"The search for extraterrestrials does not require equipment and a budget of tens of millions of dollars"

This is what Paul Schoch, founder and CEO of the SETI League, says in an interview with the scientist website, an association that searches for radio signals from aliens by scanning the skies using amateur equipment. Shuch chaired a session that dealt with the search for intelligent life in space as part of the IAC Congress that took place in Jerusalem last week

"The search for aliens does not require equipment and a budget of tens of millions of dollars." This is what Paul Schoch, founder and CEO of the SETI League, an association that searches for radio signals from aliens by scanning the skies using amateur equipment, says in an interview with the Hidan website. Shoch chaired a session that dealt with the search for intelligent life in space as part of the IAC Congress held in Jerusalem last week.

"First of all, SETI is not the name of an organization but a scientific field, it's like chemistry or biology are not the names of certain organizations. SETI science brings together a variety of methods to detect the electromagnetic signature of extraterrestrial civilizations. "
"The most recognized body in the field of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is the SETI Institute in California. The SETI Institute is a sort of continuation of NASA's SETI Office which was closed. In the early 12s, NASA established a modest office of SETI activities at NASA's Ames Space Center in Mountain View, California. On October 1992, XNUMX, they began a search project that was planned to last ten years and which was funded by the government, as part of the NASA budget. The goal was to locate radio signals from intelligent civilizations."
"Just one year later, the US government stopped funding the project. I especially remember the speech of Congressman Richard Bryan from Nevada, before Congress: "You have been looking for a whole year, you have spent millions of dollars, and not a single little green man has come and asked to be brought to your leader . It proved, according to O'Brien, that there was no one out there. He is wrong. What he proved is something we suspected for a long time - that there is no intelligent life in Washington. "

"Following the closing of NASA's SETI office, its employees opened a donation-funded non-profit - the SETI Institute, which took it upon itself to continue the activities of NASA's SETI program. But in fact he continued only half of it. NASA's plan included a search for radio signals from intelligent civilizations: a survey of the entire sky, and focused listening. The focused listening was done using two of the world's largest radio telescopes Arecibo and Goldstone, which are highly sensitive. They are able to track a specific star and listen to the transmissions emanating from it (mostly natural emissions in the radio field). They had a catalog of the thousand sun-like stars that are closest to us and that have a chance of having Earth-like planets.”

Does that sound like a very small number?
Shoch: "If the guess is wrong, it does not mean that there is no life in the universe. A thousand stars is nothing compared to the 400 billion stars in our galaxy which is one of a hundred billion galaxies, so if you were looking at a thousand stars, you've actually covered zero percent of the sky. Realizing that putting all the resources on a thousand stars is a high investment, NASA's ST office activated a component of scanning the whole sky. When scanning the entire sky, there is no need to point the telescope in a certain direction. It is possible to direct antennas with wide reception and cover the whole sky systematically over time."
"In this way we will be able to get on the signals of such an advanced culture whose signals are so strong that we can receive them even with modest radio telescopes. Using these two complementary methods, NASA estimated that within a decade it would be able to record success.”
"In 1994, the STi Institute, made up of former NASA office personnel, renewed the focused search among the thousand stars. At the same time, another organization was established by me and my friends, and I had the honor of being its founder and CEO - SETI League and our mission is to take over the execution of the survey of the whole sky. We had an asset that NASA radio amateurs and microwave experts all over the world didn't have. Thousands of people started working together on the voluntary searches and communicated with each other through the then new medium - the Internet. This way they could do collaborative science using small radio telescopes. My job as a microwave engineer was to design these radio telescopes, build a prototype and publish the plans. We have encouraged many people around the world to build these systems. It's an inexpensive solution. The project was actually a continuation of the Argos project at NASA's SETI office, named after the monster from Greek mythology that had a hundred eyes, fifty of which were pointed in every direction at once. Mythology says that when Argos died, the gods took his poor and transferred them to the tail of a peacock. In our case when Argos died, his eyes were passed on to hundreds of passionate radio enthusiasts all over the world. And they began looking for a coordinated search from different areas around the world for the elusive signals. We are in the STI League without any budget, we have reached the same success rate as the well funded STI Institute. In other words, we also did not find any sign of intelligent civilizations in space."

What is the cumulative viewing time and how many telescopes are viewing the sky at any given moment?
"Currently, in the Argos network we have about a hundred active telescopes at any given moment (as mentioned, these are small telescopes of AB hobbyists). This is a much smaller number than is needed to perform a reasonable job. Our dream is to scan the entire sky continuously in real time. About 4,000 devices operating simultaneously are required. This critical mass has never been achieved. Although these are cheap systems, 3,000-4,000 euros per device. Still there is an incremental cost. Multiply 4,000 devices by 3-4 thousand euros and you will arrive at a respectable amount. Among our operators are radio amateurs, microwave experts, signal processing experts. Although we have achieved much less than we thought, but still, this is the largest radio telescope observation project of all the other projects in the world combined. "
"At least we can be satisfied with one important scientific achievement - we proved that extraterrestrial intelligence is not widespread because otherwise we would already have encountered its signs in life as we know it, at least technological life is not as widespread as we thought. "
Shoch who participated in a special session that dealt with the search for extraterrestrial intelligences and which also included lectures dealing with the question of how long the life of a civilization lasts, while examining the ancient dominant cultures on Earth, and especially ancient Rome which collapsed after a thousand years. The conclusion was that every empire eventually collapses, therefore even if we discover signals from a culture tens of thousands of light years away, most likely it no longer exists.
Schoch disagrees with the claim of Prof. Stephen Hawking who fears the effect of discovering such a transmitter on our culture - which will be similar to the meeting of Cortez, the representative of the Spanish conquest with the Native Americans in the 16th century which ended badly for the Native Americans. "In the case of the Spaniards, we are talking about a physical meeting. I do not believe that receiving radio signals without physical contact, which is impossible due to the vast distances and low speeds at which it is possible to physically move in the universe, will not have such an effect."
"If we discover the signals, we will at most know that we are not alone, and if we do not discover such signals, then already in the search so far, celestial phenomena such as quasars and pulsars have been discovered, and they have made an important contribution to science."