Ready, Set, Contact? SETI Goes Wide

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SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence which has long suffered from a lack of resources with which to carry out its mission of looking for signals from the stars is getting a major shot in the arm over the next few years. According to this story Microsoft's Paul Allen has given SETI a $30 million gift which will,

...will enable researchers to search a million stars over 10 billion radio channels.

"The cosmic haystack is about to get enormously bigger,"
said Jill Tarter, director of SETI's research department.

She declined to estimate the odds that this new pitchfork will actually uncover an alien civilization. But she has a growing sense of excitement as the new telescope prepares to sweep the heavens for beeps and burps that could signal alien intelligence.

"It's hard to imagine how stupendous it would feel to find
something," Tarter said in an interview at SETI's Mountain View headquarters.

A plain-spoken woman with a shock of silver hair cut short, Tarter was
the model for the Jodie Foster character of Ellie Arroway in the 1997 movie "Contact," about the discovery of an alien broadcast. She has spent more than four decades -- her entire career -- trying to answer the are-we-alone question.

Now 64, she still hopes that, like Arroway, she will get her eureka
moment. If humans do find something, everything we think we know about our place in the universe will be in for serious rewriting, she says. Human beings would no longer be creation's crowning achievement. In fact, we might not even make honorable mention.

"If we find a second technological civilization, we
will know there are many," Tarter said. Earth would be transformed from an outpost to just another commuter station on a nearly infinite railroad line.

But Tarter is trying to keep her expectations low.

"It's also possible we are unique," she said.

Contrary to decades of bad science fiction movies and other odd stories, aliens are unlikely to show up at our doorstep and are far more likely to be detected remotely, not that this will be especially easy.

To catch a signal from an alien race, you either have to build an
enormous dish, like the 1,000-foot-diameter Arecibo facility in Puerto Rico, or connect many smaller dishes together, like New Mexico's Very Large Array, which has 27 dishes, each 82 feet across.

At Hat Creek, computers will combine
data from its 350 dishes to produce, in effect, one giant telescope. "What we're doing is creating a big dish, 90 acres across," Forster said.

Even with this level of technology, the SETI scientists acknowledge it's a quixotic quest.

On a recent afternoon, senior astronomer Seth Shostak, 64, was showing a visitor around SETI's headquarters when a harried-looking white-haired man rushed by.

"This is Frank Drake," Shostak said reverentially.

The stocky, distracted man extended his meaty hand, shook quickly and sped off, a little like the White Rabbit from "Alice in Wonderland."

Drake disappeared down the rabbit hole of alien research decades ago. He not only mounted what many people count as the first serious experiment to search for aliens, he also created the landmark Drake Equation, a set of mathematical assumptions that attempts to predict how many advanced civilizations might exist in the Milky Way galaxy.

The equation is N = R* x fp x ne x fe x fi x fc x L. It says that the number of civilizations we might communicate with (denoted by N) equals the rate of star formation (R*) multiplied by the fraction of stars that have planets (fp) multiplied by the average number of planets around a star that can support life (ne) multiplied by the number of those planets that actually develop life (fe) multiplied by the fraction that develop intelligent life (fi) multiplied by the fraction that develop technology that can be detected from Earth (fc).

All this is then multiplied by the length of time a technological civilization can exist (L). Remember, our world entered the broadcast age only a century ago, and has already come close at least once -- the Cuban missile crisis -- to snuffing itself out.

Some researchers have suggested that the answer could be up to 1 million alien civilizations in the Milky Way. Drake's solution? Ten thousand alien civilizations, in a galaxy of 100 billion stars.

If any signal is detected the likelihood is that it will be from a civilization at least thousands of years older than we are. If such a signal could be translated (a big "if") it may hold answers to questions that mankind has wondered about from the beginning of history: How was the universe formed? Why? Is there a purpose to existence?

Its the possibility of answers to questions like that keep the scientists who are working at SETI involved and fires their imaginations. And keep many of the rest of us out here rooting for their success.

To Seek Out New Life...

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The search for life on other worlds ramped up again yesterday when...

The Mars Phoenix lander touched down in the far north of the Red Planet, after a 680 million-km (423 million-mile) journey from Earth.

The probe is equipped with a robotic arm to dig for water-ice thought to be buried beneath the surface.

It will begin examining the site for evidence of the building blocks of life in the next few days.

Phoenix is just the latest in a wide ranging group of programs, at least part of whose goal it is to detect life elsewhere in the universe.

SETI continues to scan the skies looking for intelligent signals of non-terrestrial origin. Enlisting the public in the search, SETI allows thousands of non-scientists to participate by having standard pc's analyze the data SETI collects. You can download the software do just that here.

To date astronomers have detected over 230 extraterrestrial planets orbiting other stars:

The scores of newly identified exoplanets are the result of the numerous techniques now available to planet-hunting scientists. Peg 51 b was discovered using the radial velocity technique whereby astronomers look for slight wiggles in a star's motion caused by the gravitational tug of orbiting planets. This so-called wobble technique was also used to spot Gliese 581 C.

The transit method, another tool used by planet hunters, requires that a planet pass directly in front of its star as seen from Earth. The planet blocks some of the star's light that would reach Earth, and this slight dip in starlight can be used to calculate the planet's size.

Scientists can also spot alien worlds by observing the way a planet-harboring foreground star bends and brightens light from a background star. This technique is called gravitational microlensing. The presence of an extrasolar planet can also be inferred from the dusty debris disks that shroud some stars.

Raising the stakes

Stakes in the search for extrasolar planets have risen even higher with the recent launch of the European Space Agency's planet-hunting spacecraft, COROT, which will use the transit technique to monitor thousands of stars simultaneously. Over the course of its two-and-a-half year mission, it is expected to find up to 40 new rocky worlds, along with tens of new gas giants.

The NASA Kepler mission, scheduled to launch next year, is even more ambitious. The spacecraft would be the first capable of detecting Earth-sized planets in our galaxy. NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder mission is currently on the backburner indefinitely, but it would have the same capability as Kepler. If launched, the satellites will mark an important step in the quest to answer one of humanity's oldest questions: Are we alone in the universe?

That's if Earth-bound astronomers don't make the discovery first. The discovery of Gliese 581 C showed the radial velocity technique could spot planets much smaller than scientists had predicted only a few years ago.

Here's an interesting video on the topic:



The Phoenix lander is an important contribution to what is becoming a crowded field of study.

Hot Air also reports on the landing

NASA Wonders What To Say To An Alien

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This story today from NASA:

English students at the University of Wyoming are being encouraged to consider the possibility that humanity might one day make contact with aliens and then not know what to say.

"Interstellar Message Composition", a creative writing class, is believed to be the first of its kind to engage writers in a potential cosmic conversation, say its founders.

"We’ve thought a lot about how we might communicate with other worlds, but we haven’t thought much about what we’d actually say," Prof Jeffrey Lockwood, the course leader, told ABC News.

The course, currently being taken by 11 students, is partly financed by Nasa’s Wyoming Space Grant Consortium, which sponsors educational and research projects in the state that support the agency’s missions.

Among questions tackled in Prof Lockwood’s class is how aliens might communicate, whether they would be able to translate human language, and whether they would be able to see or hear.

One student, Dixie Thoman, created a poem about menstruation with syllables arranged in a mathematically harmonious order, known as the Fibonacci sequence.

Recordings of the Brandenburg Concerto and Johnny B Goode are among those that have been beamed into space over the years in an attempt to provoke an extraterrestrial response.

The course is being advised by Douglas Vakoch, director of interstellar message composition for the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in California.

"It could be tomorrow that we’ll need to be ready to decide if we reply [to aliens]," he said. "It’s really critical to have people start thinking about it and it makes sense to start with writers. These are people who are really trying to express the human condition."

As we saw recently, even the Vatican is open to the idea of alien intelligence, so while this may appear to be somewhat frivilous to many, it would seem a lot less so if the SETI program were, all of a sudden to get a hit tomorrow. Good for NASA.