$100 Million More for SETI

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) advanced the other week when Yuri Milner (named after Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space) pledged $100 million to assist with this ongoing work.  He made his money in international investing and now he wants to help science in an area of thin funding.  The project is part of his ongoing Breakthrough Initiatives project.

Mr. Milner has pledged the funds over a 10-year period in a project called Breakthrough Listen.  The funds will go to covering 10 times more area in the sky than current SETI programs using three primary telescopes – the 100 Meter Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, the USA (“Green Bank Telescope”), and the 64-metre diameter Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia (“Parkes Telescope”).

The increased flow of data will be fed into the existing SETI@home program and its millions of linked volunteer computers from around the world to more rapidly analyze the information for signs of intelligent communication.

A separate project, Breakthrough Message, pledges  $1 million to those who can craft digital message representing all of us here on Earth to be sent out into the universe.

It is interesting to see Dr. Stephen Hawking at the kickoff given his fears about alien intelligence. He is probably fine with listening, but any message would probably be "please stay away." It is also great to see Frank Drake and Ann Druyan helping to lead this program.

One telescope that was considered for use is the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.  However, it was not to be. You can read the long drawn-out story in ScientificAmerican.  The last paragraph in the article says it all - we have a choice to learn and grow or bury our knowledge in a hole in the ground.

A New Way to Search for Extraterrestrial Life

Should we be interested in what other civilizations might be out there in our galaxy and try to communicate, or should we keep to ourselves in case they want to do us harm?  In terms of the latter worry, it is something Seth Shostak discusses in a recent New York Times piece, where he writes: 

It’s a worry we never used to have. Victorian-era scientists toyed with plans to use lanterns and burning pools of oil to contact postulated Martians. In the 1970s, NASA bolted greeting cards onto spacecraft that will leave our solar system and wander the vast reaches between the stars. The Pioneer and Voyager probes carry plaques and records with information about what humans look like and where Earth is, as well as a small sampling of our culture.

This new timidness is interesting, and is more likely a product of our own understanding of our history.  Yes, the Europeans were not benevolent people when they arrived on the shores of the Americas and engaged the natives.  One can only hope for a better scenario if we encounter a significantly advanced civilization from elsewhere. 

But let's say we just want to listen for now.  Well, the University of California, San Diego has a new way to find such communications.  The near-infrared optical SETI (NIROSETI) instrument will allow astronomers can expand the search for interstallar transmissions in the form of pulses of infrared light.  This goes beyond the radio and optical methods we have today.  In a press release, the university noted: 

Because infrared light penetrates farther through gas and dust than visible light, this new search will extend to stars thousands rather than merely hundreds of light years away. And the success of the Kepler Mission, which has found habitable planets orbiting stars both like and unlike our own, has prompted the new search to look for signals from a wider variety of stars.

The NIROSETI instrument has been installed at the University of California's Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton (see image above), just east of San Jose.  It was put into service last month. Now we just need to start pointing it at specific stars to see what happens.

Noteworthy Quote: Habitable Worlds

"The bottom line of this is something like one in five of all stars may have an analog to Earth. That's a lot of habitable worlds, and, indeed, the number of Earths in our own galaxy might be on the order of 50 billion."

-Statement by Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at California's SETI Institute, at the NASA/Library of Congress' two-day symposium, "Preparing For Discovery."