Less Than 20 Years Until First Contact?

I hope that when we do find a signal that the Government does not censor it from the public by not allowing scientists to go public with with. I fear that the Government will try to protect religion by not admitting that there are intelligent beings out there.

@Aodhhan

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.

better off researching quantum communications or at least some neutrinos

Good Luck to them.

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.

In radio astronomy, the term “beam” refers to the sensitivity pattern of the antenna. It is borrowed from radar engineering and often leads to confusion over whether we are transmitting or receiving. The ATA does not transmit; the antennas are combined for sensitivity.

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

I hope it is within the next couple of dozen years .. it would make my twilight so very much brighter ..

Yan Luz, Huygens

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.

Dark Gnat -

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.

One of the most relevant comments here is that of Chuck Lam, who raises questions about the ability of the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) to discriminate actual signals from noise, and about the strength of those signals after 500 light years of travel.

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.

I think contact is a long, long way off. I used to believe that intelligence would arise in a lot of places that had life, and that life would start pretty much anywhere it could. But now I’m of the opinion that life might not be that common and that it takes a lot for intelligence to develop. There might be no more than a few dozen civilizations in our galaxy.

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!”