July 9, 1996
Source: Financial Times newspaper
Scientists awaiting a phone call from ET say it is just a question of 'when' not 'if', explains Bruce Dorminey.
As America watched extraterrestrials wreak havoc in the new film Independence Day last week, an interdisciplinary colloquium of scientists converged on the Italian island of Capri to discuss their real-life search for alien intelligence.
For most of the 200 participants (including three Nobel Prize winners) at the week-long 5th International Conference on Bioastronomy, the question is not whether such extraterrestrial intelligence exists, but when, where and by what means it will be discovered.
The issue has heated up since the recent announcements of Jupiter-like gaseous planets circling relatively nearby stars. San Francisco State University's Geoff Marcy and Paul Butler reported yet another planet, about 60 per cent of Jupiter's size and in orbit around Upsilon Andromedae some 40 light years away.
Of six known extra-solar planets, none is like earth. Earth-like planets could still exist in these newly discovered planetary systems, it is just that current technology is unable to detect them. No matter, extra-solar planets bolster the argument for extraterrestrial life. Yet after surveying four of the six new systems, there are no signs of a radio signal.
Searching for intelligent narrow-band radio beacons from beyond the solar system has become a continuing process since 1959 when Frank Drake first directed West Virginia's Greenbank radio telescope towards Tau Ceti, a sunlike star 16 light years away. But MIT's Phil Mgrrison came upon the notion of looking for intelligent signals in frequencies ranging from 1.420 ts 1.720 MHz (about the wavelength of a microwave oven). These frequencies encompass natural emissions of hydrogen and hydroxyl, both common in the universe.
In the last 25 years Seti (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) has been primarily conducted by four groups in the US: the California-based Project Phoenix, Harvards Beta Project, Berkeleys Serendip IV and Ohio State University's Big Ear search. Argentina's Meta II project has a southern all-sky search and Australia has just formed a Seti Institute that would like to continue Project Phoenix's targeted southern star survey.
Yet astrophysicists everywhere cringe at the thought of being associated with either the expanded UFO field or the scores of people who claim to have been "abducted" by wayward aliens.
"Do I think we have ever been visited?" asks Stuart Bowyer, chairman of the conference's scientific organising committee and director of the Serendip IV search. "No. Do I think that we will ever be visited? No. The resources needed to produce an interstellar space vehicle are huge and then what do you do when you get there?"
If extraterrestrial intelligence were discovered, earth's perceived monopoly on intelligent life in the universe would be swept aside. "The problem is not that there won't be any life out there," says Darren Leigh at Harvard. "The problem will be aiming the telescopes at each other and starting a conversation. "We can now send interstellar telegrams out to 1,000 light years at an energy cost of about a dollar a word, " he says. "Radio operators currently send each other signals by bouncing signals off the moon. With that same sort of equipment they could send radiograms to Alpha Centauri."
With a 3 million dollar (1.9 million pounds sterling) annual budget, the privately funded Project Phoenix can afford to complete its 1,000 star survey of sun like stars within 150 light years of earth. After surveying 209 stars from listening posts in Australia, it has had 39 false positives, but no verifiable detection of any radio signals. >From September, it will continue its search using the 140m-wide Greenbank telescope and a second, much smaller, radio telescope in Georgia for signal verification.
"I can't tell you how many civilisations are out there," says Bowyer. "But I can tell you once we get the carrier signal then it will be one year or less until we get TV pictures from them."
Perhaps the most famous signal seen as a real message was 1977's Wow! detection at Ohio State University, so-named for the exclamation scrawled by an excited staffer on the computer printout. "We went back 100 or more times in subsequent days and never found a thing," says Bob Dixon, the project director. "But we know it came from at least as far away as the moon and did have what communication engineers would have called sidebands which are what carries information in an AM (medium wave) broadcast signal."
While searchers can now process 250 million channels simultaneously, present search strategies and protocols still suffer from lag time. Most Seti searches assume civilisations will be constantly communicating in a directed signal beacon, which precludes the possibility of a sweeping or intermittent beacon.
It is a question of being in the right place at the right time, while avoiding ever-increasing terrestrial radio interference. This is why some Seti searchers want to place a huge radio dish on the dark side of the moon. They have targeted a 100km-wide crater near the lunar equator, the only place in the solar system with no radio interference from earth.
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