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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.'"
Only 42 installed so far. They are looking for donations to complete the array.
wot no sig
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.
That's a good name for it!
Inverse Square Law
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.
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.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
IANAS but I think it will, sooner or later, catch some informations that can be useful to non alien-related studies
!sig
...or will the new antenna rollout use the same BOINC client as I'm using now?
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
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
http://www.torrentfreak.com
http://neuron2neuron.blogspot.com
http://www.piracyisnotacrime.com
...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).
"That's no space station, Qfitzglb, that's a moon!"
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.
42. Why would they need more?
having a bunch of small radio telescopes is better than one big one- other than the cost factor.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
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.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
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.
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
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
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.
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?
There are solid scientific reasons to believe that we are unique. Rare Earth Hypothesis
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.
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...
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
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.
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.
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.
<Complete your profile by adding a signature!>
This is also used to talk to Stargate teams without tieing up the Stargate.
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?
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
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.
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"
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.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
...tubes?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
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.
:) In case they were serious, I suggest the look up the word "libertarian".
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.
That's Allen as in Paul Allen, you know.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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".)
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!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
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)
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
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".
Support SETI@home
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.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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
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
Towards the Singularity.
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?
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
"I think SETI is a hopeless pipe dream."
.211m. The brightness temperature of the galaxy as viewed from Earth's surface is around 5-10 Kelvin at that wavelength.
.211) = 4.63*10^18 meters
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 =
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 /
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.
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.
Weird, isn't it? It's almost as if the name of the array has something to do with billionaire Paul Allen!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
Last I counted here was only 190 billion stars...back to counting
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.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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.
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?
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.
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.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
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.
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.
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.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.