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New Telescope Array Goes Live For SETI

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

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.'"

2 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Shovel instead of a spoon? by Zymergy · · Score: 4, Informative

    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...)

  2. What about deflation? by mangu · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.