Posted on 05/14/2011 9:41:28 PM PDT by LibWhacker
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.
Godspeed SETI.
*PING*
Let me know when they find the long form birth certificate.
Cheers!
I wonder how old the imaging will be of the closest planet.
I wonder who is paying for this waste of time.
It’s not a waste of time if we find an intelligent life form out there. There’s certainly not one on this planet.
“A massive radio telescope in rural West Virginia has begun listening for signs of alien life”
Plenty of alien life in D.C.. Point ur telescopes in that direction.
What do we do if we find any? Complete lack of warp-drive technology on our end pretty much excludes any chance of weekend visits.
And I'm not all that encouraged if we discover that they have it. What (if you'll pardon my asking what appears to be a common-sense question one might ask about the family that has just moved in down the block) do we know about these putative star-guys? What if any radio waves we detect from them are just bait, and they’re just waiting for low-level low-tech suckers like us, life forms still trying to communicate on the EM band because they don’t know about anything faster (which means we’re totally ignorant of subspace except as a concept in science fiction, and therefore have no FTL engines or the threatening forms of weaponry derived from attendant technology)--which means that we are prey--or worse, sales contacts?
What kinds of culture-ruining technology would they try to sell us--or, once we've learned of its existence, withhold from us, "for our own good," or until the "right price" was met?
"Immortality elixirs? Why, yes, we have those in stock--but our monitoring of your cute little radio broadcasts has shown us that one of your prime concerns is your self-described out-of-control population growth and the ability of your planet (and other species) to maintain such unbridled reproduction of a single species at the cost of your environment and other life-forms which share your planet! To give you anything that would prolong your lives at the cost of almost everything else in your world (as you repeatedly express it) would be participatory in the perversion of your biosphere to a level of our own criminality! But let us suggest a compensatory deal: we will make the immortality elixir available to your entire species at the cost of, let us say, every third child among you (we will provide the recipe)--an arrangement which will provide an immediate reduction of your species' numbers, and will have the longer-term effect of removing potential breeding members of your species and any children they might have had, in hopes that you will learn responsibility in controlling your breeding instincts--and if you cannot, well, then, we will simply refuse to sell you the elixir until you have shown the virtue--or at least practical wisdom--of learning to do so, or until you allow us to harvest--I mean, to correct--the excess numbers of humans who are causing the ecological distress you are all continually going on about. We will even let you choose who among you should be (heh!) corrected, based upon your own values of ecological and social usefulness, and we will even provide you with the means (painless and humane, of course) to do so--at a very mild cost to you--because, of course, and above all, we prefer satisfied customers with whom we can regularly do business . . . "
There’s certainly not one [i.e., an intelligent life form] on this planet.Hey--I'm intelligent enough not to assume that anybody we meet out there is likely to be benevolent space brothers, brimming with interstellar bonhomie and just as eager as all get-out to induct us into the Star Club, and augment our technology until we get all Star-Trekkian and Jetsonian and live lives of unearned peace and plenty without any cost to ourselves--at least, not without stronger evidence than supplied by air-headed Hollywood movies and unrealistic and ardent wishing that it be so.
It's a great big old dangerous universe out there, and if it contains beings who are utterly unlike us, we can have no conception of their values or designs--and may not even be able to do so--and we will have to tread very, very carefully, if we are to tread there at all--
--or (perhaps worse) they may be altogether too much like us--which is also no cause for optimistic encouragement.
At the risk of sounding Neantherthalic (and you know what happened to those guys), maybe we ought to work on weapons technology before we develop star-drive.
Doom-saying unfortunately tends to produce neologistic impulses in me. Sorry.
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Will likely be a moot point before long.
What is minimized, if not ignored, by SETI enthusiasts are the particular features of Earth and our solar system important to life which imply the probability of life elsewhere in our galaxy is extremely small. Besides the size of the Earth and a habitable distance from the Sun, these features include its elemental composition, a sufficiently large amount of liquid water, the composition and thickness of Earth's atmosphere, the rate of rotation on its axis, the strength of the magnetic field, the amount of radioactive elements, the movement of the tectonic plates, the thickness of Earth's crust, the size, density, orbital distance and tidal action of Earth's moon, the nearly circular orbit of the Earth around the sun, the tilt of Earth's axis, the ratio of land-to-ocean surface area, the arrangement of continents relative to the slight eccentricity of the Earth's orbit and axis, the orbital plane of Earth and the other planets around the sun, the size and relative position of the large gaseous planets, like Jupiter and Saturn relative to that of the Earth and the inner planets, the orbital locations of asteroid and planetoid groups, the lack of large planets inside the Earth's orbit, the elemental composition of our sun, the age and size of our sun, the heliosphere of the sun, the position of our solar system with respect to the galactic arms, the relative position of our solar system from any supernovas, the location of our solar system relative to the galactic center, and the size and shape of our galaxy. No doubt more could be listed.
For each one of these features, (sometimes even small) changes one way or the other would result in conditions where life (or intelligent life) on Earth would be impossible or unlikely.
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Can't disagree with you regarding the extremely long and unlikely chain of conditions necessary for earth-like life. Personally, I don't think we're going to see much life like it out there when and if we ever travel to the stars (and thank goodness for that!).
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