Science magazine had an article a couple of weeks ago: How big money is powering a massive hunt for alien intelligence.
Some extracts:
SETI researchers are used to negative results, but they are trying harder than ever to turn that record around. Breakthrough Listen, the $100 million, 10-year, privately funded SETI effort Siemion leads, is lifting a field that has for decades relied on sporadic philanthropic handouts. Prior to Breakthrough Listen, SETI was “creeping along” with a few dozen hours of telescope time a year, Siemion says; now it gets thousands. It’s like “sitting in a Formula 1 racing car,” he says. The new funds have also been “a huge catalyst” for training scientists in SETI, says Jason Wright, director of the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center, which opened this year. “They really are nurturing a community.”
Breakthrough Listen is bolstering radio surveys, which are the mainstay of SETI. But the money is also spurring other searches, in case aliens opt for other kinds of messages—laser flashes, for example—or none at all, revealing themselves only through passive “technosignatures.” And because the data gathered by Breakthrough Listen are posted in a public archive, astronomers are combing through it for nonliving phenomena: mysterious deep-space pulses called fast radio bursts and proposed dark matter particles called axions. “There are untapped possibilities here,” says axion searcher Matthew Lawson of Stockholm University.
Breakthrough Listen set out ambitious goals. It would survey 1 million of the closest stars to Earth and 100 nearby galaxies using two of the world’s most sensitive steerable telescopes, the 100-meter Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the 64-meter Parkes radio telescope in Australia. Buying up about 20% and 25% of the time on those telescopes, Breakthrough Listen promised to cover 10 times more sky than previous surveys and five times more of the radio spectrum, and gather data 100 times faster.
There's a lot more in the article, which is a good read.
3 comments:
What a waste of time and money. Firstly they could find aliens and the aliens could drop by for a cup of tea. But who would believe them? Secondly advertising that there is a planetary economy to exploit invites the export of immortal alien criminals. Who would turn us all into debt slaves and deluded minions. They would control us via the media and targeted assassinations always involving a patsy. So you know. Like today but it could be worse.
“There are untapped possibilities here,” says axion searcher Matthew Lawson of Stockholm University.
Lost in translation? Untapped possibilities? Aren't all possibilities untapped?
Agree with Graeme: waste of money.
If the money is spare change from some billionaire or other, I have no problem with it.
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