NASA AMES CENTER DIRECTOR JOINS SETI INSTITUTE

SETI Institute ^ | 01/23/06 | Laura Lewis

[KevinDavis]

G. Scott Hubbard, director of NASA Ames Research Center, located in California’s Silicon Valley, today announced his personal plans for the future. He has accepted a new assignment as holder of the Carl Sagan Chair for the Study of Life in the Universe at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., effective Feb. 15, 2006.

As holder of the Carl Sagan Chair, Hubbard will work to strengthen the SETI Institute’s visibility and support for its research into the origin of life, and how it might be found on other worlds, particularly the planets and moons of our solar system.

“The people at Ames are among the best in the agency, and it has been both a pleasure and an honor to serve as the Ames center director. I know Ames will continue to play a creative and critically important role as NASA turns the Vision for Space Exploration into reality,” Hubbard said. “My new position at the SETI Institute is a wonderful opportunity for me to advance one of the most exciting areas of research today: the understanding of how life on Earth began, and the search for life elsewhere in the cosmos. It’s a chance to learn things that, only a generation ago, would have seemed beyond knowing.”

[KevinDavis]

[SteveMcKing]

How many times has the world been saved by weird programs out in the desert? I think SETI has that potential.

[FierceDraka]

SETI is now privately funded - so I'm completely cool with it.

But still - if the Galaxy was full of sentient, technological civilizations, wouldn't SETI be picking up their crappy infomercials - or their bad pop music?

It took Earth 4 billion years (give or take an eon) to evolve a self-aware, tool-using ape capable of sending modulated electromagnetic signals for communication purposes.

Who is to say that we Humans aren't actually an elder race - the first real people to arise in our galaxy?

Discuss...

[Brett66]

SETI is very limited in many ways we can imagine and in many ways we probably can't imagine. It can give us an opportunity to only detect civilizations that just happen to have develop radio technology at this particular slice of galactic history and only if their signal strength is enough for our recievers to detect. Very improbable odds......

[SunkenCiv]

"and don't let the door hit you on the butt on the way out."

Oops, I mean, here' s a little reprise, not used too often.

In the book "Communication with Extraterrestial Intelligence" (Sagan editor -- CETI was the old acronym) Thomas J Gold ("The Deep Hot Biosphere", "Power from the Earth") said "But I am not really willing to accept your premise, because it may well be that the means of communications they have are of a kind that we do not know how to receive, and that they would not have the means of communicating with sufficiently powerful radio or optical signals. That is something which, technologically, is too difficult for them but they would have some other means we would not recognize." (see also 210)

[Lancer_N3502A]

[RadioAstronomer]

Distances also are a major factor.