The Allen Telescope Array, a major instrument designed to speed up our hunt for intelligent beings elsewhere in the galaxy, has been turned off.
On April 15, this phalanx of small antennas, built to eavesdrop on signals that might reach us from civilizations hundreds of trillions of miles distant, was put into park, and its multimillion channel receivers powered down. It's as if Columbus's armada of ships, having barely cleared Cadiz, were suddenly ordered back to Spain.
The reason for the shutdown is both prosaic and lamentable. Money. The Array was built as a joint project between the SETI Institute (my employer) and the University of California at Berkeley's Radio Astronomy Laboratory. The former raised the funds to construct the instrument, and UC Berkeley was responsible for operations. But the grievous financial situation of the State of California and reduced funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) have sharply curtailed the university's research budget, and private donations haven't yet been adequate to keep the Array in operation.
In tough economic times, a lot of folks who hear this story will dismiss its importance. After all, with problems like expensive health care, a weakened education system, and pervasive joblessness, it's unlikely that people are going to march in the streets to get the hunt for ET back on track. They're more likely to shake their heads, and profess that this sort of exploration is superfluous.
Frankly, it's easy to suggest that basic research, the kind that's done for curiosity rather than to spawn a product, should take a back seat to immediate needs. I still recall the schoolboy in Australia who wanted to know why, with people starving in the world's baleful backwaters, the U.S. was spending hundreds of millions of dollars on "motorized skateboards sent to Mars." From his point of view, they did little more than paw at the dirt and make some nice photos.
The answer is that discovering new things is what distinguishes our species. That's not glib; that's the difference between the grinding monotony of the Middle Ages and life after the Renaissance. Are we destined to merely endure, or to flourish?
It's hard to imagine anything more interesting than learning how we're woven into the enormous tapestry of existence. Where did our universe come from? How special is our world, and how special are we?
We allocate tens of billions of dollars annually to NASA, NSF and academia in search of the answers. Sure, nobody will make a fortune if we figure out why the Big Bang happened. But just about everyone would like to know.
Finding evidence of intelligence elsewhere in the galaxy would also be profoundly interesting. We would know if sophisticated beings are rare -- possibly even miraculous -- or a cosmic commonplace.
So let's put it in perspective: the Americans and the Europeans have invested enormous effort in getting spacecraft to Mars, in an attempt to unravel the history of this tantalizing planet. But most people -- and that includes scientists as well as the citizenry -- are less interested in the particulars of Red Planet geology than in the question of whether this world ever hosted life. Was there ever anything as lively as pond scum on Mars?
This hunt for alien biology in our solar system costs you a few dollars per year. What would be the surcharge to augment this exploration by adding a radio experiment that could turn up life on worlds around other stars? Life that's not microbial, not mindless moss, but as clever as we are?
A few additional cents.
The SETI Institute is making strenuous efforts to resuscitate the Allen Telescope Array and put it back on the air. Obviously, I have a dog in this fight -- I'm part of the search team that uses the Array.
But let me suggest that you are, too. You're a member of the first generation possessing technology good enough to turn up some cosmic company, and your financial support could restart this instrument. We can never prove that we're alone in the universe. But the Allen Telescope Array could prove that we're not.
For more information, or to help resuscitate the Allen Telescope Array , please visit the SETI Institute's homepage.
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Now that that's out of the way.
How can we allow this to happen! Mothballing this array at this time when we are starting to have the information for a really earnest search for extra terrestrial technological intelligence is stupid. A piddly triffiling 1.5 million is all we need? The pentagon alone... I mean the actual building probably spends as much on toilet paper in a given month. We can find this money... this is NOT a pork barrel project.
At a time when the US is loosing it's great physics instrument at FermiLab, and loosing it's human spaceflight ability, this is one more sign of the overall decay of basic research in the USA. As a theoretical cosmologist myself...it seems to find secure and true research opportunity I need to learn French or German and move to Europe.
http://www.nowpublic.com/culture/contact-day-everything-will-change
this does not mean i don't advocate developing the technology for contact - we Must. but we can use similar technology for pulsar detection (which is an extremely important area of astronomy) so it is applicable elsewhere .. plz skim the essay when you have time .. my 'bottom line' here is that we must develop technology where ever we can (genetics, space, and AI), apply them, and evolve our spirituality to the point so that any ETs perhaps 'waiting in the wings' will welcome us into their brother/sisterhood :) ^^ may God bless you for reading this :) sam iam
Once we do that, we can go a bit further and find it in the news media.
After that, let's focus on the rest of the galaxy.
SETI should try for loftier aims than sitting at a listening post. How about sifting through cataloged data of astronomical observations to look for the large-scale system and star cluster engineering that we might expect from an advanced civilization? Impossible orbits, shifts in star or planet spectra that indicate massive energy harvesting, etc.. There's more than one way to skin this cat.
I agree that we need such a listening post, just in case. However, SETI, much like NASA, seems to have lost all vision, and focused more on keeping their funding secure than inspiring people enough to do more to support it. What you're doing is valuable, just not very valuable by itself. I hate to say it, but there it is.
I understand your instinct to defend SETI. I have it too. But the fact is, it was unlikely to succeed in the first place, and more comprehensive/unified efforts need to be undertaken to address this problem. That's all I'm really saying. SETI and NASA have all but forgotten their wider fundamental mandates and purpose in favor of tightly focused interests and petty power struggles. And they're both dying from this cancer. I didn't say these were pretty truths. But they are truths nonetheless.
We're also currently moving into quantum encryption, and possibly even quantum-based communication. We've even begun to think that the truly best way to talk over interstellar distances, is instant communication via quantum-entangled matter, or even light. Your argument is unfortunately, invalid.
Reeses Pieces.
They like them here and there. They like them everywhere. They even like them in a box, with..eh...fox...errr...on a boat with a goat...
You see where I'm going with this.
That said, isn't there something other than searching for alien radio signals that all that equipment could do? Maybe something that would pay the rent, and let the search go on, at least after-hours? Not knowing myself, I couldn't say. Just posing that question to a higher intelligence.
China and India have money and equally bright, talented research scientists, why not offshore SETI and sell all of the equipment we've been using to any country that is willing to carry on the research?
I consider the folks involved with SETI to be intelligent. What is one hallmark of intelligence? Seth Shostak stated it well in his essay:
"...discovering new things is what distinguishes our species. That's not glib; that's the difference between the grinding monotony of the Middle Ages and life after the Renaissance. Are we destined to merely endure, or to flourish?"
However, it's to our advantage to explore as much of the awesome cosmos as we can. The human race is insatiably curious which bodes well for our species.
I personally believe that one of the big reasons officials don't want real work toward space colonization to be done is quite simple: The powers that be wouldn't necessarily have control over it. What do ALL colonies eventually do? What did we in the U.S. do?
That's right. They become, or seek to become independent once self-sufficiency is established. That terrifies the power-mad like nothing else will. The prospect of a revolt. They're having a hard enough time keeping their boots on the necks of the Earth's population as it is. Why make trouble for themselves?
As it is, they're trying to make space travel an exclusively private industry enterprise. If you think the mining camps of the 1800's were bad, wait till the company can take away your air, just because you dared complain or tried to whistleblow. Just imagine how many corners on safety and maintenance they'll cut, and how many lives will be lost to make a buck. Won't it be great?
I weep for the future of our species, and any other species unlucky enough to cross our path.
Radio waves are useful for transmitting information, but it wastes lots of energy to emit them at high enough power to be detectable from hundreds of light years away, and it's completely unnecessary if you've got decent antennas. High-energy industrial processes wouldn't be allowed to emit radio noise at that volume, and interfere with communications. We already do that. So it seems unlikely that we can detect alien civilizations from far enough away to have good odds of finding one.
But that's no reason to waste a perfectly good radio telescope. It would have been doing lots of good astronomy, at a very reasonable price.