New Telescope Array Goes Live For SETI

The Skinny writes "Today is a historic day for the SETI program. The New York Times reports that astronomers are flipping the switch today on the Allen Telescope Array — 350 antennas, each 20 feet in diameter — which will, among other things, extend the search for extraterrestrial life a thousandfold. From the article: ' There are some 200 billion stars in the galaxy, and a significant fraction of them have planets. Estimates of the number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy have ranged from one (or none, if you are particularly discouraged about human affairs) into the millions. Dr. Shostak calculated that the full Allen array would be able to detect a signal from as far as 500 light years that is only a few times more powerful than what can now be sent by the Arecibo radio telescope, a 1,000-foot-diameter dish in Puerto Rico that is the world's largest (although it is in danger of being shut down to save money). That translates to about a million stars, which he said was getting into a promising number. Dr. Shostak described the expanded search as looking for the needle in the proverbial haystack with a shovel instead of a spoon.'"

Comments

Only 42 installed so far

[Maddog Batty]

Only 42 installed so far. They are looking for donations to complete the array.

I vow for our new Alien Overlords

[Anonymous Coward]

To look at this.

Re:I vow for our new Alien Overlords

[Tackhead]

> To [www.goat.cx] look [goatse.cx] at [www.goat.cx] this [goatse.cx].

"That's no space station, Qfitzglb, that's a moon!"

Shovel instead of a spoon?

[moderatorrater]

I think the better metaphor would be "trying to move a mountain with a spoon instead of a pen cap." Seriously, taking into account the number of stars, the number of planets orbiting the stars, and the span of time that they're likely to be spewing radio waves, the task is monumental compared to any resources that SETI may get. The work is still important, but let's not underestimate the task.

Re:Shovel instead of a spoon?

[Zymergy]

Maybe not....
Study Predicts Trillions Of Planets http://dsc.discovery.com/news/afp/20030922/universe.html
NASA estimates the number of terrestrial planets to be as high as 30 Billion: http://astrobiology.arc.nasa.gov/news/expandnews.cfm?id=1227
(And both articles are several years old...)

Re:Shovel instead of a spoon?

[TekPolitik]

Seriously, taking into account the number of stars, the number of planets orbiting the stars, and the span of time that they're likely to be spewing radio waves, the task is monumental compared to any resources that SETI may get.

The number of stars has no effect on the time taken to identify a civilisation. The population density of the galaxy does. It doesn't matter how many stars there are, if every hundredth star system has an earth-like planet, with a life-form that is emitting radio waves, chances are you will have success after checking just 100 stars. The thing is we have no real way of knowing what the real statistic is until we've found a few, or at least until we've found one that is transmitting us the Encyclopedia Galactica's chapter that has this information.

Re:Shovel instead of a spoon?

[Mahjub Sa'aden]

This is an honest question: how is this work important? I really would like to know. Other than providing some work for skilled technical labourers like myself, what do these things do other than point at the sky?

Re:Shovel instead of a spoon?

[I don't want to spen]

The best way to look for a needle in a haystack is with a magnet. (The worst way would probably be to set fire to the haystack.)

Re:Shovel instead of a spoon?

[murrdpirate]

I'm no expert in solar system formation, but it seems to me that it would be strange if a star didn't have any planets. I mean, what are the odds that every bit of matter in the accretion disc is pulled into the star? We only really have our own solar system to study, but I doubt we are the exception to the rule. The same principles apply to moon formation, and we have an average of 20 moons per planet and counting! If moon formation around a planet is similar enough to planet formation around a star, the little data we have would indicate that with 8 planets, we may be lower than average. With our primitive detection methods, we're finding planets around 5% of stars. These are almost always massive planets, often many times larger than jupiter, in a small orbit. So we're basically finding that 1 in 20 stars has a huge planet orbiting very close to the star. What are the odds of having a planet that big, that close? There are so many other possible formations.

Re:Shovel instead of a spoon?

[SetupWeasel]

Shhh! Speak too loud and you may scare that cat out of its bag.

Re:Shovel instead of a spoon?

[moderatorrater]

It depends on who you are. If you don't give a shit if there's intelligent life other than us in the universe, then it's not too important. If you're interested in other intelligent life or in exploration for the sake of exploration, then this is what we can do now. I guess it's as important as anything else we do in space.

Re:Shovel instead of a spoon?

[boyfaceddog]

I think the first metaphor is perfectly accurate, provided you image the haystack to be the size of the known universe.

Billions or millions, right?

[bogaboga]

How many millions of dollars have they "wasted?" Surely, that money could eve been put to better use. Are they following my president's paradigm with all the funds spent in Iraq?

Re:Billions or millions, right?

[ed.mps]

IANAS but I think it will, sooner or later, catch some informations that can be useful to non alien-related studies

Re:Billions or millions, right?

[theguru]

I always find it amusing when people say money is "wasted". If I took a stack of bill and burned them, or buried them never to be seen again, that would be wasting them.

If they spent $100mill on a telescope array, where did the money go? It went to some firms who do that, who in turn paid their employees and their suppliers, who paid their employees, etc. Those employees bought groceries, sent their kid to the dentist, sent their kid to college, bought a new car.. the money flowed through the economy. Assuming a large percentage of the firms and suppliers are in this country, then the money stayed in the national economy.

When the economy is flowing actively, more of those people downstream will be willing to donate their time and money to what you'd probably classify as "good things". When it slows down, or the Government is taking a big chunk at every step as taxes, then they'll be less inclined to do so.

Re:Billions or millions, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

spoken like a true liberal.

People don't "sit" on money. Even those evil evil rich people that you hate so much. They put it into a bank, and the bank loans it out to a business.

Compare this with what you would (I'm sure) prefer that the government take 100% of all money and then dole it out as the government sees fit (and we should all be thankful to the benevolent government, right?). In this case, at every step of the process of dolling out that entitlement money, some fat bureaucrat, some lazy SOB who wouldn't last 10 minutes in a private sector job, he takes his cut. And then at the end of that pipeline are the little people, the serfs, kept poor and kept dependent on government.

Yeah, that's a much better use of money than giving it to a private company.

Re:Billions or millions, right?

[Red Flayer]

A couple points to make.

The first is that there is a concept of 'best-use'. That is, there are some projects (such as SETI) that some people feel are less worthwhile than other projects. Some people believe that the man-hours and capital used on SETI is wasted because nothing of value is produced by SETI (in their opinion) -- so yes, the money flows through the economy, but on a more worthwhile project, that money would flow through the economy while producing something of value. The money is in effect hoarded, which means that the opportunity to use it for growth is wasted.

The second point has to do with your remark about taxes.

When the economy is flowing actively, more of those people downstream will be willing to donate their time and money to what you'd probably classify as "good things". When it slows down, or the Government is taking a big chunk at every step as taxes, then they'll be less inclined to do so.

Money paid as taxes also flows through the economy, for the same reason that money put into erstwhile "wasteful" projects flows through the economy. It's a bit of a double-standard to say that money that goes to taxes inhibits downstream spending, since that money is, in a very real way, redistributed to others, whether by government contract, to government employees, or otherwise. The exceptions would be foreign spending, which generally has benefit to the US as well, if less tangible.

If anything, with today's government, money taken out as taxes actually produces more money in circulation, since the US government runs a deficit budget with a cap on borrowing based loosely on government receipts. Every $1.00 given to the federal government returns $1.00 * [1 + (annual debt)/(annual receipts) -- of course, that's financed at an as-yet-undetermined final cost, since who knows what interest rate we'll have to pay on it when we refinance through new debt offerings...

Re:Billions or millions, right?

[Lurker2288]

At the same time, though, I think many people would argue that there is greater social value in spending $100 million on, say, textbooks for underprivileged students than spending $100 million on Internet pornography and rubber chickens. In both cases, the cash will flow through the economy providing benefit, but on the whole, society is likely value one scenario more highly than the other. Of course, this depends on your relative preferences for education, porn, and latex fowl, and I'm not necessarily convinced /. is a representative sample in this case.

Re:Billions or millions, right?

[SomeJoel]

I suggest you brush up on the broken window fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window). Just because money is flowing into the economy does not mean it isn't wasted.

Re:Billions or millions, right?

[Joe The Dragon]

This is also used to talk to Stargate teams without tieing up the Stargate.

Re:Billions or millions, right?

[Cassius Corodes]

All you have done is replaced the "evil rich man keeping the honest man poor" bs with the "evil govt bureaucrat keeping the honest man poor" bs.

Re:Billions or millions, right?

[theguru]

I'm familiar with it, but I don't think it applies. It rings true in cases of unexpected, or undesired spending. I wreck my car, I have to pay a body shop. In this case, SETI didn't break their old antenna and have to buy a new one. They chose to. Instead of me wrecking my car, I voluntarily chose to spend the money on a new car, and sell my old one.

The parable is better applied with the government in the role of the boy, and the public in the role as the shopkeeper. The government takes the public's choice out of spending X% of their resources in the form of taxes and directs it to the window glazier. Loss of choice is the ultimate opportunity cost.

Another reply compared the merits of buying $100 worth of textbooks for the underprivileged vs $100 of Internet porn, or $100 of rubber chickens. I love this example, because it tries to put a value on giving the textbook to the underprivileged individual, but ignores my point that either way $100 is flowing from the buyer to a seller. Either a bookstore, an adult entertainment site, or a joke shop. While some of those choices might be more likely to pass the cash on to more "humanitarian" efforts, I'll go out on a limb and say that all three shopkeepers are most likely going to buy groceries for their kids, make their car payments, etc. Maybe the bookshop owner needs the cash to finance his crystal meth lab, and the adult entertainment site operator works for Meals on Wheels due to their more flexible schedule. From an economic standpoint, neither outcome should have an influence on my $100 purchase.

I'm not heartless, just a realist. We can't all dedicate our lives to "helping". Some people have to fish, and others have to cut bait, clean fish, cook, gather firewood, etc. I have friends who are full time humanitarians. Because a lot of companies "waste" money on IT services that just make them more "evil money", I can afford to help support my friends efforts.

Another responder called me a liberal who wants the government to take everything and redistribute it. It was an AC poster so I'm just assuming they're a troll and not an idiot. :) In case they were serious, I suggest the look up the word "libertarian".

Re:Billions or millions, right?

[budgenator]

Well maybe SETI will inspire one of those underprivileged students to realise that the reason we can't hear anybody talking out there is because nobody has enough power to talk with and they invent the super-uber powerfull screw-thermodynamics generator and we have so much free power that the 6 billion people in the world all sit arround watch Television, getting fat and having heart attacks when they are not busy behaving badly like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears and talking too fast and running all of their sentences together like the whole world has ADD and takes amphetamines so they can look at porn and have sex with rubber chickens!

Re:Billions or millions, right?

[roystgnr]

If I took a stack of bill and burned them, or buried them never to be seen again, that would be wasting them.

That would be "wasting money" literally, but it wouldn't be wasting wealth, except insofar as paper money could be used as a scratchy substitute for toilet paper. Imagine if you destroyed 90% of the dollars in the world. Would it be a travesty? Of course not - the remaining 10% of dollars would just be worth 10 times as much.

If they spent $100mill on a telescope array, where did the money go?

It paid people who were capable of building telescope arrays to spend their time and resources building telescope arrays instead of something else productive. If the telescope array is less valuable then what they would have done instead (which I don't think is the case in this instance, but which can happen in general) then yes, you've wasted wealth.

Re:Billions or millions, right?

[servognome]

If they spent $100mill on a telescope array, where did the money go? It went to some firms who do that, who in turn paid their employees and their suppliers, who paid their employees, etc. Those employees bought groceries, sent their kid to the dentist, sent their kid to college, bought a new car.. the money flowed through the economy. Assuming a large percentage of the firms and suppliers are in this country, then the money stayed in the national economy.

You have confused $100M with $100M worth of resources. The resources used to make the telescope don't just magically appear, it is value that is created by work, which gets represented in the form of money. If economics was just about the movement of money you would be correct, money could cycle seamlessly. In reality goods and services must be provided in exchange for money which are not unlimited.

Re:Billions or millions, right?

[servognome]

The first is that there is a concept of 'best-use'. That is, there are some projects (such as SETI) that some people feel are less worthwhile than other projects.

In economic terms it's called "opportunity cost." The idea being that the cost of something is not just the price, but also the opportunity to use the resources towards something else.
That is why you can have a business that makes monetary profit, but not economic profit (eg your business makes 3% profit, but you could have earned 4% on a CD)

Re:Billions or millions, right?

[heinousjay]

The problem with both points of view? The word evil.

The truth of the matter is, no matter what your economy, there will always be the rich and powerful at the top, and whiners at the bottom. Why pander to them if they aren't going to shut up anyway?

Re:Billions or millions, right?

[murrdpirate]

As others have said, it's not really "wasting" money, but I understand your point that millions of dollars could have been used to feed the children and whatnot. Maybe I'm being a bit whimsical (if that's even the right word), but I don't think there is much point in life if all we're concerned about is making sure everyone is alive. I mean, where would you draw the line? Should we stop making art?

In addition, while it seems there is no social benefit, there will be. Our pursuits into space have produced a lot of useful technology. In addition, and more importantly, they inspire us to work harder. And who knows, maybe we'll actually find some aliens with a cure for cancer.

Re:Billions or millions, right?

[clambake]

I always find it amusing when people say money is "wasted". If I took a stack of bill and burned them, or buried them never to be seen again, that would be wasting them.

What about blowing crap up? i'm curious if the money we spent on the war was wasted or not.

Re:Billions or millions, right?

[tyrione]

Speaking of the term, 'best use' and what definitely isn't an example: The Iraq Conflict/War/Quagmire, whatever the hell you want to call it. Millions displaced, hate inflated and nothing but a deficit. Some might think it went to "best-use' but I'd rather 100,000 telescope arrays were developed before such a complete and utter waste of time.

Re:Billions or millions, right?

[Magada]

Because they'll come wring your neck in the night if you don't, eventually. Fact of life. Happened lots of times before, will happen again. The constant threat of rioting is what keeps the plebs furnished with bread and circus. Interesting that you consider yourself to be one of the rich and powerful. I bet they'd disagree.

Re:Billions or millions, right?

[Red Flayer]

I've learned that using economic terms on slashdot is pretty useless, since most people here have an incomplete or incorrect understanding of the terms. If discussing with someone with an economics background, I'd use terms like opportunity cost... but most of the time I try to use laymans terms here, so that the discussion doesn't get bogged down in corrections of terms usage.

Prime example of this is how some people on slashdot believe a free market == a market that is free from regulation.

Re:Billions or millions, right?

[mdwh2]

The resources and time spent putting together the telescope are resources which could have been spent elsewhere.

Now, I'm not making a comment as to whether SETI is a waste or not - but it's a perfectly reasonable opinion to say it is. By your logic, nothing is ever wasted - the Government could spend 10 trillion dollars on making paper hats for no purpose at all, and that would be okay, right?

Basically, you are confusing physical money, with wealth. Yes, burning money gets rid of the physical bits of paper, whilst spending it doesn't.

But it's the other way round for wealth - burning money doesn't get rid of wealth, however, people might rather that their generated wealth is spent on useful things rather than pointless things.

Re:Billions or millions, right?

[mdwh2]

Prime example of this is how some people on slashdot believe a free market == a market that is free from regulation.

I'm curious - what is the definition then?

Re:Billions or millions, right?

[2short]

A free market is free from regulations the person calling it free doesn't like.

It has regulations needed to prevent people abusing it in any obvious way you point out, but for semi-mystical reasons, these won't add up to the same regulations the person doesn't like. The regulations they don't like are assumed to have been imposed by mischievous gremlins just to make trouble, and not for any useful purpose.

Re:Billions or millions, right?

[Red Flayer]

An ideal free market, to economists, is one where prices are defined simply by supply and demand, and are free from external pressures. This means that all goods are commodity goods (i.e., one supplier is the same as any other), there are no barriers to entry (government-induced or otherwise), etc.

The reason this is important is that economic analysis either needs to assume those characteristics or account for the lack of them. I should have clarified in my earlier post that I was referring to an ideal free market.

What happens a lot of the time is that people try to apply economic theory to markets that are free-from-regulation, not realizing that this is not the same as an ideal free market.

Re:Billions or millions, right?

[heinousjay]

I don't consider myself to be rich and powerful at all. Where did you get that?

My opinion, to be quite frank, is that nothing actually will ever work to everyone's satisfaction. I think people just like to whine.

Re:Billions or millions, right?

[Magada]

I don't consider myself to be rich and powerful at all. Where did you get that? Your post, actually. It implies that.

Alien Telescope Array?

[KlomDark]

That's a good name for it!

Re:Alien Telescope Array?

[Stanza]

It's good to know that I'm not the only person to read "Allen Telescope Array" as "Alien Telescope Array".

Re:Alien Telescope Array?

[Yoozer]

Yeah, but is it serial or parallel?

Inverse Square Law

[Anonymous Coward]

Inverse Square Law

To be honest

[Skiron]

With 200 billion stars in OUR galaxy alone, and billions of other galaxies in our universe, anybody that thinks we are unique (usually religious type folks) are seriously fooled.

There has to be hundreds of thousands of life forms out there (at least). The sooner science finds it, the better.

Re:To be honest

[Anonymous Coward]

Why, so we humans can screw up their worlds too?

Re:To be honest

[arlanTLDR]

Yes but with 200 billion starts in our galaxy alone, how can we hope to find these life forms? Even if we received a signal, the society that generated it would likely have died out billions of years ago.

Re:To be honest

[Skiron]

That isn't really relevant. Finding life (that existed) or perhaps still exists removes this silly charade of religion dogma that plagues our the whole world through no other medium than 'belief' and control.

Re:To be honest

[Daimanta]

Insert Fermi's paradox:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

Tell me, if there is such a ridiculous high chance of other life, where is it? There is not a single clue of extraterrestrial life and this will be a huge moneypit. Well, that and the moonrace.

Re:To be honest

[UncleTogie]

Finding life (that existed) or perhaps still exists removes this silly charade of religion dogma

It surely does not. It just puts a different spin on it.

that plagues our the whole world through no other medium than 'belief' and control.

Anyone can choose a bad apple and attempt to infer that all apples are bad by it. Doesn't make it any more so...

Re:To be honest

[Cro Magnon]

It's a big universe. The odds that extraterrestrial life exists is high. The odds of us finding it in this big universe is not so high.

Re:To be honest

[StikyPad]

I highly doubt we are unique, or at least that self-replicating beings capable of problem solving are unique to our planet, but the Sagan-esque "billions and billions" argument is not an axiom. Unless and until we find other life, we don't know the actual odds. The probability could very well be lower than the number of atoms in the universe. Maybe intelligent life only pops up once every other universe or so. Maybe this is the first time ever.

In other words, it is no more foolish to insist that we are unique than to insist that we are not.

Re:To be honest

[sidb]

It doesn't logically follow that, just because we exist, intelligent life is at all likely. It could be so absurdly rare that it would never be likely to happen even once in the life of the universe. The fact that we are here says nothing about the probability of it happening again because we're already a given. It's unintuitive, but it's also basic statistics. There is no solid evidence of how likely life is, just guesses. I wouldn't be surprised to somehow find out that intelligent life is fairly common, but I also wouldn't be surprised if we're completely alone. And that argument has nothing to do with religion.

Re:To be honest

[DerekLyons]

With 200 billion stars in OUR galaxy alone, and billions of other galaxies in our universe, anybody that thinks we are unique (usually religious type folks) are seriously fooled. There has to be hundreds of thousands of life forms out there (at least). The sooner science finds it, the better.

Nonsense. Your claim is as fact free and agenda driven as those whom you deride.
 
We simply don't have enough information to evaluate the scarcity or commonality or worlds that will support life. We don't even have enough information to make an informed guess.

Re:To be honest

[UbuntuDupe]

I agree. UFOs are REAL!!!!!!

There is, however, no credible evidence supporting its existence of SETI.

Re:To be honest

[geekoid]

"Tell me, if there is such a ridiculous high chance of other life, where is it? "

You are overlooking time.

Within the time span of the universe, it is certain there are forms of life that had existed but no longer.

For example, there have been species on this planet that no longer exist.

So what we could fine is a radio wave that was sent out 1000 years ago...or perhaps some species launched a dive that gives off a regular signal as it just travels across space.

The moon race has generated a LOT of revenue, technologies and devices. Many times it's cost.

'Life' doesn't mean intelligence. For SETI to discover it ,it does.

Re:To be honest

[budgenator]

Not really they'll just say the Bible said God created the Earth but it doesn't say he only created the Earth, the Mormons accommodated Turtle Island without too much trouble.

Re:To be honest

[borroff]

Well, a few years ago, I would have agreed with you immediately. I certainly don't accept the view that God created the Earth as the exclusive home of intelligence and the center of the Universe. In an effectively infinite universe, almost anything can happen, and will. Including intelligent life.

On the other hand, the last I heard, the only bounds we have on the likelihood that amino acids created in an early earth atmospheric environment will combine to form a DNA-like replicating structure are somewhere between extremely unlikely and almost impossible. In the Drake Equation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation/), the frequency of earthlike worlds in the Universe is just one of the factors; the probability that life will develop on such a world is another.

Re:To be honest

[bcwright]

You are overlooking time.

The Fermi Paradox cannot be so easily dismissed. Assuming that ANY extraterrestrial civilization within our galaxy achieves interstellar travel, it just shouldn't take that long (in geologic time) for them to colonize the entire galaxy. Once ships from the civilization leave their home star, it becomes very difficult for that civilization to become extinct due to some local catastrophe. Therefore it becomes hard to avoid the conclusion that there are few if any such space traveling civilizations - and most likely none in this galaxy.

Perhaps interstellar travel is just simply harder than we think it is - although it is difficult to see exactly how that might be the case; and some civilizations may well forgo it simply because of the expense and time spans involved with the easier forms of it. But again, it only takes one space faring civilization to colonize the entire galaxy.

Personally I find the Fermi Paradox a very strong argument, but it's important to note that it only implies that the probability of space faring civilizations must be low. It says nothing about the probability of life on other planets (intelligence may be very rare in the universe - it certainly is among earthly species), or about the probability of intelligent life with a fairly advanced civilization that is short of being a space faring civilization. The latter is the only kind we'd be likely to find with SETI (since true space faring civilizations are apparently almost nonexistent) and it's that latter type of civilization that would be most vulnerable to extinction due to some local catastrophe - in fact, it's a good guess that that's why we haven't seen any.

Therefore it is hard to avoid the conclusion that either (1) we are very likely alone in the galaxy, although quite possibly not alone in the Universe (though it would be extremely difficult to detect civilizations in other galaxies), or (2) technological civilizations are almost always relatively short-lived. Obviously these possibilities are not mutually exclusive, but in either case SETI must be rated as an extreme long shot. Still it's probably worth funding at some level, simply because if we do get lucky the scientific and other implications can be tremendous.

Re:To be honest

[Anonymous Coward]

With 200 billion stars in OUR galaxy alone, and billions of other galaxies in our universe, anybody that thinks we are unique (usually religious type folks) are seriously fooled.

There has to be hundreds of thousands of life forms out there (at least). The sooner science finds it, the better.

Oh yes, the religious folks must always be the ones who are fooled. They are on the same list as Microsoft as far as being bashed on this site. I'd hate to be a Catholic who works at MS, double whammy. Anyway, the only reason you should think there are other forms of life out there is if you believe in evolution. In that case you believe that life can show up anywhere. It's funny how those proteins way back when only seemed to have started life once on this planet. If it started on other planets it should have been able to start multiple times on the same planet, given the "proof" that it worked one time already. In fact, you may as well believe your exact clone is walking around somewhere on another planet. With evolution that would be quite possible.

The reason why religious (I'll narrow that Christians since I can't speak for others) people believe there are no other life forms is because they believe God created life on this planet and only this planet. Too bad not ever finding life out there year after year and wasting millions of dollars will still not be proof enough that it is a fruitless endeavor (i.e. it's hard to prove a negative). I'd much rather have the funding go to the LHC at Cern or the Fermi Lab in Chicago. If there are hundreds of thousands of life forms out there then I'd sure like to know why we haven't found them or why they haven't came here to find us up to this point. Oh that's right, it just takes time, like that evolution thing. It's so much time you can't see it happening. That's a great argument.

Re:To be honest

[H0p313ss]

There is not a single clue of extraterrestrial life and this will be a huge moneypit.

Well... statistically it's very unlikely that we're alone, but it is possible. However it is infinitely more likely that deciding we must be alone after less than 50 years of research is a little naive.

I'd rather spend a few percent of the money spend on weaponry on a wasted effort to detect alien life than to turn around in a decade or a century to discover that we're not alone... AND THEY DON'T LIKE US.

Re:To be honest

[clambake]

If the chance is so low that life exists out there in the universe, then that means the chance of US being here is quite low too... and yet, here we are! Which makes you wonder how rare life ACTUALLY is after all.

Re:To be honest

[kalirion]

Unfortunately the only way we seem to be able to look for it right now by attempting to detect radio signals. As others point out, the could mean we have a fairly small window of time to detect an alien civilization. For example, at any point in time we can only detect signals which were sent exactly N years ago from exactly N light years away. If their technology has progressed beyond radio signals 15 years ago, we will only find them if they keep sending out radio transmissions specifically to alert other civilizations (like us) of their existence. And this isn't even taking into account the power of a radio signal that we can detect.

Re:To be honest

[2short]

Chances that that intelligence exists elsewhere in the universe: near certainty.

Chances that SETI will find any: pretty small.

Chances that there is intelligence close enough that we could exchange any communication during the lifetime of one of our species: practically zero.

"The sooner science finds it, the better."

Why? What possible benefit in knowing a radio-transmitting culture existed around a star impossibly far away sometime before the rise of dinosaurs?

SETI has a very small chance to find something of little apparent value.

See Seth Shostak if you can

[G4from128k]

Seth Shostak ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Shostak ) is a very entertaining and informative speaker of SETI topcis. See/hear him if you get a chance. He's a fun combo of dry, acerbic, and self-deprecating.

Re:See Seth Shostak if you can

[quakehead3]

Youtube to the rescue!
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Seth+Shostak

Re:See Seth Shostak if you can

[602]

He has a podcast.

Will we need a new client....

[UncleTogie]

...or will the new antenna rollout use the same BOINC client as I'm using now?

Re:Will we need a new client....

[AragornSonOfArathorn]

I can't imagine that you'd need a new client. If this is part of SETI@Home project, I'm sure they'll just make the data from the new array available for the current client to access. I don't know for sure, I'm just guessing, but it makes sense to me...

Re:Will we need a new client....

[Mage Powers]

BOINC was designed with the purpose of being a meta client, so if the SETI people are going to make this new stuff under a different BOINC project, all you have to do is add it to your clients, and BOINC will download any necessary processing cores. I don't see why they wouldn't add it to the existing project after a testing phase though.

Re:Will we need a new client....

[UncleTogie]

BOINC was designed with the purpose of being a meta client, so if the SETI people are going to make this new stuff under a different BOINC project, all you have to do is add it to your clients, and BOINC will download any necessary processing cores.

I knew about BOINC being a metaclient, as I also run Einstein@home... Just wasn't sure if they'd count it as a different project or not. I remember the switch from the dedicated SETI client a while back...

Thanks for the clarification!

Re:Will we need a new client....

[neuron2neuron]

Hardly. SETI@home is not 'SETI' - it is one small subgroup of it. If anything, it's more of a publicity stunt than serious science. As i've posted elsewhere, the processing power of SETI@home is dwarfed by a system Harvard retired in 1995, for a more powerfull system. The other problem is that the Aracebo telescope is not the best scope to be using for SETI work. It's not very steerable, it's a fixed dish in a depresion in Puerto Rico - the only aiming that can be done is by moving the receiver (the bit they fought on in GoldenEye)

If Berkley was really serious about SETI, they'd have fitted a META (MillionChannel, Extra-Terrestrial Array - http://seti.harvard.edu/seti/meta.html) or a BETA (BillionChannel Extra-Terrestrial Array - http://seti.harvard.edu/seti/setihist.html) to process it. It actually takes about as much hardware for a META as is needed for the backend of the BOINC client.

If you really want to help space exploration, and science, and communication, you'd be better off with a project like the Muon1 DPAD (http://stephenbrooks.org/muon1/ ), working on the Neutreno, which may be a viable communicative method when understood, as it appears to not generally interact with matter. imagine Europe-Japan communication direct, beamed through the earth, rather than via satelites, or cables run on the surface/ocean floor.

Re:Will we need a new client....

[azenpunk]

scientific progress goes....BOINC?

Re:Will we need a new client....

[SETIGuy]

If Berkley was really serious about SETI, they'd have fitted a META (MillionChannel, Extra-Terrestrial Array - http://seti.harvard.edu/seti/meta.html) or a BETA (BillionChannel Extra-Terrestrial Array - http://seti.harvard.edu/seti/setihist.html) to process it. It actually takes about as much hardware for a META as is needed for the backend of the BOINC client.

I think this shows that you have a grave misunderstanding about how SETI@home, SERENDIP, META, and BETA work and how the are very interrelated. In fact, if you go the the BETA page, you will see "The FFT processor evolved from a design of the Berkeley SETI group."

SERENDIP, META, and BETA are essentially simple FFT processors, with BETA essentially being four 80 million channel analyzers. That is proof that to an astronomer 240 million is equal to a billion. SERENDIP IV (the last one deployed) was a 168 million channel analyzer. Both had channel widths of about 0.5 Hz (0.5 Hz for BETA, 0.6 Hz for SERENDIP). The channel width limits the sensitivity. Simple FFT analyzers cannot go to narrower channels without correcting for Doppler drift which will chirp the signal out of the channel in less than the integration time, and because the Doppler drift depends upon the properties of the transmitter in addition to the motion of the Earth, it's not a simple process that can be done on the fly.

SETI@home implements coherent dechirping which allows for channel widths of 0.075 Hz or less. In essence you are changing maximum coherent integration time on a signal from 2 seconds to (in SETI@home) about 13 seconds for simple (single time bin) signals. In addition SETI@home searches at higher sensitivity for multi-time-bin signals with up to 107 seconds integration. SETI@home also searches for repeated (fixed period) pulsed signals, which none of the special purpose instruments can do.

Now add the consideration that SETI@home (and the Berkeley SERENDIP instruments) uses a telescope with a collecting area 140 times as large as the telescope used by BETA.

If you calculate the maximum value of the processing power of BETA, (a 240 million point FFT every 2 seconds) you get 16 GFLOPS. That's an overestimate because a) it's not a floating point processor, but an integer processor, and b) it's implemented as sixty three 4 million point tranforms.

SETI@home, on the other hand, currently cannot handle real-time data from the ALFA instrument because it only has about 1/3 of the 1.2 PFLOPS it needs to process at that rate. In other words to do the same processing as SETI@home does, you need to build 75000 BETAs.

That's not to say BETA (and the SERENDIPs on which it was based) wasn't worth the effort. At the time it was among the best. SERENDIP V will eventually take over where SERENDIP IV left off, so the age of the SETI hardware based spectrometer isn't over.

Pfft

[neuron2neuron]

I wonder if this new publicised technology is better than seti@home, which was eclipsed by the jarvard META array, before it was even launched (the META array could do the job of SETI@home, in real time, and was retired in 1995 for the BETA, which has orders of magnitude more power). As long as SETI is dominated by PR stunts like seti@home, however, it'll never go anywhere

Re:Pfft

[SETIGuy]

I think this shows that you have a grave misunderstanding about how SETI@home, SERENDIP, META, and BETA work and how the are very interrelated. In fact, if you go the the BETA page, you will see "The FFT processor evolved from a design of the Berkeley SETI group."

SERENDIP, META, and BETA are essentially simple FFT processors, with BETA essentially being four 80 million channel analyzers. That is proof that to an astronomer 240 million is equal to a billion. SERENDIP IV (the last one deployed) was a 168 million channel analyzer. Both had channel widths of about 0.5 Hz (0.5 Hz for BETA, 0.6 Hz for SERENDIP). The channel width limits the sensitivity. Simple FFT analyzers cannot go to narrower channels without correcting for Doppler drift which will chirp the signal out of the channel in less than the integration time, and because the Doppler drift depends upon the properties of the transmitter in addition to the motion of the Earth, it's not a simple process that can be done on the fly.

SETI@home implements coherent dechirping which allows for channel widths of 0.075 Hz or less. In essence you are changing maximum coherent integration time on a signal from 2 seconds to (in SETI@home) about 13 seconds for simple (single time bin) signals. In addition SETI@home searches at higher sensitivity for multi-time-bin signals with up to 107 seconds integration. SETI@home also searches for repeated (fixed period) pulsed signals, which none of the special purpose instruments can do.

Now add the consideration that SETI@home (and the Berkeley SERENDIP instruments) uses a telescope with a collecting area 140 times as large as the telescope used by BETA.

If you calculate the maximum value of the processing power of BETA, (a 240 million point FFT every 2 seconds) you get 16 GFLOPS. That's an overestimate because a) it's not a floating point processor, but an integer processor, and b) it's implemented as sixty three 4 million point tranforms.

SETI@home, on the other hand, currently cannot handle real-time data from the ALFA instrument because it only has about 1/3 of the 1.2 PFLOPS it needs to process at that rate. In other words to do the same processing as SETI@home does, you need to build 75000 BETAs.

That's not to say BETA (and the SERENDIPs on which it was based) wasn't worth the effort. At the time it was among the best. SERENDIP V will eventually take over where SERENDIP IV left off, so the age of the SETI hardware based spectrometer isn't over. And yes, the ATA will have a hardware based spectrometer. And no, for reasons I mentioned elsewhere, SETI@home is unlikely to be given access to the ATA.

I for one...

[Digitus1337]

...welcome our new alien overlords.

It's so nice when that meme fits without having to be stretched. This certainly is exciting news (about the telescopes too).

At least they got the answer right...

[mangu]

42. Why would they need more?

Re:At least they got the answer right...

[ackthpt]

42. Why would they need more?

Because the 43rd would probably be the one what picks up that crucial signal:

All your base are belong to us!

Which would remove all doubt .. there is no intelligent life in outer space.

Re:At least they got the answer right...

[MyrddinBach]

Wheres the whoosh mod?

Re:At least they got the answer right...

[bilabrin]

Yeah, 42 is the answer to life the universe and everything....nice.

wrong analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

They can now see farther, not search more quickly so the proper analogy is:

"We can now search through a haystack that is 1000 times bigger than the old haystack. We are still using a spoon".

The odds that there is any needle to find in the haystack does increase now that the haystack is bigger.

Meanwhile 501 years ago on the Alien Transmitter

[trickyrickb]

orbiting Beta Canis Majoris.... Lets turn this thing off! No one is out there listening!

I never quite understood how ...

[iknownuttin]

having a bunch of small radio telescopes is better than one big one- other than the cost factor.

Re:I never quite understood how ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually work with the guys who make this happen. At the end of the day it's not really the physical size of the dish that matters, but the baseline of the array: in other words the distance over which the receivers are spread. A little fancy math later and you get better results for a LOT less money. Basically the performance scales with the total distance, whereas the cost scales as a square of the size of any dish.

The bottom line: it's mostly an economic thing (math is cheaper than steel). But there are also physical issues in that you just can't build a dish the right shape once it gets too big since no one can work a piece of metal like that.

Re:I never quite understood how ...

[neuron2neuron]

It's called Baseline interferometry. You combine the signals from multiple scopes, to get a scope with the effective size of the distance between them. There have been plans for years to put some in Earth's solar orbit, at various points ahead and behind. this would give a dish that, parallel to the plane of the ecliptic, has an effective size of about 1AU (8 light minutes) radius.

There are other mutli-telescope arrays, apart from the VLA in New Mexico (made famous by films like Contact) although few are grouped together. One of them is MERLIN (http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/booklet/Merlin.html) which was established in 1980.

Now, if only I can finish my designs for a fairly cheap BLI capable road-mobile telescope of sufficient size, we might get even more data.

Re:I never quite understood how ...

[ChrisA90278]

It's not "a bunch of little telescopes". It is one large phased array. The signals from all the antenna are added in phase. By controlling the delay from each antenna before adding the signals they can point the beam around in the sky. By building more "adders" they can have multiple simultainious beams.

Think of each dish antenna as an element of a single larger antennta

I used to run the SETI client...

[Anonymous Coward]

...but then I got smarter. Donate your CPU cycles to something that actually produces useful results instead, e.g.

http://folding.stanford.edu/

Not just the wrong band, the wrong everything

[Wingsy]

I keep tellin em but they never listen. Aliens gave up on radio eons ago. Poor range, prone to interference, and a host of other disadvantages. If you want to eavesdrop on what's being said about us in the universe, you gots to gets your hands on one of them newfangled SHF gravity wave radios.

Re:Not just the wrong band, the wrong everything

[santathehutt]

I agree.

Of course there is also the possibility that they never developed radio communications to begin with. They could have developed a completely different technology for long range communications.

I do believe it is likely there is life elsewhere in the universe, but if they never developed radio, or stopped using it eons ago, we will never detect them this way.

Re:Not just the wrong band, the wrong everything

[sbillard]

Aliens gave up on radio eons ago

That's OK. It takes eons for the signal to reach us.

What about deflation?

[mangu]

If I took a stack of bill and burned them, or buried them never to be seen again, that would be wasting them.

Although I agree with the rest of your comment, I don't think burning money is wasting it. If you destroy currency you are removing it from circulation, which will cause prices to go down due to deflation.

If you truly want to waste money, you should buy something of value to others and destroy that thing. The grandfather post would be right, if one assumes that scientific research has no value. However, that is very seldom the case. Research is almost always valuable, even if it turns up nothing. Negative results are also knowledge. If we find no sign of extraterrestrial intelligence in our search we will know more than we did before about the abundance or scarcity of intelligence in our galaxy.

Re:What about deflation?

[SetupWeasel]

The grandfather post would be right, if one assumes that scientific research has no value. However, that is very seldom the case. Research is almost always valuable, even if it turns up nothing. Negative results are also knowledge. If we find no sign of extraterrestrial intelligence in our search we will know more than we did before about the abundance or scarcity of intelligence in our galaxy.

This is not scientific research. This is more like a lone nomad sifting through the Sahara looking for the Eternal Tome of Wisdom. He would be much more likely to find a copy of the Di Vinci Code, but even that would be hopelessly unlikely. About the only scientific value SETI has is in improvement of sifting methods. Hopefully some real scientist will find some way to use this aimless collection of noise to do some real work.

Re:What about deflation?

[2short]

"If you destroy currency you are removing it from circulation, which will cause prices to go down due to deflation.

If you truly want to waste money, you should buy something of value to others and destroy that thing."

Not at all. Either way, you remove value from the world. Whether in the form of a physical object of a particular value, or in the form of cash (a physical representation of abstract value), your destructive act has the same effect on the wider economy. Which is to say, not much unless it's an awful lot of money - value is constantly being created at a fantastic rate.

As far as whether money spent on SETI is "wasted", the point is not whether any good thing (like feeding the builders kids) comes out of it. The point is whether *more* good things would come out of spending that money on some other thing. That same builder could get paid, and feed his kids, building something in support of some more worthy cause. Is there a more worthy cause? Well, I think so, but it isn't my money.

"Research is almost always valuable, even if it turns up nothing."

For one thing quite a bit of research is utter garbage that neither proves nor disproves anything except that a particular researcher can't set up a good experiment; a fact of rather small value.

But more generally, there are always far more interesting research questions than we (as a society) can afford to pursue. That a particular program will learn "something" is too low a bar to decide which ones are worthwhile.

It is only reasonable to estimate SETI's chance of finding something, and the usefulness of that find, multiply the two together, and ask how much it's worth to spend on it. The answer obviously depends on your estimates. Mine come out to not very much.

"If we find no sign of extraterrestrial intelligence in our search we will know more than we did before about the abundance or scarcity of intelligence in our galaxy."

No, we won't. We have no way to judge the accuracy of our search technique.

Re:What about deflation?

[Copid]

As far as whether money spent on SETI is "wasted", the point is not whether any good thing (like feeding the builders kids) comes out of it. The point is whether *more* good things would come out of spending that money on some other thing. That same builder could get paid, and feed his kids, building something in support of some more worthy cause. Is there a more worthy cause? Well, I think so, but it isn't my money.

I think that your last point is the key. There's almost always a more "worthy" cause for any given dollar to go to. The $1 is just pumped into a vending machine for a snack could have been contributed to cancer research (although who is to say that it won't be, now that it's out of my hands?). The fact that a lot of people seem to be forgetting that even the billions of dollars spent on a project like this, amortized over the life of the project and compared to everything else we do with our cash, is chickenfeed. I hear arguments against the billions spent on space missions and then think that nationally, we probably spent a lot more money on irritating ring tones for our cell phones over the same amount of time. Sure, I think that SETI is probably one of the less useful ways to spend telescope money, but I don't think it's without value, and compared to how we spend the rest of our money, spending it on any moderately interesting research at all is probably a step up.

Re:What about deflation?

[2short]

Well, I do think SETI is without value. Which does put it above many things we spend money on that actually make life worse for the world at large. But "not evil, just pointless" is not exactly a ringing endorsement. The point of noting that it's not my money is that I won't be protesting in the streets if someone else spends their money on it. I will however, consider them an idiot.

Re:What about deflation?

[Copid]

I assess it similarly to you in that I would be surprised if they actually find the signal that they're looking for, but I also don't see it as totally unlikely that the sheer quantities of raw data that they'll be producing will be useless for other research. Sure, I'd rather see it used on more directed data gathering that could be broadly useful in astronomy, but as I see it, as long as it's producing raw data for somebody to chew on and as long as it's not squeezing out some scarce resource, more power to them. My only real concern would be if they were consuming some sort of truly scarce resource (e.g. if the construction of the telescopes required making a huge dent in the world's supply of platinum or some other scarce resource that's useful to a host of important processes).

Sounds great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Will it help me find my keys?

Re:Sounds great!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but your pants are as good as found!

Torrent the Encyclopedia Galactica!!!!!

[jameskojiro]

Now we can finally use this new device to hack into the galactic internet. I am sure there are some dumb species (like the pakleds) that bought their Wireless Galactic Network Access Point, just plugged it in and left it on the defaults. We need to hook ourselves up with free Galactic Internet Access and then start downloading the Encyclopedia Galactica. Of course our once we start downloading it we better hope the ICFPPC (Intergalactic Copyright Federation for the Protection of Privlidged Content) doesn't nuke out asses from orbit for illegally downloading stuff off the Galactic Internet.

Now Downloading the Encyclopedia Galactica from galaxy.torrentz.pakled.serverz
7.43x10^43 Files containing 1.453x10^50 Bytes at 11 Mpbs per second
Estimated time till download completion - Eleventy Billion Years

Re:Torrent the Encyclopedia Galactica!!!!!

[kalirion]

Personally, I think the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a more entertaining read.

But... lets thing about this logically...

[Rooked_One]

with a spoon, you could easily see the needle... with a shovel of a hay, the needle becomes a little more hard to see.

Did I mention its not backwards wednesday?

Rare Earth

[WrongMonkey]

There are solid scientific reasons to believe that we are unique. Rare Earth Hypothesis

SETI is hopeless

[anethema]

I dont mean to flame but...

I'm in the EE field, specifically wireless/radio communications.

The calculation for path loss is:

Loss dB = 32.44 + 20 log (dist in km) + 20 log (freq in MHz)

Lets take absolute optimal conditions..proxima centauri is roughly 4 light years away. This is roughly 3.78x10^13 km away. One of the most common frequencies monitored is the "hydrogen line" (1420.40575 MHz) since this is the resonant frequency of hydrogen and is more likely to be used by aliens since we'd most likely be looking there.

So, lets fill in the equation:

32.44+ 20log(3.78x10^13)+20log(1420.41)= 367.038 db of loss...

So lets say they are transmitting with a million watts(90dBm), and there is a 60db dish on both ends(huuge dish)...This gives us a receive level of -157.038dBm. This is a good bit below what any normal radio will receive at. The noise floor is certainly higher than this. Now keep in mind this is the very closest star, which I don't think even has any livable planets.

Our galaxy is 70-100 thousand light years across and we are right near the edge. So if you take a star not even close to that distance, say 500 light years (still somewhat close on a galactic scale) then the calculations work out to a receive signal of -198dBm. The equipment doesn't exist to pick the signal out of the noise at levels like that.

God forbid trying to pick the signal out of another galaxy, the nearest being Andromeda. some 2.5 million light years away. Giving Rx signal levels of ~ -273dBm. Safe to say the noise floor is MUCH MUCH higher than this.

I think SETI is a hopeless pipe dream. That being said, I DO think there is intelligent life out there, probably in our galaxy. There are just too many stars with too many planets to think otherwise.

Re:SETI is hopeless

[Anonymous Coward]

Killjoy, wet blanket, spoil sport.

I bet you couldn't enjoy a sci-fi movie if you were paid to do it.

Get off my /.

[THIS -5 TROLL BROUGHT TO YOU BY A.C. INC.]

Re:SETI is hopeless

[pz]

Loss dB = 32.44 + 20 log (dist in km) + 20 log (freq in MHz)

Sorry, I've forgotten 90% of the EM I learned from 20 years ago, but I don't recall that there's a frequency dependence for transmission in vacuum. Is this the right equation to use?

Re:SETI is hopeless

[pz]

Duh. A few more clicks and I would have found the answer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-space_loss -- the short version being that it's the diameter of receiving antenna that gives the frequency dependence.

Re:SETI is hopeless

[locster]

Personally I prefer to run the World Community Grid clients currently searching for drugs for AIDS drugs, Dengue fever and Muscular Dystrophy along with a more general investigation of the Human Proteome.

I feel like SETI is an all or nothing approach at aquiring knowledge - if we are able to receive data from an alien civilisation we could learn far more in a short space of time than from research here on terra firma. It's a gamble and I think maybe we should spread our bets a bit more evenly by shifting CPU time away from SETI and onto these other projects. If just a small proportion of CPU's running SETI switched to WCG that would be a massive boost. Currently the stats show just under 200 years worth of runtime each day (so 73,000 full time clients) versus SETI's over 1.6 million clients.

Even if we did find a signal I doubt we would get much useful information from it. Mainly it would be a big cultural moment for our species.

Re:SETI is hopeless

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite correct. With the correct receiver bandwidth and processing signals weaker than -200 dBm are quite readily detectable. Ultimately it depends how much processing power you want to throw at it which is what SETI@home is all about.

Re:SETI is hopeless

[anethema]

Fairly true, but it always works out that, despite whatever gains of the receiving and transmitting antennas, this equation holds.

Re:SETI is hopeless

[Anonymous Coward]

Your path loss calculation is correct. However, I find your noise floor argument ludicrous, especially from someone claiming to be an EE.

Surely you know that the noise floor is -174dBm/Hz, thus giving us a 20dB margin of detection for a 1Hz narrowband signal (or conversely a 100Hz bandwidth detection threshold, for an integration time of 1 sec). And just to give a concrete example: modern 'indoor' GPS receivers have a sensitivity of -155dBm.

Re:SETI is hopeless

[Anonymous Coward]

SiRF 3 GPS chipset has a sensitivity of -155dBm, using integration time of 1 sec.

Re:SETI is hopeless

[stmfreak]

Don't forget the coincidental timing required for two civilizations to be looking and broadcasting in each other's direction. We cannot listen to them all simultaneously. And if we wanted to be a broadcaster, we certainly couldn't pump jiggiwatt lasers at them all, simultaneously. And if we did, it would only be this decade. That's 10 years out of 14 billion, last count.

Seti is noble. It's good PR. But it's hopeless and doomed to failure even if the universe is teaming with sentient, space-faring life.

Our efforts are far better served getting off our flat-asses, working together on cooperative, global space projects like an elevator and orbital ring platform and getting out there.

Then there is the incentive issue. We're hoping that another race is broadcasting on hydrogen trying to say hello. Are we broadcasting? Why would they? When we are finally a space faring race, which scenario is more likely:

a. opening up lines of communication with pre-space, primitive industrial and war-faring societies?

b. opening up lines of communication with space-faring societies we come across.

Re:SETI is hopeless

[Anonymous Coward]

The noise floor of "perfect" receiver staring at a black body of 290K is -174 dBm/Hz. The temperature of empty space is ~3K (left over from the big bang) so now the noise floor is -194 dBm/Hz. So now it's up to how long we want to integrate. If we integrate for 1000 seconds we can get down to -224 dbm/Hz. If we integrate for 1 year we can get down to -269 dBm/Hz.

Now we are assuming the aliens will be transmitting a pure, low phase noise CW tone over that whole time. If we see that CW tone with sufficient SNR we can assume it's an alien race. That tone contains no information but it's good enough for us. There is really no way to communicate over those distances since there is only so much information that can be coded into that narrrow bandwidth (see Shannon's capacity theorm). The aliens would have to send a BPSK signal (coded so it shows some intelligence) with a data rate of years/bit.

Re:SETI is hopeless

[AaronParsons]

I think you're underestimating the antennas involved here. Arecibo (which is the biggest telescope we've got) has a gain of approximately 140 dB. But the Allan Telescope Array will have a gain only about 10 dB down from that with 42 antennas, and with 350 antennas, it will have a gain of ~170 dB. So if they transmit with an Arecibo, and we listen with a 350 ATA, then Proxima Centauri will come in loud at 30 dBm, and we can see out probably a factor of 100 out past that. It's only a small part of the galaxy, but it's not hopeless.

Re:SETI is hopeless

[synonymous]

Not to mention that there has been contact already. The indians of the past recorded them as petroglyph's, we now record them on paper and video. To give you one of the greatest shortcuts you could receive, they are everywhere. You have much research to do. Here are two good starter links. One is compliments of NASA via a helpful Canadian receiving the encrypted signal, and the other is to a youtube author that makes it into the top 100 about every day, of the 40 or so million subscribers. Get in touch w/me if you like the links, I may be able to get you in deep. If you are up for it.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=973120271616169522&q=david+sereda+tether&total=23&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=1
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=theduderinok

Re:SETI is hopeless

[Zoinks]

You're "in the field," eh? Are you an EE? You learn this stuff in a senior level comm class.

The "noise floor" (actually noise power spectral density) is determined by kT, Boltzmann constant times Kelvin temperature.

Looking into empty space, the noise temperature is the magical 3 K. As far as the receiver noise floor, astronomical receivers are typically cryogenically cooled just to reduce the noise floor. So, assuming receiver noise is lower than space noise, the noise PSD is -193.8 dBm/Hz.

And bandwidth? Depends on how fast/slow the message is. Add 10log(BW) to the noise PSD and THAT'S your noise floor.

Anyway, the link budget *is* difficult, but not impossible. It does require a certain amount of the other civilization actually *wanting* to be found, though.

Only 6 meters wide dishes

[jonfr]

They are only using 6 meters wide dishes. Given that they are monitoring 2.4Ghz, this isn't a lot of gain they are getting, even if they inter connect all of the dishes. At least I think I got that correct. But a C-Band system uses large dishes, 2.4Ghz is close to that frequency range (3Ghz).

Corrections are welcomed.

Re:Only 6 meters wide dishes

[AaronParsons]

The Allan Telescope Array uses a correlator to combine the signals from its antennas. By correlating each pair of antennas, the sensitivity of an array is increased by a factor of (# of antennas)^2. Thus, 42 x 6 m dishes is roughly equivalent to a 240 m dish (because sensitivity also scales as diameter^2). So a 42 antenna array is almost as good as the 305 m Arecibo telescope (the largest single dish telescope in the world).

Use the right tool for the job

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who has tried to move a haystack with a shovel knows that a pitchfork works much better for that. But if you are mixing concrete then you would want to switch to a shovel or else you are a dumb mortar forker.

So from what distance....

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know the distance from which this new array could detect the equivalent of what we are typically giving off in the form of TV/Radio signals?

Re:So from what distance....

[budgenator]

I've heard the phrase a sell phone on Saturn thrown arround for aricebo. Most of what we are giving off is garbage from a ways out, the multitude of signals would interfere pretty badly I don't think we have too many clear channels stations, a frequncy with only one station, any more, so mostly we just make noise.

Needles in haystacks

[barakn]

Spoons, shovels? I always thought it would be easier to search for a needle in a haystack with a magnet, but what do I know?

Re:Needles in haystacks

[Fuji Kitakyusho]

Or you could simply set the haystack on fire, and sieve the ashes.

Re:Needles in haystacks

[gmby]

OK. I'll buy that; but how do you find a "Straw in a Needle Stack?"

Re:Needles in haystacks

[barakn]

Or you could set the haystack on fire and run a magnet through the ashes. I'm really hung up on the magnet for some reason.

Re:Needles in haystacks

[Fuji Kitakyusho]

What if it was an aluminium needle?

Laziness

[XHIIHIIHX]

Hey, if one is going to use a tool to look for a needle in a haystack, I would choose a *magnet*. Consider the amount of radio energy we're spewing into space, we've got a great magnet already. And considering that if there is any other life, it's probably more intelligent then us, the best thing to do is just *wait*. Let's not forget the fact that even if we did discover a radio emenation from 500 light years away, it would take *1000 years* for us to get a response. Surely in 1000 years we'll come up with something better then a stupid radio signal. Folks, please concentrate your efforts on something more useful.

Re:Laziness

[ChrisA90278]

They are NOT listening for random signals like the type that are leaked out from Earth. The array is not sensitive enough for that. What they are hoping to find as a beacon. A huge transmitter beamed right at us. If they find such a thing then we might reasonably guess there is a signal on it. We would not have to wait for 2-way communication to learn a lot. Heck even if all we got was a "Hello Earth" greeting that in itself would be one of the greatest discoveries in all of history.

I doubt there are any huge microwave beacons. If we do discover anyone out there it will only be after our arrays become powerfull enough to hear the "leakage" signals that only escape by chance, like the signals we are currently sending. But we could get lucky. It's like buying a lottery ticket.

Re:Laziness

[XHIIHIIHX]

That's my whole point. Assume that there are many other civilizations, why would they not already be looking for and find us? Hoping to find another civilization that has created radio technology within 500 light years is ludicrous. Hoping that another civilization in the universe has evolved technology that will allow them to find us is much more reasonable. Hoping to evolve technology which is able to find other civilizations more then 500 light years away is also much more reasonable. In 20 years, I'll be able to run the whole seti project of today on my PDA. Why waste the resources now when there are far better purposes, and it's a near certainty that nothing will come to light in the next 20 years, and even if it does we won't be able to really do anything. Notions of alien civilizations beaming us directions about how to make a time-jump gate indeed. Of course I hope to eat all those words. But face the facts people. None of us are going to live to chat with aliens!

Re:Laziness

[murrdpirate]

I would say that we are looking for them looking for us. It's pretty doubtful that they're just going to show up here, we have to look for signs of them trying to communicate with us. With the electromagnetic spectrum being as fast as physically possible, I think that's a good way of doing it. Technology 40 years from now will be even better, so why not wait till then? We have no idea what the odds are on finding life, theres no way you can really say "now's a good time to start looking." Just as a guess though, I would say that being able to scan a million stars and many more in less detail sounds pretty decent. Honestly though, if I had known how few stars SETI was able to scan before this, I probably wouldn't have been for it.

Re:Laziness

[sbillard]

huge microwave beacons...
beamed right at us...

OMG! They're trying to COOK us!!!!!

Re:Laziness

[XHIIHIIHX]

The universe is a big place. Scary big. I mean, you think from here down to the drugstore is a long ways, but that's nothing compared to the size of the universe. -- misquoted hhttg It's a whole have your cake and eat it too. What are the odds of there being other intelligent life? Pretty good. What are the chances of it being within 500 light years. Oh something around 1+10e-17.

Re:Laziness

[murrdpirate]

I know you're exaggerating, but we really have no idea how common intelligent life is. Maybe most solar systems have intelligent life. So far we've intermittently scanned only a few hundred stars to any significant degree. How are we going to know until we try? A few million bucks to scan at least a million stars (and provide other astronomy purposes) doesn't sound like a bad deal to me.

Re:Laziness

[XHIIHIIHX]

Ok let's throw out some odds... It's a three dimensional equation and we're on the losing end of every part of it. The universe is big and old, and we are young and small... There are 10^20 observed stars http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/newton/askasci/1993/astron/AST014.HTM The universe is 11 - 20 billion years old. We have been "intelligent" for 10000 years (generous, not sure we're intelligent yet ) on 1 planet around 1 star. 10^20 * 10^9 / 10^4 = 10^25 These are the odds of intelligent life being on this planet in this 10,000 year period. Divide by a million stars and you have 1 in 10^19 probability of there being intelligent life around any of these million stars. If there are a million civilizations in the universe, the odds of them being in those million stars at this time is still 1 in 10^13. The odds of us being the most intelligent are still 1 in 10^25. Ok, bunch of flaky math, but hey, the odds of *us discovering* alien civilizations is inversely proportional to the number of alien civilizations, and the more there are of them the more likely that they would *discover us*. The odds don't get better with more civilizations, they get worse.

Re:Laziness

[murrdpirate]

It's interesting to throw these numbers around, and I agree that it at least gives us an idea of what factors are involved. If the emergence of intelligent life is random, your odds might be right. It took almost 5 billion years after the formation of our solar system to form intelligent life. It could be similar everywhere. Maybe the entire universe is starting to spawn intelligent life. So I don't think you can just compare a 10,000 year history to the history of the universe.

I think the odds of life might be a lot higher than we imagine. And once life starts, I think you have to have evolution, and it is only a matter of time before intelligent life evolves. And once you have intelligence, I think it's most likely going to stay around for a while, and maybe populate other stars. I definitely would not bet on us finding anything with this project, but I don't think the odds are so low it's not worth trying. I'm not sure what you mean that the odds don't get better with more civilizations. I agree that it's more likely another civilization will discover us before we discover them, but I don't think we can realize we have been discovered without looking.

Uh, money?

[Anonymous Coward]

wait, I thought SETI was out of money and that's why they keep emailing me saying that Arthur C. Clarke says I should donate. Yet they built 360 antennas? I thought they didn't have enough horsepower to analyse the data they already have collected?

Re:Uh, money?

[Markus Landgren]

Weird, isn't it? It's almost as if the name of the array has something to do with billionaire Paul Allen!

Surest sign of intelligent ET life

[ShadowOfMe]

I can't remember who said that but I think it applies: "The surest sign that there is intelligent etraterrestrial life is that they have not yet tried to contact us"

Re:Surest sign of intelligent ET life

[tizan]

I remember reading this in "Calvin and Hobbes"

Re:Surest sign of intelligent ET life

[JetScootr]

I read a sci fi story back in the early 70's about how we've not discovered ET yet cuz the entire solar system has been quarantined to prevent humans from becoming an epidemic. They scratched one world to save the galaxy.

But what if they communicate with...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

...tubes?

All thanks to Microsoft!

[HarryCaul]

That's Allen as in Paul Allen, you know.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

One million civilizations = 300 light years

[602]

...the full Allen array would be able to detect a signal from as far as 500 light years that is only a few times more powerful than what can now be sent by the Arecibo radio telescope...

If there are a million civilizations in the galaxy, their average separation is 300 light years. (I think this datum is from Shklovskii & Sagan's "Intelligent Life in the Universe".)

First signal

[Anonymous Coward]

we'll recieve will be a blue screen of death...

SETI Institute != SETI@home != SETI

[SETIGuy]

More confusion in the media (and on Slashdot) about just what SETI is. SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a field of study, like physics for example. You wouldn't say "Physics gets a new particle accelerator," would you? It is not a project or a program.

The SETI Institute is an organization that employs many scientists. A few of the scientists there do SETI (i.e. they search for extraterrestrial intelligence). The vast majority do not. The SETI Institute, in collaboration with the University of California Berkeley, are building a telescope called the Allen Telescope Array. Some of the scientists at the SETI Institute will use it for SETI. Other astronomers will use it for non-SETI related projects.

SETI@home is a project at the University of California Berkeley. It is neither funded by nor affiliated with the SETI Institute. In fact, some SETI scientists at the SETI Institute, dislike SETI@home because it directs attention (and therefore funding) away from SETI Institute projects. Competing projects also have some at the institute worried that someone else may be the first to detect extraterrestrial intelligence. For those reasons it is unlikely that SETI@home will ever be allowed to utilize data from the Allen Telescope Array.

From my vantage point, it appears that this confusion is promulgated by the SETI Institute. They would like the world to think that they are in control of all SETI related projects, and they would very much like to control all SETI related funding. At this point they feel that there is no advantage to preventing this confusion. In fact, scientists at the SETI Institute often drop the word "Institute" when they mention their affiliation, and just say they are "from SETI" or "with SETI".

Re:SETI Institute != SETI@home != SETI

[p3d0]

You wouldn't say "Physics gets a new particle accelerator," would you? Sure I would. What's wrong with that?

Like using dial up

[synonymous]

Hate to break it to y'all but. Using the electromagnetic spectrum like they are is kinda like google using a dial up modem to crawl the web. The advanced life forms can travel the universe in an instant. Why would they bother sending mail via Pony Express? Not to mention that we are in contact now and further into the past than any recorded history, even past petroglyphics. Here's a good link to something a little more believable for you people to busy with your earthly passions.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3874568473252816241

Re:But... lets thing about this logically...

[autophile]

Well, then, maybe he should have said, instead of a spoon, it's a hundred spoon-gnomes, each with their own spoon. That would have been not only a better analogy, but amusing as well!

--Rob

Your calculations are wrong; SETI is viable

[Anonymous Coward]

"I think SETI is a hopeless pipe dream."
I assume you think your erroneous application of signal theory leads to that conclusion. More studious and clever people than you have already illustrated the viability of signal reception at these distances, and your analysis is quite simply wrong. Your "EE" expertise has led you astray: when you ask someone who only knows about whales a question about ducks, he talks about whales anyway. Radio astronomy has had these things down for more than 50 years, and you're a day late and a dollar short.

We're interested in obtaining a signal against a background. The antenna temperature, Ta, determines this:

Ta = [(pi^2)/16k] * (W/r^2) * (D1^2 * D2^2) / lambda^2
where
k is Boltzmann's constant
W is the power per unit of bandwidth of the source
D1 and D2 are the diameters of the receiving antenna and (hypothetical) transmitter antenna
lambda is the wavelength

The signal, per the common example, is 1420.4GHz => 21.1cm = .211m. The brightness temperature of the galaxy as viewed from Earth's surface is around 5-10 Kelvin at that wavelength.

What about the noise temperature of the receiver? A receiver must have sufficiently low Tn, otherwise it's louder than the signal it tries to measure:

Tn-rms = Tn / sqrt(t * Bw)
where
Tn-rms is the root-mean-square value in question
Tn is the noise temperature of the receiver in question
t is the integration time (how long we keep the lid off the photon bucket)
Bw is the receiver's bandwidth

The noise temperature of modern low-noise amplifiers is much lower. A rule of thumb for present-day: 1 Kelvin per GHz, plus 1 Kelvin, so 2~3 Kelvin for this LNA, and there are lower noise devices available for a price, but only to a point. The cosmic background noise is larger than the receiver noise!

Let's combine them and rearrange, and see just what kinds of power and distance we need:
r = (pi/4) * sqrt(W / k*Tn) * (D1 * D2 / lambda) * (t * Bw)^.25

Suppose we have a 50kW transmitter, use the 300m Arecibo dish to transmit and receive, use a bandpass of 1Hz (this is reasonable), and an integration time of about 20 minutes (1,000s). Go ahead; do the math--

r = (pi/4) * sqrt(50000 / [(1.38e-16)*3] * (300 * 300 / .211) = 4.63*10^18 meters

Which is 489 light years.
Yes, given currently manufactured technology, the Arecibo dish could communicate with an identical dish at exactly the distance in the article, given a modest 50kW transmitter. I picked numbers to contrive the distance in question, but all of them are available with current technology, and most of them are already installed and operational at Arecibo Observatory. What if we chose a MW transmitter (available), or halved the wavelength to 10cm, or used a bigger (perhaps virtual) dish, or a lower noise antenna? All of these things would MASSIVELY improve the resolvable range of the transmission. 5000 light years is well within our current technology-limited broadcast/reception range. The hard part, as discussed by others here, is justifying implementing this much hardware and employment (versus buying ONE SINGLE JET FIGHTER).

If you think the problem with SETI lies in its technical shortcomings, you're sorely mistaken. The SETI program is a long shot for other, more difficult scientific and borderline philosophical reasons, but close examination of the physical problem at hand (which you clearly have not done) illustrates that it's not as long as your cynicism would have you judge in lieu of actual thought. You're welcome to argue your opinions, but don't mis-apply one inapt little corner of signal theory as proof that your perception of the world is, in fact, reality.

+5 Insightful? The mods have been bamboozled by unfamiliar equations. As for my analysis? Go ahead-- verify it with your favorite relevant textbook, for a change; please.

Re:SETI is hopeless : WRONG

[pablo_max]

No no no, That equation does not work in a vacuum. The air loss needs something else...namely....air ;) How is it that we can pick up the little tiny signal coming from voyager which went so far beyond us is your equation worked in a vacuum? I guess we would not.

200 billion stars?

[Aeros]

Last I counted here was only 190 billion stars...back to counting

the REAL problem with radio

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides the signal strength, interference issues mentioned here, everyone seems to forget the obvious.

With radio nobody will ever have a "conversation" with ETs.

With interstellar distances, radio receivers (and telescopes, for that matter) are time machines.

Any intelligent signals we pickup will have been sent hundreds/thousands/millions/etc of years ago.

If, and it's likely given an infinite universe, that somewhere out there is a civilization sending radio signals, today, we will have long decomposed back into dust before the signals reach SETI's antennas. Conversely, the signals we are sending won't be received by anyone else until we are long dead and gone and we have advanced to the point where radio is a distant memory, a curious technology equated with cave drawing, on the evolutionary scale.

It's nice that we're trying, since it does provide people with jobs, and it does help advance technology somewhat, but at interstellar distances, any technology limited to the speed of light is pretty much useless. Radio isn't even practical for communicating with our own satellites - it takes 3 hours to send a ping to Cassini and get a response for example.

he's at free annual Boulder conference

[peter303]

Every April the University of Colorado in Boulder convenes a week long World Affairs Conference with luminaries in science, arts, and politics conducting about 300 panels on all kinds of topics. Its free and some people actually plan their vacations to attend this. Seth has been for several years.

RE from the hello-is-there-anybody-out-there dept.

[Rockin'Robert]

NO.
We're all underground,
occasionally surfacing for lunch
on cattle and free range humanoids.
RR

Aliens & US Wire Tap Laws

[Dareth]

Maybe the aliens are encrypting their radio transmissions making them indistinguishable from background noise?

Given the current US wiretap rules, that may not be a bad precaution.

Did anyone else read that as "alien array"?

[Iowan41]

Amazing what you can do with old satellite dishes. But ansible traffic tends to be very secure by nature, they won't be able to pick that up.

equation typo fixed

[Anonymous Coward]

Forgot to type out the last factor:

(pi/4) * sqrt(50000 / [(1.38e-16)*3] * (300 * 300 / .211)

should of course be

r = (pi/4) * sqrt(50000 / [(1.38e-16)*3] * (300 * 300 / .211) * (1000 * 1)^.25

so that the right-hand side (r that is) actually does come out to 4.63*10^18 meters.