huge cost for powering and maintaining such equipment over such a timespan. There is very little payback on the timescales of our societies for performing such an ET-friendly transmission. This means billions of channels in the spread of frequencies the FCC allocates to 1 station to play Brittney Spears music. And any signal is likely to be little more than a carrier signal for the local pop-music or military radar. Hence the huge processing requirements for projects like SETI@home to sift such needles in the radio haystack.

      To the benefit of both, the encyclopedia galactica may be being beemed at us right now. We just may have the dial on the wrong station.

      --

      "You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."
    8. 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.

    9. Re:Has Anyone Considered... by Graymalkin · · Score: 1
      In the end, we may be getting detectably strong ET signals right now. But, we cannot hear them for the chatter of our own civilization which prefers to use the same channel for repeating Brittney Spears' 3 top selling songs.


      This is part of the reason the ATA was built. It's design includes active interference mitigation which allows it to observe frequencies terrestrial emitters are using. It can also scan a huge field of view and a vast range of frequencies from 500MHz to 11.2GHz. The SETI portion of the ATA mission is going to scan about a million stars within 300pc (~978ly). The ATA is sensitive enough to pick up an Arecibo-power planetary imaging radar (500kW) at such distances. The ATA expands SETI beyond the neutral hydrogen band to a much larger spectrum. This would include harmonics of HI and even the HI band multiplied by pi (why does slashcode strip HTML entities like pi?).

      Neutral hydrogen is theorized to be the band to transmit a deliberate signal on specifically because it is relatively dead in terms of interstellar interference. If you want to be seen you don't want to send out a broadcast over thousands of light years on a band with tons of natural interference no matter how locally useful it is to you. It's also going to be a fundamental band civilizations would study if they have any interest in interstellar cartography or galactic make-up.
      --
      I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
  4. 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
  5. Re:Waste of time, money and effort by arcaneman · · Score: 1

    There is value is simply having strong evidence that intelligent order has been detected in the chaos of space noise. I agree with your sentiment that human being as we know oursleves today will not interact with aliens.

  6. Re:Waste of time, money and effort by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Isn't it getting kind of late back there in Kansas?

  7. 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.

    1. Re:Goalposts, now? by AdmiralWeirdbeard · · Score: 1

      fucking a
      I for one couldnt tell you within 50% how fucking tall american football goalposts are... and I'm ok with that. I mean, do we have standardized units of measurment for some fucking reason? or are they just ornamental?

      --
      Come read my stupid blagablog. Rants and Giggles
    2. Re:Goalposts, now? by Anonymous+Cowpat · · Score: 1

      I think that's about 1/3 of a Nelson's Column, 1 1/2 London Busses or 1/10 of a St. Paul's Cathedral

      --
      FGD 135
  8. Cool, but by rackrent · · Score: 2, Interesting

    While I'm all for SETI, it seems we have so many other things to learn first. Personally, I'm a big fan of the work done at the coolest of all "Arrays", the Very Large Array located in New Mexico. It's a sight to behold, and the information they gather through radio information has been extremely valuable over the years.

    I'm sure it's that more impressive as it is in the middle of nowhere...there is a visitor center there (unstaffed) and the last time I went through there they sold postcards, pictures, etc., and had a box where you were kindly asked to deposit your payment. That tells me they were interested in the science first, the glitz and glamour of space.com is probably very low on their list.

    --
    --- There is a man in a smiling bag.
  9. From the articel by 1u3hr · · Score: 2

    For God's sake Zonk, use spellcheck.

    1. Re:From the articel by 1u3hr · · Score: 1
      If you see a mistake in a story, email the author. We'll get it fixed pronto.

      For the record, I did that before I made the above post, about 11 hours ago now. Zonk particularly seems to be untroubled by spelling, grammar, dupes... and never makes any corrections. Taco screws up frequently, but occasionally does fix a glaring error.

  10. You missed the point. by nekojin · · Score: 2, Informative

    I wasn't aware the idea of SETI was to establish communications with other sentient life. I thought the whole point was simply to FIND them if they are there. We can work on what comes after that, AFTER THAT.

  11. Re:Waste of time, money and effort by JoshRosenbaum · · Score: 1

    Sure, if you only consider the idea of them sending "Hello Earthlings."

    What if they send us the specs to create a new propulsion system to get to them? Or the secret to new energy methods? *Insert next 1 billion things here.*

    This could be intentional or even passive through leaked signals.

  12. DAMN FONTS! by clambake · · Score: 1

    Why does a lower-case L look so much like an lower case I in my font? I was getting REALLY excited for a second...

  13. Re:Waste of time, money and effort by DigiShaman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Uhhh...no! The would not be a waste of time. The culture shock this would have all around the world would shatter our very perspective of the universe around us.

    While we wont be able to communicate back with them in real-time, it would spawn a whole new field of science dedicated to the decoding of the transmission and any potential science discoveries to be learned from the original aliens that transmitted their discoveries. It could potentially be a passive version of a "galactic alien library" beamed out to space! Second, it would spur the desires for the younger generation to dive into math, science, and engineering in hopes to one day discover meathods for FTL travel. While the idea is far-fetched, at least there is now a definitive goal to strive for.

    --
    Life is not for the lazy.
  14. Why not by Rhinobird · · Score: 3, Funny

    I mean 1 goal post is just 3 Sasquatches. 1 sasquatch is 3 grey aliens...but only 2 reptilians.

    --
    If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
  15. Nice site, shame about the ad by Gordonjcp · · Score: 1
    Did anyone else get a huge grey box with a little Flash window in it that covered up the whole article and wouldn't go away?


    Until recently I've tried to be a bit discriminating with Adblock, only blocking ads that move about or flash in an annoying way. Lately though, I've started blocking http://.//* from any company that does adverts, because they are all just so obtrusive.

  16. Obligatory joke by Federico2 · · Score: 2, Funny


    350 anntennas array?
    Imagine a beowulf cluster of this!

  17. Re:What's the point of SETI by 1u3hr · · Score: 3, Informative
    What's the point of spending all this money on such a useless and rather silly project? Seriously.

    "philanthropist Paul G. Allen has committed $13.5 million to support the construction of the first and second phases of the Allen Telescope Array... This announcement follows the successful completion of a three-year research and development phase that was originally funded by an $11.5 million gift from the Allen Foundation."

    It's private money (actually Microsoft money). $24 million might fund a "low budget" Hollywood movie or buy one Impressionist painting. The array will also be doing "ordinary" astronomy; "In addition to conducting a SETI survey of the inner galaxy, the ATA-32 will observe in the direction of the galactic anti-center to detect primordial deuterium, study dark matter in nearby dwarf galaxies, and generate maps of polyatomic molecules in molecular clouds."

  18. Are they ever going to finish it? by heroine · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This Allen Telescope Array has been getting advertised for at least 15 years now and all they've gotten is 10% of it erected and not a single bit of data yet. They must be spending $1 a year on it.

    Wouldn't it be farther along if they didn't build it on the most expensive real estate in the world? Maybe instead of spending 15 years building 10% of it outside Sacramento they could compromise and build it 1 mile east of Calif* for a trillion dollars less.

    Are they ever going to finish it or is it just supposed to be neverending publicity for Paul Allen?

    1. Re:Are they ever going to finish it? by xs650 · · Score: 2, Informative
      This Allen Telescope Array has been getting advertised for at least 15 years now and all they've gotten is 10% of it erected and not a single bit of data yet. They must be spending $1 a year on it.

      Wouldn't it be farther along if they didn't build it on the most expensive real estate in the world? Maybe instead of spending 15 years building 10% of it outside Sacramento they could compromise and build it 1 mile east of Calif* for a trillion dollars less.

      Mr Google tells me it's nearest Cassel CA, population 366, in the Mt. Lassen Area. That is a low priced area. The median home in Cassel in the 2000 Census data was valued at $130,000.

    2. Re:Are they ever going to finish it? by Cheerio+Boy · · Score: 1

      Mr Google tells me it's nearest Cassel CA, population 366, in the Mt. Lassen Area. That is a low priced area. The median home in Cassel in the 2000 Census data was valued at $130,000.

      $130.000 is not low priced. My parents paid about $37,000 for their first house in the 70's and it had four bedrooms. Granted it was in a slightly slummish area of the suburban Midwest/Chicagoland but still a good deal.

      In my opinion a house shouldn't cost that much without some seriously nice features and some good land.

      Besides - other than physical maintenance why do the people need to live near it once it's built? I can understand temporary housing while building it but if you put it on cheap land you can afford a large amount of people to build it quickly and then go back to their real homes.

      The array data can then be transmitted over land line to the most neadby town. Or am I underestimating the size of the station wagon needed? ;-)

      --

      "Bah!" - Dogbert
    3. Re:Are they ever going to finish it? by xs650 · · Score: 1
      $130.000 is not low priced. My parents paid about $37,000 for their first house in the 70's and it had four bedrooms. Granted it was in a slightly slummish area of the suburban Midwest/Chicagoland but still a good deal.

      In my opinion a house shouldn't cost that much without some seriously nice features and some good land.

      Besides - other than physical maintenance why do the people need to live near it once it's built? I can understand temporary housing while building it but if you put it on cheap land you can afford a large amount of people to build it quickly and then go back to their real homes.

      The array data can then be transmitted over land line to the most neadby town. Or am I underestimating the size of the station wagon needed? ;-)

      "Bah!" - Dogbert

      Dogbert, I wasn't suggesting that people move there. I used the low price of housing there to illustrate to those who think California is only Los Angeles and San Francisco that that Cassel is not an expensive area .

      Speaking of illustrating, in the future, wait for me to write your words for you.

      Scott

    4. Re:Are they ever going to finish it? by colbykraybill · · Score: 1

      I work for the Radio Astronomy Lab at UC Berkeley which is building the ATA with the SETI institute.

      The ATA was once called the One Hectere Array (1HT) and wasn't originally
      intended to be part of a SETI project. Once SETI sold the idea (along with the RAL) to the Allen Foundation, funding was approved. It's important to note that making arrays is not a manufacturing problem. It is mostly one of research. As technology progresses, the tools for doing science must be re-evaluated and if something cheaper/better or slightly more expensive/better comes along, it slows down the process of building.

      The ATA has been in an R&D mode for many years and the new set of dishes being brought online is the columination of all the work done for it over the last 10-15 years. The VLA was a concept on a drawing board many years before it was built.

      The cost for building has almost nothing to do with real estate prices. Most of the land was already under the control of UC of Cal, and the rest has been under lease from local land owners since the 1950's. Also, Hat Creek is a very radio quiet area. Radio quiet being a harder thing to come by year after year.

    5. Re:Are they ever going to finish it? by colbykraybill · · Score: 1

      Hi, I work for the Radio Astronomy Lab at UC Berkeley, which is the group that runs the Hat Creek Radio Observatory. When the observatory was founded in the 1950's, the primary consideration was radio quietness. The location is in somewhat of a natural bowl, geologically speaking, sheilding it from a lot of radio noise, but by no means all (reflections from airport radars can be seen off of Mt Lassen and Mt Shasta just to name one from many sources).

      We already have the infrastructure there, so, it makes sense to build more telescopes there. The primary cost of building has nothing to do with the real estate. Leasing more land from local land owners is a small part of the cost (an extremely small one).

      The physical maintenance of the antennas should not be taken lightly. With 350 of them planned for the future, at least a few, perhaps a dozen will be down for maintenance work everyday. We've already done work to streamline the process of building (one antenna a day is the goal). Plus, we simply don't have the money to do one big construction push.

      For those comparing to the VLA, the cost of construction for the VLA was about $78 million dollars in ~1975 dollars (http://www.rozylowicz.com/retirement/vla/very-lar ge-array.html). Adjusting for the changes in currency valuation, that's approximately $285million in 2005 dollars (using http://www.bls.gov/cpi/home.htm to adjust). Note, that does not include the costs to research and design the system, which was many more millions.

      So far, the ATA has cost less than $20million and at completion should be more capable than the VLA in many ways and cost about 90% less to build.

      And, it's primary mission is to do science with SETI operations piggybacking on the surveys taking place.

      You are severely underestimating the total data needs of the system. For the ATA to do the best interference mitigation that it can do, the correlator would peak at about 194GB/sec of data throughput. We won't push the correlator to do that for many reasons, but even a data rate of say 100MB/sec means that a possibly typical observation for 4 minutes would consume 24GBytes. As you might imagine, a data feed that could transport
      a constant 100MB/sec away from the observatory would be prohibitively expensive.

      We've been discussing making the ATA an imaging instrument, in that the raw data is thrown away after a much smaller and easier to handle "image" is generated. These sorts of design considerations will also flow into the upcoming Square Kilometer Array.
      To do this imaging may require a small beowulf cluster.

      So, yes, you are underestimating the size of the station wagon needed.

      And finally, the RAL is a teaching institution, fully part of the astronomy department of UC Berkeley. This means we want undergrads/grads/postdocs/researchers to have access to the site and it be a teaching environment, which means that the telescopes are not just built in the middle of nowhere, to be left alone producing data in the quiet wilderness.

      For more info on the array, check out the wikipedia entry:
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_telescope_array

      P.S. Using the CPI conversion for your parents house cost of $37,000 in "the 70's" (I'll use 1975 again), the equivilent amount in 2005 dollars is: $135,068.87.

    6. Re:Are they ever going to finish it? by Cheerio+Boy · · Score: 1

      Thanks for the solid info!

      I was truly just looking for a proper perspective on this as to why it wasn't being built all at once, etc. and you've answered that completely.

      --

      "Bah!" - Dogbert
  19. Radio SETI is so pointless by bradbury · · Score: 1

    While the dishes may be useful for radio astronomy, the concept of radio SETI is so absurd at this point in evolution that its support is entirely unjustified.

    The entire concept is over 40 years old and is based on a lack of understanding as to how complex species evolve. If we are to understand SETI there has to be an update of the concepts which integrate them with both modern molecular biology as well as modern computer science. The "traditional" radio astronomy researchers have generally failed to do that.

  20. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  21. Re:Waste of time, money and effort by edxwelch · · Score: 1

    Hey, you know reality will get you modded down on Slashdot. Us Sci-fi fans like to dream about meeting 3 breasted aliens

  22. yes this could spell problems by subtropolis · · Score: 1

    I hope they're not contracting out to any Australian or European shops to build the rest of them. There's be untold opportunity for a goal post unit mix-up.

    --
    "Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
  23. isn't that the point? by subtropolis · · Score: 1

    How to do you propose that they "prove it" then? Why don't you "prove" that it's worthwhile reading your posts and then we'll decide whether to read them.

    --
    "Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
  24. Expensive land? by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 1
    They already own it. And they don't pay taxes. But in any case, Real Estate is not by any means the largest expense.

    There is lots of space in Mojave, but who wants to live there? The personnel would much rather live at Hat Creek. I expect that getting good personnel is a more difficult problem than finding empty land in California.

    Bruce

    --
    Bruce Perens.
  25. Re:Waste of time, money and effort by Thing+1 · · Score: 1
    Second, it would spur the desires for the younger generation to dive into math, science, and engineering in hopes to one day discover meathods for FTL travel.

    I'm more interested in methods of FSM travel.

    Slashdot won't accept pictures, but I envision it as something similar to the "skyhook" concept, where there'll be a whirling mass of pasta with the meatballs at the center connected via gears and levers so that it rotates. As His Noodly Appendages reach towards the earth, they can grab spaceships waiting to be lofted into space, and once the ship reaches the top of the arc, it is let go.

    This won't get us faster than light, but it will get us there in full pirate regalia while thumbing our noses at the Kansas School Board.

    --
    I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
  26. Entangled photons - Instant Communication by ajpr · · Score: 1

    Surely, any alien civilisation would be sending out 1 out of each pair of entangled photons. They would keep one and keeping changing its spin. This would allow for instantaneous communication. Obviously we would need to technology to capture one or more of these photons. How far off is this technology and is it possible theoretically? (i.e. doesn't break any laws)

    1. Re:Entangled photons - Instant Communication by forgetful · · Score: 1

      I think the deal is that even though the entangled photons change instantaneously, the means to receive the information that they changed cannot travel faster than "c." I think the cryptographic significance relies on subtracting that information, so I've wondered if maybe it would be possible to subtract the entangled photon information from some universal constant and thus somehow make instantaneous communication possible. Maybe someone out there who really understands this could enlighten the rest of us.

      --
      "...while history is usually explicable it is often irrational" --Roger Spiller
    2. Re:Entangled photons - Instant Communication by lostchicken · · Score: 1

      The minute you say "instantaneous communication", we can throw out the idea as being impossible under our current knowledge of physics. It's a problem of "causality".

      Basically, here's how it works. You've got two events, separated in time and space. Say, I sneeze, and somebody at Alpha Centauri falls out of his chair three years later (three years in both people's rest frames. let's assume they're not moving relative to each other). Relativity says the relative time between those events can be shifted by up to (speed of light)*(rest distance between objects). (I can work out the math and post something if people are interested, and it's not just theory, it's been observed many-a-time) For our sneeze/chair situation, that's four years. This means that you, on the far away star can have fallen out of your chair and be well on your way to paying that hospital bill long before I ever sneeze. This is called a "spacelike separation", because you can't say which order two events happened in.

      Ok, now let's say we have an instant communications system. We have a transmitter and a receiver (one here, one on alpha centauri), both with a bomb on them. When you press the button on the transmitter, it blows up the receiver. But not before the receiver sends a signal back saying "ok, I'm about to blow up, you can go ahead and blow up yourself". This is all fine and dandy in the rest frame, but if we're moving quickly, the receiver gets its signal before the transmitter sends it, just as how you fell out of your chair before I sneezed! The receiver sends its message to blow up the transmitter, it blows up, but the problem is, the transmitter never sent its message.

      I'm sure there are holes in my thought experiment, but it's the best I could come up with on short notice;-) There are better ones, I'm sure, but you get the picture. As far as we know, if you can send a message faster than light can, you more or less break the universe.

      --
      -twb
    3. Re:Entangled photons - Instant Communication by forgetful · · Score: 1

      But what happens if the guy on Alpha Centuri--or within the realm of our near-term technology, a space craft at Saturn--has a "box" with the other one of two entangled photons. If he manipulates his, how long before we know it by the effect on ours? Isn't that something to do with the subtraction of info from something we both previously know?

      --
      "...while history is usually explicable it is often irrational" --Roger Spiller
    4. Re:Entangled photons - Instant Communication by ajpr · · Score: 1

      AS far as I know, there is no "explanation" for entanglement and the inherent instantaneous communication. I'm sure Einstein said it was "spooky action at a distance" or something along those lines. So i guess the ball is still in the court...somewhere :]

    5. Re:Entangled photons - Instant Communication by centauri · · Score: 1

      "If he manipulates his, how long before we know it by the effect on ours?"

      About four years. He'll have data about his photono of the pair that we'll need to correlate with the data we have on ours before we can work out who did what when to which.

      --
      Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
  27. Booring by patternjuggler · · Score: 1

    These tiny arrays of dishes aren't going to show us much. We need arrays spread out across the entire solar system if we really want to see some interesting stuff. Like SWINE and OLGA

  28. Re: Allen Telescope Array In Action by ScrewMaster · · Score: 1

    Well, maybe if they had spelled it as: "Al L en Telescope Array" it would have been less confusing.

    --
    The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
  29. Waste of time by medazinol · · Score: 1

    SETI: "Silly Effort To Investigate" coined by Stan Friedman. Total waste of time to be looking for radio signals from "aliens". Who says they have or will ever use radio signals?? Besides, they're already here, all you have to do is get your head out of your ass and go read some good books on the subject... If you laugh, you're ignorant. SETI indeed...

  30. Re:ALIENS! by falzer · · Score: 1

    > I misread that as "Alien Telescope In Action"... Am I alone?

    That's what SETI hopes to find out.

  31. Re:What's the point of SETI by johansalk · · Score: 1

    Fine. If they do other studies that are useful to scinece then that's just fine. I just find the idea of looking for intelligent extra-terrestrial life in very, very far space rather silly - it reeks of the UFO craze redux, more science fiction than science.