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Search For Alien Life On 86 Planets Begins
liqs8143 writes "Astronomers from the United States have begun searching for alien life on 86 possible earth-like planets. A massive radio telescope that listens for signs of alien life is being used for this project. These 86 planets are short-listed from 1235 possible planets detected by NASA's Kepler telescope. The mission is part of the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, launched in the mid 1980s. A giant dish pointing towards each of the 86 planets will gather 24 hours of data, starting from this week."
I would first search the exoplanets pointed to by the most interesting crop circles from the global crop circles database why do the hard work when the aliens have done it for us, just draw a line from the centre of the Earth, through the crop circle to the appropriate starsystem
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
Just be sure we're up on the latest copyright laws from alien worlds. We wouldn't want to get some giant metallic radiation sphere orbiting our planet as a cease and desist order!
we need to take spectroscopic measurements of earth-sized and super-earth-sized planets to detect evidence of life's biochemistry. But our short-sited congress cancelled the Terrestrial Planet Finder. The most monumental scientific discovery of mankind would be life elsewhere, it will need a little investment which is so very minuscule compared to the money we waste on enriching mega-corporations, imperialism and warmongering.
..are the signs of alien life they will listen for?
- "If one man can create that much hate, you can only imagine how much love we as a togetherness can create."
Data from all NSF funded instruments are in the public domain after a 'suitable' period for the primary investigator who proposed the actual science with the instrument has had crack at it.
For the telescopes this tends to be 1 year from observing, after that the data is available to all. It sounds like the data from this project will wave that 1 year period and be available for SETI@home as soon as it's done.
They'll intercept transmissions of our reality TV shows, decide that something like that can't be allowed to pollute the universe and then proceed to nuke the whole planet from orbit.
Not sure why the author felt it was necessary to repeatedly reference 'a radio telescope in rural West Virginia' without giving an
actual link or reference to the GBT instead of yet another self referential physorg link.
The Green Bank Telescope GBT (http://www.gb.nrao.edu/) is a very impressive instrument just from an engineering stand point.
If you're even in the area it's well worth visiting though it is a bit off the beaten path.
With it's spectrometer (http://www.gb.nrao.edu/gbsapp/) it's also a good instrument for interstellar medium (ISM) biochemistry surveys. That may be a more fruitful area of study unless of course somebody does pick up the Ff99x22dddlw race's version of an Olympic broadcast.
No alien life would intentionally broadcast it's planets location.
No iPhones there?
Yet.
Have gnu, will travel.
30 years? I do believe that radio communications are older than 30 years. Try about 100 years.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
From the relevant thread over at Seti@Home:
"Grad student Andrew Siemion reports that new modifications to a data recorder at Green Bank that we need for our Kepler SETI observations are now complete, thanks to a huge amount of help from Paul Demorest, a former grad student and one of initial authors of AstroPulse. Our first hour of test time is scheduled for this Saturday, 17:30 EDT. We'll be observing with 450 seconds per target on 90 Kepler field stars with interesting planet candidates (~habitable zone, ~Earth size, ~Earth period, ~several planets), then do a raster scan of the entire Kepler field. " - Eric Korpela
and rubber gloves.. who's got the gloves?
Neil deGrasse Tyson makes some interesting points in relation to this: (1) The five most common elements in the solar system are hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen. (2) Of all the elements, the one that makes the most compounds is carbon -- there are more compounds containing carbon than all other compounds of all of the other elements combined. (3) Life on Earth is made mostly of H, O, C, N, plus some trace elements, and is based on C. ("Organic chemistry" means the chemistry of carbon compounds.)
In other words, we are made out of the most common available materials (discounting helium which doesn't react with anything so doesn't produce interesting chemistry), including the element that produces the most complex and varied chemistry. So if you are looking for complex chemistry (i.e. life) elsewhere in the galaxy, it actually does seem to be a reasonable starting point to expect that it is fairly likely to also be based on the most common elements available, and on the element that produces the most complex and diverse chemistry.
OK smartypants, how are you going to detect technology that doesnt exist yet? How will you categorise signiatures from biochemical processes that we have never seen or studied?
We either have to use our own experience as a reference point or not look at all. I vote we look and hope we get lucky.
How far away are these planets I wonder? What would they see (assuming there's life there) if they did a similar experiment and pointed a radio telescope at us - based on previous comments if they are more that 100 light years away (I assume they are) they would get nothing!
Is this telescope even capable of detecting Earth-type leaky RF signals at such a great distance?
And if it's not, isn't this like cupping your ear and hoping to hear conversations in China?
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb