This article, from 1992, shows the optimism that existed before the start of the STI operation. As we know, Congress eliminated the project's budget about a year later, and it was renewed a month later on a much smaller scale and with the help of Internet surfers' personal computers
Based on an article by Dava Sobel, published in Life magazine in September 1992. Translated by Avi Blizovsky
Is there intelligent life in outer space? A project operated by NASA at a cost of 100 million dollars and which begins this fall may finally provide an answer to one of humanity's most complex questions: Is there anyone out there?
Next month, NASA will begin an operation that will turn into real science, what has so far only existed between the pages of science fiction - the existence of life in other solar systems.
Eight-year-old Shana Tarter was sitting at the kitchen table trying to delve into a questionnaire she received from school, in which she was asked to fill in several details about herself. After some time she reached the section "mother's occupation". I wish she could write something like "doctor" or "teacher". She asked her mother for help, and her mother Jill Tarter repeatedly tried to explain to her family what she did every day. Words like "intelligence", "radio waves", "extraterrestrial", flew in the air. Shana listened, tried to understand something logical, and finally she smiled, returned to the form and wrote: "Looking for little green people".
"A message from a foreign civilization may pass through our homes at this very moment."
On October 12, 1992 at three o'clock in the afternoon Atlantic time, when the American nation will celebrate the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America by Columbus, Jill Tarter will turn on the switch of the most powerful radio telescope ever built in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. -time. At that very moment, an assistant "launched" a second telescope at the Goldstone Trekking Station near Barstow, California, as part of an international network of radio telescopes. The two scientists will start, no less and no more, than in one of the most ambitious scientific operations designed to discover worlds that Christopher Columbus could not even imagine.
No rocket will take off, no voice from the control room will read over the loudspeakers before takeoff, no television camera will send images from an alien planet to Earth. Despite this, over a hundred physicists, astronomers, programmers, and technicians will be stationed at control sites when supercomputers will follow millions of radio frequencies, looking for logical signals that will confirm what most astronomers have believed for years - that we are not alone.
With the full backing of Status, a NASA operation - the 100 million dollar project, called SETI, an acronym for Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, will last at least a decade, hoping to discover radio waves created by intelligent beings. Radio waves that may have started their journey to Earth at the speed of light at some time that could be just as yesterday, or thousands of years ago.
Although astronomers have used radio telescopes in the past to listen for signs of intelligent life in the universe, the current project dwarfs previous attempts. At least six radio telescopes around the world will be designated for the current operation as reinforcements for the Arecibo dish - a fifth of a mile (about 300 meters) in diameter - which is also supposed to increase its sensitivity by 300 percent using special software designed to translate signals. The project is so sophisticated that after three days of listening it will overtake anything done in the 32 years since astronomer Frank Drake began pointing a radio telescope at two nearby stars, Epsilon Iridani and Tau-Stei, in hopes of finding intelligent life on orbiting planets. Maybe these stars.
Drake, a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, now 62 years old, is now the head of the Seti Project located in Mountain View, California. His spirit is already short of waiting for October 12 "I found nothing more frustrating than the thought that a radio message from a foreign civilization is making its way towards us at this moment, which, like a whisper, is hard for us to hear.
When Jill Tarter was nine years old, in 1953, her parents bought a television set. Every Saturday morning, she and her friends in Eastchester, New York, gather around the device and exchange photos with their Flash Gordon viewer. To her, the idea of life in the universe was as natural as cornflakes.
On vacation from school, Jill would hike with her father along the Florida coastline as they studied the shape of systems. They were wondering what kinds of creatures could colonize other planets. In 1976, after receiving her PhD in astronomy at Berkeley, Tarter began working at the Ames Research Center, researching brown stars there (a term for planets that are supposed to orbit other stars and some of which have been discovered in recent years, AB). "So I started Operation Seti with a big step" she says, and indeed in 1988 she was appointed the main operator of the operation.
Tarter is lucky. She never shared in the skepticism that Frank Drake's pioneering experiments raised. In 1959, when Drake proposed using the new government radio telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia, to search for messages from outer space, his fellow scientists looked at him with wonder. He recalls many raised eyebrows. Despite this he managed to achieve 200 hours of listening in telescopes prepared for other studies. He was told, "You can do the research once, but then you have to convince your fellow conventional astronomers. Searching for extraterrestrial beings can damage your career."
When NASA began to take these efforts seriously and include them in the budget, in 1978 Senator William Proxmeyer slammed the space agency with one of his Golden Fleece awards against those who want to waste American taxpayers' money. NASA kept the project alive, but in the 1981 budget Proxmeyer demanded that not one cent of the budget be allocated to such research, and it passed.
Carl Sagan, who became famous after the success of his book "Dragons of Paradise" and his television series "Cosmos", met Proxmeyer. He counted the stars for a centurion, billions in one galaxy like which there are billions in the universe. And also because science has not yet discovered a single planet that orbits the sun differently, he understands that there must be millions of them. There are so many stars similar to our sun in the universe, Sagan said, that it is inconceivable that we humans are the only intelligent beings in it.
"Proxmeyer made a decision based on insufficient data" - said Sagan - "when he receives more information, he will withdraw from the decision".
Even so, many people thought Sagan and his colleagues were crazy. Desperate that NASA would never receive enough money to finance Seti, Sagan founded the Planetary Society, an organization that grew within 18 months to a hundred thousand members with an annual budget of over two million dollars. In 1982, he signed a petition calling for funding for Seti and over fifty well-known scientists including Francis Crick, Stephen Gould, Linus Pauling, and Stephen Hawking, signed. In the same year, a group called the Blue Seal, a group of astronomers, declared that "intelligent beings are part of the universe, like stars and galaxies. It is hard to imagine another astronomical discovery that will have an impact on all human fields like the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence."
Three years later, Sagan offered the producer of E. T., Steven Spielberg, and convinced him to donate $1990 to a study to search for intelligent signals, which he would conduct at the Mega-Channel Extraterrestrial Essay, at the Howard University Observatory in Oakridge, Massachusetts. But the main support for the Seti project, which has increased steadily in recent years, has fallen due to the arbitrariness of government officials. In 75, Massachusetts Republican Senator Silvio Conte tried to block NASA's budget for Seti by commenting to his fellow lawmakers: "Of course there are advanced civilizations in outer space, but we don't need to spend six million dollars this year to find traces of nefarious beings." these For that purpose, XNUMX cents to buy a tabloid at the neighborhood supermarket." And so last June, Senator Richard Bryan (Democrat from Nevada), tried to take budgets (#) out of the NASA-Sty project.
The world's largest radio telescope does not appear to be an optical telescope used by astronomers. Nor does it have the long tube that stands out from the observatories found on mountains around the world. Like in Plummer in California, or Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The telescope in Arecibo is an aluminum covered bowl in a hole in the ground. Above the bowl hundreds of tons of steerable antennas hang on cables attached to support towers in the surrounding hills. Similar to a normal satellite antenna, a radio telescope focuses every radio wave that hits it towards a central collection point, where the signal is fed to a computer and processed by a receiver. In an experiment conducted in 1987, a new supercomputer, connected to the telescope at Goldstone in the Mohab Desert, easily detected thin one-watt signals emitted by the Pioneer 10 spacecraft, which was launched from Earth in 1972 and traveled four billion miles in space. Since the mid-XNUMXs, when the first radio telescopes were built, scientists have realized that they are of great value in the search for intelligent life in the universe. Radio signals emitted by stars are irregular and crazy, while the radio waves used for communication have regular patterns, which can be easily detected and displayed on monitors such as an oscilloscope. The idea to look for such signals created by extraterrestrial beings came to the mind of the astronomer Frank Drake, and the physicists - Giuseppe Cocconi, and Philip Morrison at Cornell.
Coconi and Morrison, proposed that intelligent beings could use radio frequencies for interstellar communication, and that such communication could be decoded
"The chance of success is incalculable" - Kokoni and Morrison wrote in the journal Nature in - 1959 "But if we don't look, the chance of success is zero".
Compared to other NASA projects, Project Seti is cheap. Between the years 1962 and 1973, for example, the Apollo missions to the moon cost 24 billion dollars. The budgets amounting to 13.5 million dollars allocated this year to SETI are only one tenth of one percent of NASA's budget, which stands at 15 billion dollars. "If you take into account the chance of success and the consequences of that success, this is the best investment in history," says Frank Drake.
Most of the money is intended for new equipment - mainly for clearer reception, as well as for signal decoding software. When the telescopes are simultaneously tuning such a large amount of cosmic noise in millions of channels, only computers can sift through the information, looking for patterns and possibilities that no human operator could detect.
Of course, it takes a person, physicist Kent Collers, to design such software, but Collers, 43, is no ordinary person. He was blind from birth, never saw a radio signal since his days, nor an oscilloscope. Despite this, he always loved astronomy. When he was five years old, Collers recalled, his father read him passages from the Golden Book of Astronomy. "The idea that there are other worlds to discover ignited my imagination", he recalls, and what an imagination, Kohlers was able to plant such wisdom in his software, which can detect intelligent signals engulfed in static noise.
As one whose entire childhood was fascinated by interstellar travel, Jill Tarter, now 48 years old, will therefore be the first to say that extraterrestrial beings have never visited Earth, and probably never will. NASA-STI scientists reject the stories about flying saucers and stories of encounters with aliens. Most do not believe that travel through the vast expanses of space is possible, or desirable. The energy required to send living bodies through space, unlike radio waves which have no mass, firmly eliminates this possibility even in the eyes of the most open-minded scientists. Conservative estimates indicate that a spaceship carrying 10 people, on a 5-light-year journey, round trip to a neighboring solar system at the speed of light, will be 500,000 times greater than the amount of energy the US will consume this year.
What Seth scientists are looking for is intergalactic communication between civilizations far enough apart to prevent invasion, takeover, colonization, "cannibalism", etc. A message from one of them, which began its journey to Earth thousands of years ago, when our culture was in its infancy, can be recorded at any moment. If received in Seti's system in Arecibo, such a message could be decoded by Callers' software, which would call the phone. At this point, a duty astronomer will take command and make manual checks.
And maybe it will be Tarter who calls, when it happens right on her shift. She will reorient the antennas to look for a repeat of the signal and call her colleagues to help find the signal and celebrate the discovery. For days she will search again and again for the signals, repeatedly checking their authenticity. Finally, when she is convinced that these cannot be anything but what we hope they will be, she will tell the world. "As soon as we are sure that this is true, we will provide this information to the public" says Tarter. "Every signal received is the property of all humanity. They were sent to Earth, not NASA. After thousands of years of wandering, all humans will have to know that we are not alone."
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* Daba Sobel, former science reporter for the New York Times, has written about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence for 18 years. In 1992, a book she wrote about the astronomer Frank Drake was published. The title of the book is "Is there anyone out there?"
