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Search For Alien Life On 86 Planets Begins

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

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."

18 of 248 comments (clear)

  1. crop circles by Beliskner · · Score: 4, Funny

    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?
    1. Re:crop circles by supertrinko · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Have you factored the rotation of the earth into this plan of yours?

      --
      If it rhymes it must be true.
    2. Re:crop circles by JoshuaZ · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I would first search the exoplanets pointed to by the most interesting crop circles from the global crop circles database [cropcircleresearch.com] 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

      So the aliens are coming down to Earth from hundreds of light years away, and leaving hints in crop circles about what planets they are coming from instead of just saying hi? And they happen to use a calling card that is easily duplicated by low level technology? And the aliens happened to start in a handful of Western countries and then spread their message around the globe?

      I was talking to my barber a few days ago. Nice chap by the name of Occam. He had some interesting things to say about this sort of claim.

    3. Re:crop circles by Nidi62 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      why do the hard work when the people with rope and wooden boards have done it for us,

      Fixed that for you

      --
      The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
    4. Re:crop circles by Time_Ngler · · Score: 3, Funny

      It's obviously a project being run by an alien bureaucratic agency of some kind. Probably has been running for centuries to keep the "wooden board and rope" skilled aliens employed.

    5. Re:crop circles by Beliskner · · Score: 3, Funny

      Have you factored the rotation of the earth into this plan of yours?

      The aliens would probably expect us to be able to solved all trivial problems like that.

      --
      A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
    6. Re:crop circles by Opportunist · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Hmm... odd, most reports about contacts have been from some hillbillies high on moonshine.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    7. Re:crop circles by TapeCutter · · Score: 3, Informative

      If this data (and I call it data, because it isn't useful enough to be called knowledge), were good for anything, then why doesn't the private industry seem interested in it[?] This type of research is just welfare for otherwise bright individuals who decided to get an ivory tower education so they could spend their lives on meaningless pursuits.

      Because private industry isn't interested in "meaning", they're interested in profit. Oh, and "fixing the earth" is a political problem, not a resource problem.

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    8. Re:crop circles by tnk1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That's the silliest thing I have ever heard. Even if the aliens have found a way to generate universal peace amongst their own kind right now, they are the results of evolution just like we are, and they had to adapt to their own biospheres much like we did. That means a capacity for conflict. It is unlikely that an alien species who has any idea about evolution and natural selection, which is to say any alien civilization who could detect us or vice-versa, would stare at us in some sort of uncomprehending disbelief.

      The only real possibility of that happening is that they are so old a civilization that they have actually forgotten where they themselves came from and even then, they can't be ignorant of the basic conditions that life has to deal with. More likely, they know exactly why we kill one another, they probably have just as much history of it as we do.

      In other words, I find the whole E.T. concept of advanced alien civilizations made up of beings who can travel through space in starships, but somehow be unable to comprehend the basic facts of life to be ridiculous.

  2. too bad they cancelled TPF-1 by rubycodez · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:too bad they cancelled TPF-1 by Insanity+Defense · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Short sighted? Or did they think ahead and realize that finding life bearing worlds hurts their religious voters?

  3. What exactly.. by slackzilly · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ..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."
    1. Re:What exactly.. by jcampbelly · · Score: 5, Informative

      Over the planet's transit over the face of the star, from our angle, the light interacts with the atmosphere of the planet before passing through to be seen by our telescopes. The light is broken down into component frequencies to determine the chemicals present and their relative concentrations in the atmosphere. Some chemical signatures can be understood as the the result of natural processes, while others do not seem to occur without the influence of biological processes. We are looking for 'unnatural atmospheres' modified by exotic processes that cannot be readily explained under natural conditions.

  4. Re:Accessible data? by belthize · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. Telescope in West Virginia by belthize · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Telescope in West Virginia by Scott+Ransom · · Score: 4, Informative

      Actually, they aren't using the GBT's spectrometer. They are using an instrument that I helped to develop for pulsar research called GUPPI, which uses FPGAs and GPUs to real-time process 800MHz of radio bandwidth.

      However, in this case they are using GUPPI's GPU nodes to record 800MHz of Nyquist-sampled band centered at 1.5GHz. Each sample is 2-bits, and with 2 polarizations, that is how they get 800MB/s (or almost a GB/s as it says in the article).

      If you want some basic info about GUPPI, you can find it here:

      https://safe.nrao.edu/wiki/bin/view/CICADA/NGNPP

  6. News from Seti@Home by ah42 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  7. Re:lol by aXis100 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.