May I be the first to cordially welcome you to our signal! My advice steer clear of 'sites' that require a 'credit card' & end in .com. Many of them may appear to be our 'leader' but in fact only link to information on variations in how our species attempts reproduction but mostly is absolutely incorrect physiologically speaking.

Maybe for an effective transition to Earth culture monitor our 'television' broadcasts and then decide if it may be better to wait until our sun expands into a red giant and life re-emerges on Mars – luck with that!!

I have found your radio signal but am confused about how to navigate this "internet." Could someone please direct me to the "website" of your "leader?"

I "believe", (basing my judgement from science/evolution of how life readily developed on Earth, and how the organic building blocks of life are ubiquitous in our solar system and in interstellar space), that the universe is brimming with life.

Most of this will be microbial/bacterial, but on a small (perhaps very small indeed) fraction of worlds sentient beings will have developed, like us, from these microbes and muck (to quote Sagan), and who knows how thet utilise the RF spectrum or lasers, or their TX powers!

As a species of wanderers and explorers, despite setbacks, politics and economics, we can never cease either space exploration or ETI searches – it's part of us, and hence, SETI's modest cost is well worth it. 24 years may be rather hopeful, but how many of us 6 months ago were actually expecting to see images of exo-planets – some taken from ground-based telescopes? And that's before we talk about serendipitous discoveries of ETI!

Less than "2 Dozen years" is actually 24 (2 x 12), not "20" as in the head line. So there's an extra 4 years to come up with those little green guys!
Damned imperial-metric conversions

Then there's the simple fact that it is easier to passively listen for signals than it is to send them. We've made maybe five or six attempts to send a signal to whoever might be out there, and all of those were symbolic efforts for our benefit, with no hope of actually reaching someone. If we don't make an effort, why should we expect the aliens to? We might be one of fifty civilizations, all sitting around with their hands cupped around their ears going "Someone say something!"

There are indeed reasons why SETI won’t work, at least not with ATA or other current equipment, and one wonders why the SETI Institute team endeavors to skirt this matter entirely.

SETI (in the words of the SETI Institute) “seeks evidence of life in the universe by looking for some signature of its technology.” On the public face of the matter the impression has been created that it primarily searches for the radio leakage inadvertently streamed into space by extraterrestrial civilizations.

Even using a 300 meter antenna (like Arecibo), which has an area 7 times larger than that of ATA’s combined antennas, Earth’s own radio leakage would diminish to indiscernible static at the relatively short distance represented by Saturn’s orbit, which of course is infinitesimal compared to any interstellar observation. Because of such inversely proportional attenuation and the existence of multitudinous sources of noise, the detection of leakage from a radio-using civilization on a planet circling the closest other possible solar system, at only 4 light years distance, would require an antenna measuring 33,000 kilometers in diameter. I kid you not.

While the intriguing possibility of radio leakage from extraterrestrial civilizations garners much public interest, the SETI Institute is certainly aware of the presently nsurmountable obstacles to detecting such signals, and accordingly is not even trying to look for something it knows it cannot see. Rather, their effort is entirely based on the premise that some of the radio-using civilizations will to some degree lance focused beams into space. While focused beams are more easily detectable, the improvement is puny on the interstellar scale, and one is persuaded that in the vastness of space it is very improbable that any extraterrestrial beacons would casually impinge upon the infinitesimal dot which is Earth. While we are often subjected to the Drake Equation with its entirely unfounded assumed variables, we have never seen any efforts to calculate the extreme unlikelihood of interstellar focused beams impinging on our planet.

It is nice that Mr. Allen has financed the SETI array bearing his name, but neither this decidedly modest array nor anything else on our planet comes remotely close to the minimum basic requirement for the detection of radio leakage from even our nearest potential neighbors. In fact, the current antennas are less than 0.001% of what is needed to get started, aside from the sensible questioning of the nature of any extraterrestrial signals.

One wonders why SETI proponents completely skirt this fundamental detection issue. The SETI Institute enthusiastically informs its sponsors about its sophisticated instrumentation, but neglects to mention that it is all connected to an antenna array which will be just as effective in receiving extraterrestrial signals as a toaster.

You and some other Christians may not have an issue with ETI, but I also know many fundamentalist types who are certain that God created only one planet with any life in the Universe – all for our benefit, of course.

We are currently watching various groups in the USA flip out about the first black President. Imagine how they will react to an intelligent being from another planet. Centuries of stories about hideous aliens invading Earth will not help the situation.

-
Drew

Christianity has no problem with extra-terrestials. The vatican announced a while back that it would not contradict the techings. Technically, angels would be considered aliens (heavenly beings), anyway.

Not everyting is a conspiracy.

As for the topic:

I'm very skeptical of this 20-30 year prediction. I'm betting aliens will be so different than us, that they may not even communicate the same way, or use the same technology that we do. We may not even be aware of what we are looking at. I wonder if he'd be willing to put some money on it.

SETI needs to get past the old paradigm of biological beings living on a planet orbiting a Sun type star, or the search will take even longer for success.

Over the course of the next two decades, the the SETI program on the ATA will observe about one million or more stars. We will be sensitive to narrowband signals with transmitters no more powerful than our own airport radars. Unlike Seth, I will not predict that we will find a signal. I will predict that we will search those stars over a wide range of frequencies and good sensitivity.

Peter Backus
Observing Programs Manager
SETI Institute

Go back and reread the article Aodhhan. It says right in the article that "a method called “beamforming” that electronically combines the antennas into a single virtual telescope." It's the same as the idea of launching multiple small telescopes that maintain a set distance from one another and combining the input to gain a sharper image.

Considering how this planet wastes money on some things like defence & weapons I've got no problem with money being spent on this.

It is after all the question of the age.

Thanks, I'll read up on beamforming. I thought they were doing something akin to radio interferometry similar to the long baseline array of large scale radio telescopes.

cheers

Flashlight? I don't think so – it's a listening post not a transmitter unless I'm sorely mistaken.

It has a large enough area to detect faint radio signals out to a distance of about 500 years which is pretty impressive but still small in the context of the larger galaxy.

I've heard of others busy with flashlights hoping to signal ET directly – an act of questionable wisdom IMO.

Then again, most cults – I mean religions – are pretty self-deluding, aren't they?

If Obama weren't coming into office in a few months, I might agree that the Government would hide an alien signal to preserve religion, especially the Christian ones.

By the way, Frank Drake used to predict ETI detection by the distant future year of 2000. Oddly enough, the rest of the Universe probably does not base their calendars on the birth of a Jewish radical.