"It's a cookbook!"
Posted on 05/28/2007 6:24:59 PM PDT by John W
DALLAS - The search for life around the universe will now take place around the clock.
The SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute plans to have 42 radio astronomy dishes up and running in northern California by the end of 2007, which will enable it to scan the heavens for alien radio waves on a continuous basis.
"There are a number of groups around the world doing SETI research. They are listening for radio signals out there, but it is not 24/7," said Scott Hubbard, who holds the Carl Sagan Chair for the Study of Life in the Universe at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.
"But it tends to be borrowed time where scientists sign up to use a facility for a few days or a few weeks at a time," he told Reuters Friday on the sidelines of a space development conference in Dallas.
That will change when the 42 radio astronomy dishes of the Allen Telescope Array are up and running. It is named for Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen, who donated some of the $12.5 million construction costs.
"When you put all these dishes together it makes a pretty large patch in the sky which you can listen to with great sensitivity — detecting signals which are either very far away or very faint," Hubbard said.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Ping
Why do they assume that the aliens will be in the Northern sky? From Northern Cal you can’t see as far south as the LMC. Scorpio would be on the horizon.
What if some advanced civilization on Delta Octantis III is desperately beaming to us?
"It's a cookbook!"
MIB
I’m for the SETI project and encourage the effort.
However, Douglas Adams projected that we had already been visited but did not pay attention because they were dogs.
My take on that is thqat until we can develop two way communication with honey bees or ants or termites or other civil, colonial insects, we can forget communicating with those from the stars.
"Duck."
Sounds like a major plus for SETI.
I have been interested in this field since reading “We Are Not Alone”. I think it was written in 1966 and was about the search for life on other worlds.
They should look on Capitol Hill first.
Does this mean they’ve given up looking for intelligent life on Earth? ;)
"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." -- Thomas J. Gold, 'Communication with Extraterrestial Intelligence' (Sagan, ed)
What a misleading title.
But, in reality, it's probably due to funding issues. I heard an mp3 last year of an Aussie interview with a Seti-type, and he was saying something about putting data recorders at Southern radio telescopes. T
What if some advanced civilization on Delta Octantis III is desperately beaming to us?
I hope you are making a joke.
You’d think they would have got even a little hint of something by now, huh?
My Klingon is a bet rusty, define the word please.
You earthlings crack me up!
Start at the DNC.
I seriously hope not a dime of tax money is going toward this. If Paul Allen wants to flush his money down this rat hole, fine; but the American taxpayer shouldn’t have to.
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