But outer Space,
At least this far,
For all the fuss
Of the populace
Stays more popular
Than populousRobert Frost-----------------------
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/06/AR2010110604127.html
Observatories on 5 continents to scan skies for extraterrestrial life
Gallery
A global search for extraterrestrial intelligence
It's the 50th anniversary of Project Ozma, a pioneering search for
extraterrestrial Intelligence experiment to search for signs of life in
distant solar systems through interstellar radio waves.
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By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 6, 2010; 8:20 PM
The scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence went global this
weekend as observatories in 13 nations on five continents trained their
telescopes on several promising star systems.
This Story
a.. Observatories on 5 continents to scan skies for extraterrestrial life
b.. What message would you send to extraterrestrials?
c.. A global search for extraterrestrial intelligence
While they don't expect their one-day joint effort will find the kind of
intentionally produced signal from afar that enthusiasts have been seeking
for decades, participants say the undertaking illustrates just how far the
search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, has come.
Frank Drake made the world's first such observations at the Green Bank radio
telescope in West Virginia 50 years ago, listening on a single-channel
receiver that took in radio waves one frequency at a time. Today's
technology allows scientists to receive radio signals at millions of
different frequencies per minute, in addition to searching for laser-like
bursts of light communication using optical telescopes.
The international star-viewing extravaganza, the first of its kind, comes at
a time of fast-paced discovery in the science of exoplanets, bodies that
orbit suns beyond our solar system.
Last month alone brought the announcement of the first Earth-sized planet
found that appeared to be potentially habitable, as well as a study from top
scientists in the field which concluded that the number of Earth-sized
planets in the Milky Way alone could be counted in the tens of billions.
Suddenly, the prospects for finding planets that might have complex life and
environments to support it appear to have brightened. Scientists well in the
future may still conclude Earth is the only planet that harbors life, but
discoveries in the last few years seem to increase the odds that we are not
alone after all.
"This is a real coming of age for exoplanets and for SETI," said Drake, who
remains active in the field and whose founding of the science of SETI five
decades ago was being commemorated as well over the weekend.
"It shows SETI has gone truly international, and it's happening when our
knowledge about planets beyond Earth is just exploding," he said. "We made
predictions based on weak evidence 50 years ago and now a lot of that is,
very satisfyingly, getting hard scientific support."
Practical matter
Doug Vakoch, a SETI Institute scientist who helped organize the effort, said
the coordinated observing is probably most important for its practical side.
"What this weekend really does is begin the process of making it possible to
track a possible SETI signal around the globe," he said. "If a signal is
detected, it has to be confirmed and followed, and now we're setting up a
network to do that."
The participating observatories are in Italy, India, Argentina, Australia,
France, Germany, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Sweden, the Netherlands,
and several in the United States and Japan. Officials at the largest radio
telescope in the world, Arecibo, will also participate.
The idea for the unprecedented global observation was initiated by Shin-ya
Narusawa, director of Nishi-Harima Astronomical Observatory in western
Japan - one of the largest observatories in that country. Narusawa organized
a many-centered SETI observation in Japan last fall, and was invited to
present his results at the biannual NASA-sponsored astrobiology conference
held this spring.
There, Narusawa met SETI Institute President Jill Tarter, he proposed a
bilateral and then international observation, and before long 19
observatories and research centers in 13 nations had joined in.
This Story
a.. Observatories on 5 continents to scan skies for extraterrestrial life
b.. What message would you send to extraterrestrials?
c.. A global search for extraterrestrial intelligence
The telescopes will be trained in a coordinated way on a number of star
systems, including Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani - the nearest systems in the
Northern Hemisphere and the two that Drake observed 50 years ago in what he
called Project Ozma, a reference to the princess in "The Wizard of Oz.''
(Keeping with the theme, the weekend's effort is called Project Dorothy for
the heroine of the book.)
"These two stars were the best SETI targets a half-century ago," Narusawa
said. "They remain the symbol of the project Ozma and so are two of the
target stars for Project Dorothy."
But with more than 500 exoplanets identified in the past 15 years and 700
more awaiting confirmation, he said, the observation can be far more
directed and ambitious. Some will include stellar systems that have planets
which appear to be located the right distance from their suns to support
life, he said.
'Earth is tiny'
While Narusawa is a scientist, he said he had another, non-scientific reason
for organizing the global event. "When we do this worldwide observation," he
said in an e-mail from Japan, "citizens remember the Earth is tiny and we
are the same earthlings."
The SETI enterprise has, from the start, had many skeptics - scientists who
say it involves looking for a needle in a haystack, and at times legislators
who have been outraged that for a short time the effort received federal
funding. That came to a quick end in 1993 and SETI has relied on private
funding since, although the institute was allowed to compete again for
federal grants late in the Bush administration.
Its biggest coup has been to win almost $30 million from Microsoft
co-founder Paul Allen to build a large array of radio telescopes in the
mountains of northern California. The Hat Creek array and its 42 radio
telescopes are jointly run by the SETI Institute and the University of
California at Berkeley, and are used for SETI observing and more traditional
radio astronomy. The facility was one of the 19 to participate in Project
Dorothy.
With new scientific discoveries announced regularly that support key
assumptions that Drake and SETI made decades ago, and now with a global
network of astronomers who agree that SETI constitutes solid and important
science, Drake said he has never been more optimistic about ultimately
finding intelligent life beyond Earth. Although 50 years of SETI observing
has yet to come up with a signal, he said, the percentage of stars actually
studied is minuscule.
He also said it's time for people to consider an initially unsettling
understanding that flows from the work being done by exoplanet hunters and
by SETI - that distant planets are as much a part of nature as Earth is.
"Who knows what kind of life we'll ultimately find out there?" Drake said.
"It won't be like our life because it will have evolved in response to
different kinds of forces. But there's no doubt about it - the underlying
chemistry will be the same and that means it will be basically an extension
of what we have here".
-----------------------------
Phil Whitmer
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