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SETI Hangs up the Phone

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Christopher O'Brien

Christopher O'Brien

Back in the Saddle Aginn
Staff member
SETI Institute to shut down alien-seeking radio dishes
By Lisa M. Krieger

Article HERE:

If E.T. phones Earth, he'll get a "disconnect" signal.
Lacking the money to pay its operating expenses, Mountain View's SETI Institute has pulled the plug on the renowned Allen Telescope Array, a field of radio dishes that scan the skies for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.

In an April 22 letter to donors, SETI Institute CEO Tom Pierson said that last week the array was put into "hibernation," safe but nonfunctioning, because of inadequate government support.

The timing couldn't be worse, say SETI scientists. After millenniums of musings, this spring astronomers announced that 1,235 new possible planets had been observed by Kepler, a telescope on a space satellite. They predict that dozens of these planets will be Earth-sized -- and some will be in the "habitable zone," where the temperatures are just right for liquid water, a prerequisite of life as we know it.

"There is a huge irony," said SETI Director Jill Tarter, "that a time when we discover so many planets to look at, we don't have the operating funds to listen."
SETI senior astronomer Seth Shostak compared the project's suspension to "the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria being put into dry dock. "... This is about exploration, and we want to keep the thing operational. It's no good to have it sit idle.

"We have the radio antennae up, but we can't run them without operating funds," he added. "Honestly, if everybody contributed just 3 extra cents on their 1040 tax forms, we could find out if we have cosmic company."

<SNIP>
 
Now I don't want to sound as if I'm not for searching the skies cause I am. But, I find it ironic that ole Seth would say 'now that we have observed more planets." Well, does he think that just because we have "observed" them that they can hear us now? Hmmmm? :) I mean couldn't they have heard us anyway? I know, I know he more than likely means now he will know where to point his antena (that's what she said.) :) But, it just seemed kind of funny. I guess I'm in a quirky mood today.

:)
 
I recently had dinner with a man that knows Shostak very well. He says that Shostak honestly believes that SETI is a few years at most from detecting signals. Apparently he has known him for 10 years and just within the last year or so Shostak has started saying this privately.

Personally, I think it was a massive long shot.
 
In a funny coincidence, I happen to be reading Confessions of an Alien Hunter right now. Although I really like Shostak and his writings, he has an easily discernible chip on his shoulder about SETI's funding and he uses a lot of metaphors to convince you that SETI represents the onset of the next stage of human history (he uses Columbus and the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria analogy often) and a lot of statistics to persuade you that this is just decades away. ("... either we will discover evidence for ET within the lifetime within the present generation or we've erred badly in our presumptions." (in reference to Drake and Sagan's calculations of the likelihood of finding an ET signal)). Shostak and Tarter both seem to operate under the presumption that finding an ET signal would fundamentally change the world and that the government would start throwing wads of cash at SETI, thinking that ET's would help us solve our problems. I would like to think that this would happen...but I just don't.

I feel very ambivalent about this project (and always have) because I think looking for ET is a worthy goal and that radio astronomy is the best way to go about it given our current level of technology and understanding of physics, but if everybody added three cents to their 1040's for a remedy for our social ills we might really get somewhere towards making this a better place to live. Invest in cleaner energy (because wars have been and will continue to be about procuring cheap energy), invest in clean water and food sources (because not enough people have this now and the population is growing), invest in education (so people can aspire for the stars again). If we get a signal from ET, are we really going to be seeking a bailout, like a bank that made bad decisions? This is my reservation with Shostak and his pov; we can be and should be prepared to be better when we meet ET. It's idealistic perhaps but not any more so than SETI.

What's sad about this isn't the fall of SETI itself so much as the decline of things that inspire dreams and fire the imagination. I don't want the following generations of people to be lemmings who care only about buying the hottest new phone and maintaining the status quo.
 
SETI Setback

from the Associated Press

By Marcus Wohlsen - 26 Apr 2011

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - In the mountains of Northern California, a field of radio dishes that look like giant dinner plates waited for years for the first call from intelligent life among the stars.

But they're not listening anymore.

Cash-strapped governments, it seems, can no longer pay the interstellar phone bill.

Astronomers at the SETI Institute said a steep drop in state and federal funds has forced the shutdown of the Allen Telescope Array, a powerful tool in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, an effort scientists refer to as SETI.

"There's plenty of cosmic real estate that looks promising," Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the institute, said Tuesday. "We've lost the instrument that's best for zeroing in on these better targets."

The shutdown came just as researchers were preparing to point the radio dishes at a batch of new planets.

About 50 or 60 of those planets appear to be about the right distance from stars to have temperatures that could make them habitable, Shostak said.

The 42 radio dishes had scanned deep space since 2007 for signals from alien civilizations while also conducting research into the structure and origin of the universe.

SETI Institute chief executive Tom Pierson said in an email to donors last week that the University of California, Berkeley, has run out of money for day-to-day operation of the dishes.

"Unfortunately, today's government budgetary environment is very difficult, and new solutions must be found," Pierson wrote.

The $50 million array was built by SETI and UC Berkeley with the help of a $30 million donation from Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen. Operating the dishes cost about $1.5 million a year, mostly to pay for the staff of eight to 10 researchers and technicians to operate the facility.

An additional $1 million a year was needed to collect and sift the data from the dishes.

The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, the billionaire's philanthropic venture, had no immediate plans to provide more funding to the facility, said David Postman, a foundation spokesman.

The institute, however, was hopeful the U.S. Air Force might find the dishes useful as part of its mission to track space debris and provide funding to keep the equipment operating.

The SETI Institute was founded in 1984 and has received funding from NASA, the National Science Foundation and several other federal programs and private foundations. Other projects that will continue include the development of software and tools to be used in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Despite the shutdown of the Allen Telescope Array, the search for E.T. will go on using other telescopes such as a dish at Arecibo in Puerto Rico, the largest radio telescope in the world, Shostak said.

The difference, he said, was that SETI researchers can point the Arecibo telescope at selected sites in space for only about two weeks a year.

While the telescope in Northern California is not as powerful, it could be devoted to the search year-round.

"It has the advantage that you can point it where you want to point it and you can keep pointing it in that direction for as long as we want it to," Shostak said.

The dishes also are unique in the ability to probe for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations while gathering more general scientific data.

"That made the telescope a double-barreled threat," said Leo Blitz, a professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley and former director of the observatory that includes the Allen Telescope Array.

Original URL: http://apnews.myway.com/article/20110426/D9MRKPU80.html
 
New SETI search at Green Bank

US astronomers launch search for alien life on 86 planets

May 14, 2011 - by Kerry Sheridan

A massive radio telescope in rural West Virginia has begun listening for signs of alien life on 86 possible Earth-like planets, US astronomers said Friday.

The giant dish began this week pointing toward each of the 86 planets -- culled from a list of 1,235 possible planets identified by NASA's Kepler space telescope -- and will gather 24 hours of data on each one.

"It's not absolutely certain that all of these stars have habitable planetary systems, but they're very good places to look for ET," said University of California at Berkeley graduate student Andrew Siemion.

The mission is part of the SETI project, which stands for Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, launched in the mid 1980s.

Last month the SETI Institute announced it was shuttering a major part of its efforts -- a 50 million dollar project with 42 telescope dishes known as the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) -- due to a five million dollar budget shortfall.

ATA began in 2007 and was operated in partnership by the UC Berkeley Radio Astronomy Lab, which has hosted several generations of such experiments. It was funded by the SETI Institute and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

With ATA's dishes in hibernation for now, astronomers hope the powerful Green Bank Telescope, a previous incarnation of which was felled in a windstorm in 1988, will provide targeted information about potential life-supporting planets.

"Our search employs the largest fully steerable radio telescope on the planet, and the most sensitive radio telescope in the world capable of undertaking a SETI search of this kind," Siemion told AFP.

"We will be looking at a much wider range of frequencies and signal types than has ever been possible before," he added, describing the instrumentation as "at the very cutting edge of radio astronomy technology."

The surface of the telescope is 100 by 110 meters and it can record nearly one gigabyte of data per second, Siemion said.

The 17 million pound (7.7 million kilogram) telescope became operational in 2000 and is a project of the NSF's National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

"We've picked out the planets with nice temperatures -- between zero and 100 degrees Celsius -- because they are a lot more likely to harbor life," said physicist Dan Werthimer.

Werthimer heads a three-decade long SETI project in Puerto Rico, home of the world's largest radio telescope, Arecibo. However that project could not observe the same area of the northern sky as the Green Bank telescope, he said.

"With Arecibo, we focus on stars like our Sun, hoping that they have planets around them that emit intelligent signals," Werthimer said in a statement.

"But we've never had a list of planets like this before."

The Green Bank Telescope can scan 300 times the range of frequencies that Arecibo could, meaning that it can collect the same amount of data in one day that Arecibo could in one year.

The project will likely take about a year to complete, and will be helped by a team of one million at-home astronomers, known as SETI@home users, who will help process the data on personal computers.

(c) 2011 AFP

Article at: US astronomers launch search for alien life on 86 planets
 
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