Category Archives: SETI

SETI

$100M initiative announced for the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life

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Announcement of a major donation to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) with the Breakthrough Initiative:

Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking Announce $100 Million Breakthrough
Initiatives to Dramatically Accelerate Search for
Intelligent Life in the Universe
10-year, Multi-disciplinary Search Effort Will Harness World’s Largest Telescopes
to Mine Data from Nearest Million Stars, Milky Way and 100 Galaxies

LONDON, July 20, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — Yuri Milner was joined at The Royal Society today by Stephen Hawking, Martin Rees, Frank Drake, Geoff Marcy, Pete Worden and Ann Druyan to announce the unprecedented $100 million global Breakthrough Initiatives to reinvigorate the search for life in the universe.

10-year, Multi-disciplinary Search Effort Will Harness World’s Largest Telescopes to Mine Data from Nearest Million Stars, Milky Way and 100 Galaxies

The first of two initiatives announced today, Breakthrough Listen, will be the most powerful, comprehensive and intensive scientific search ever undertaken for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. The second, Breakthrough Message, will fund an international competition to generate messages representing humanity and planet Earth, which might one day be sent to other civilizations.

Breakthrough Listen

  • Biggest scientific search ever undertaken for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth.
  • Significant access to two of the world’s most powerful telescopes – 100 Meter Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, USA (“Green Bank Telescope”)1 and 64-metre diameter Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia (“Parkes Telescope”).
  • 50 times more sensitive than previous programs dedicated to SETI research.
  • Will cover 10 times more of the sky than previous programs.
  • Will scan at least 5 times more of the radio spectrum – and 100 times faster.
  • In tandem with a radio search, Automated Planet Finder Telescope at Lick Observatory in California, USA (“Lick Telescope”)2 will undertake world’s deepest and broadest search for optical laser transmissions.
  • Initiative will span 10 years.
  • Financial commitment is $100,000,000.

Unprecedented scope

The program will include a survey of the 1,000,000 closest stars to Earth. It will scan the center of our galaxy and the entire galactic plane. Beyond the Milky Way, it will listen for messages from the 100 closest galaxies. The telescopes used are exquisitely sensitive to long-distance signals, even of low or moderate power:

  • If a civilization based around one of the 1,000 nearest stars transmits to us with the power of common aircraft radar,Breakthrough Listen telescopes could detect it.
  • If a civilization transmits from the center of the Milky Way, with any more than 12 times the output of interplanetary radars we use to probe the Solar System, Breakthrough Listen telescopes could detect it.
  • From a nearby star (25 trillion miles away), Breakthrough Listen’s optical search could detect a 100-watt laser (energy output of normal household light bulb).

Open Data, Open Source, Open Platform

The program will generate vast amounts of data. All data will be open to the public. This will likely constitute the largest amount of scientific data ever made available to the public. The Breakthrough Listen team will use and develop the most powerful software for sifting and searching this flood of data. All software will be open source. Both the software and the hardware used in the Breakthrough Listen project will be compatible with other telescopes around the world, so that they could join the search for intelligent life. As well as using the Breakthrough Listen software, scientists and members of the public will be able to add to it, developing their own applications to analyze the data.

Crowdsourced processing power

Breakthrough Listen will also be joining and supporting SETI@home, University of California, Berkeley’s ground breaking distributed computing platform, with 9 million volunteers around the world donating their spare computing power to search astronomical data for signs of life. Collectively, they constitute one of the largest supercomputers in the world.

Breakthrough Message

  • International competition to create digital messages that represent humanity and planet Earth.
  • The pool of prizes will total $1,000,000.
  • Details on the competition will be announced at a later date.
  • This initiative is not a commitment to send messages. It’s a way to learn about the potential languages of interstellar communication and to spur global discussion on the ethical and philosophical issues surrounding communication with intelligent life beyond Earth.

Project Leadership

  • Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, Fellow of Trinity College; Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics, University of Cambridge.
  • Pete Worden, Chairman, Breakthrough Prize Foundation.
  • Frank Drake, Chairman Emeritus, SETI Institute; Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California, Santa Cruz; Founding Director, National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center; Former Goldwin Smith Professor of Astronomy,Cornell University.
  • Geoff Marcy, Professor of Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley; Alberts SETI Chair.
  • Ann Druyan, Creative Director of the Interstellar Message, NASA Voyager; Co-Founder and CEO, Cosmos Studios; Emmy andPeabody award winning Writer and Producer.
  • Dan Werthimer, Co-founder and chief scientist of the SETI@home project; director of SERENDIP; principal investigator for CASPER.
  • Andrew Siemion, Director, Berkeley SETI Research Center.

Yuri Milner said: “With Breakthrough Listen, we’re committed to bringing the Silicon Valley approach to the search for intelligent life in the Universe. Our approach to data will be open and taking advantage of the problem-solving power of social networks.”

Stephen Hawking said: “I strongly support the Breakthrough Initiatives and the search for extraterrestrial life.”

Frank Drake said: “Right now there could be messages from the stars flying right through the room, through us all. That still sends a shiver down my spine. The search for intelligent life is a great adventure. And Breakthrough Listen is giving it a huge lift.”

“We’ve learned a lot in the last fifty years about how to look for signals from space. With the Breakthrough Initiatives, the learning curve is likely to bend upward significantly,” added Frank Drake.

Ann Druyan said: “The Breakthrough Message competition is designed to spark the imaginations of millions, and to generate conversation about who we really are in the universe and what it is that we wish to share about the nature of being alive on Earth. Even if we don’t send a single message, the act of conceptualizing one can be transformative. In creating the Voyager Interstellar Message, we strived to attain a cosmic perspective on our planet, our species and our time. It was intended for two distinct kinds of recipients – the putative extraterrestrials of distant worlds in the remote future and our human contemporaries. As we approach the Message’s fortieth anniversary, I am deeply grateful for the chance to collaborate on the Breakthrough Message, for what we might discover together and in the hope that it might inform our outlook and even our conduct on this world.”

Additional information www.breakthroughinitiatives.org.

Science and Technology, SETI, Space Science

Video: Prospects for life in Titan’s hydrocarbon seas

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Here’s a SETI Institute seminar given by Prof. Jason Barnes of the Univ. of Idaho who talks about the possibility of life on the Saturn moon Titan: It’s Life Jim, but Not as We Know It: The Prospects of Life in Titan’s Seas – SETI Institute –

Here is the caption:

It’s Life Jim, but Not as We Know It: The Prospects of Life in Titan’s Seas

The prerequisites for life are thought to be: (1) a liquid solvent; (2) chemical building blocks; and (3) an energy source. Life like we have on the Earth uses water for its solvent and organic molecules for its building blocks. Hence searches for Earth-like life can focus on habitable zones around stars where liquid water can be stable on planetary surfaces.

But is water the only solvent in which life can exist? Though more exotic solvents (like ammonia, liquid nitrogen, or supercritical carbon dioxide) may exist in extrasolar systems, the only surface liquids outside of Earth that we know about today occur on Saturn’s smoggy moon Titan.

Dr Barnes will describe these seas, their chemistry, and hydrology, with an eye toward whether they could serve as possible abodes for life. Recent Cassini discoveries show evaporitic bathtub rings and ‘salt’ flats around seas, which indicate that at least some materials do dissolve in the lakes. He will also discuss new Cassini RADAR evidence for compositional variations between the seas, and VIMS observations that may show the first sea-surface waves ever seen outside of Earth.

Science and Technology, SETI, SpaceCasts

Video: Extending SETI into the near-infrared wavelengths

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been dominated by searches in radio wavelengths. Eventually SETI has been supplemented with Optical SETI, i.e. searches for signals in optical wavelengths. In the SETI Institute seminar video below, Shelley Wright of the University of Toronto reports on new technologies that are allowing the expansion of SETI into the near-infrared spectrum. Extending the search for ETI communication to near-infrared wavelengths – SETI Institute –

From the caption:

We are poised to take advantage of a remarkable confluence of technological advances and scientific opportunity. For the first time, very fast, wide bandwidth, high-gain, low noise near-infrared avalanche photo diode (APDs) detectors are available and reasonably priced.

Dr. Wright and her team are designing and constructing a new SETI instrument to search for direct evidence of interstellar communications via pulsed laser signals at near-infrared (900 – 1700 nm) wavelengths. The new instrument design builds upon our past optical SETI work, and is the first step toward a new, more versatile, and more sophisticated generation of very fast optical and near-infrared pulse search devices.

Dr. Wright will discuss the advantages of SETI searches at near-infared wavelengths. Dr. Wright will also present the instrument layout, including an overview of the opto-mechanical design, detector selection and characterization, signal processing, and integration procedure.

Finally, she will describe our initial observational setup and search strategies for SETI targets and other astronomical studies.

SETI

Video: Searching for ETI in the near-infrared

Here is a SETI Institute seminar by Shelley Wright of the University of Toronto on Extending the search for ETI communication to near-infrared wavelengths –

From the caption:

We are poised to take advantage of a remarkable confluence of technological advances and scientific opportunity. For the first time, very fast, wide bandwidth, high-gain, low noise near-infrared avalanche photo diode (APDs) detectors are available and reasonably priced.

Dr. Wright and her team are designing and constructing a new SETI instrument to search for direct evidence of interstellar communications via pulsed laser signals at near-infrared (900 – 1700 nm) wavelengths. The new instrument design builds upon our past optical SETI work, and is the first step toward a new, more versatile, and more sophisticated generation of very fast optical and near-infrared pulse search devices.

Dr. Wright will discuss the advantages of SETI searches at near-infared wavelengths. Dr. Wright will also present the instrument layout, including an overview of the opto-mechanical design, detector selection and characterization, signal processing, and integration procedure.

Finally, she will describe our initial observational setup and search strategies for SETI targets and other astronomical studies.

Exoplanets, SETI, Space books

Review: “Five Billion Years of Solitude” by Lee Billings

Zooming in on the universe has not been easy or quick. Humans watched the night sky for tens of thousands of years so that by the time early civilizations arose in areas like Mesopotamia, China, and Pre-Colombian America, amazingly detailed knowledge had been gained of the movements of the planets and other heavenly objects visible to the naked eye.

It was not until 1610 that a newfangled gadget called the telescope allowed Galileo to go beyond the limits of the eye and make his famous observations of four moons orbiting Jupiter.

Over the next three centuries, ever larger and more sophisticated telescopes focused in on new planets (Uranus in 1781, Neptune in 1841, Pluto in 1930), asteroids, and moons in our solar system.

Many discoveries were also made of the universe beyond our solar system but it still was not until 1923 that telescopic instruments advanced to a sufficiently sensitive level to allow Edwin Hubble to discover that many of those stellar lights were not stars but galaxies, i.e. conglomerations of billions of stars  just like our own Milky Way.

And it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that a star was resolved by a telescope as a disc rather than a point blur of light. The star was the red super-giant Betelgeuse, whose diameter is about as big as the orbit of Jupiter. Only a handful of similar giants have been subsequently resolved .

So making the next step and zooming in on planets around other stars is clearly a terrifically difficult task. I think it is fair to say that most people, including most astronomers, assumed up until the 1980s that such discoveries would require gigantic telescopes not available until far into the future; at least for spotting planets significantly smaller than Jupiter.

In Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars, Lee Billings tells the story of how astronomers successfully developed methods to detect planets around other stars without seeing them directly. The trick is to detect the effects of an exoplanet on its host star.

The first method to find an exoplanet successfully involves measuring shifts in the frequency of a star’s light as a planet orbits the star. The orbiting planet causes the star to wobble and this wobble results in an increase in the frequency of light when the star moves towards us and a decrease when the star moves away from us. This is a very tiny effect but by monitoring hundreds of spectral lines for the telltale signs of Doppler shifts, the combined statistics of the shifts in all those lines creates a significant signal in the data as more and more orbits of the planet are observed. Groups in Canada, Switzerland and the US found the first exoplanets using this method in the early 1990s.

(In the book, Billings touches on the professional rivalries and squabbles that have arisen in the highly competitive exoplanet-finding field. Here is an article by him about one such battle: The Ugly Battle Over Who Really Discovered the First Earth-Like Planet – WIRED.)

This Doppler shift method (officially referred to as the radial-velocity method)  is biased towards big exoplanets orbiting close to their stars. While our sun has little Mercury as its closest inner planet, it turns out that there are many stars out there with massive exoplanets orbiting much closer to their stars than Mercury is to the Sun. Over time this method has gotten increasingly refined and smaller planets, farther out from their star have been observed.

Another method is to look for the slight dimming of a star when one of its planets passes between us and the star. This transit method requires that the plane of the planet’s orbit is oriented edge on from out point of view. This would seem to be very rare but there are so many stars out there that it happens often enough to give us plenty of cases to observe.

The Kepler space observatory has been spectacularly successful using the transit method. The Kepler team has accumulated a list of about 1000 confirmed exoplanets and over 4000 candidates are still under study. Most of the Kepler exoplanets are also large and too close to the stars to allow for life as we know it. However, a small subset of rocky planets similar in scale to the earth have been detected in “habitable zones” in which their orbits receive sufficient energy from their suns to allow for liquid water if the planets have dense enough atmospheres. That a handful of such candidate rocky exo-earth candidates have been detected is an enormous accomplishment.

The book, however, is not a technical guide to exoplanet detection. As the full name of the book implies, Billings puts the exoplanet discoveries in the broader context of the search for life beyond earth and for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). He focuses particularly on Frank Drake, the leading pioneer in SETI, who published his famous Drake Equation in the 1960s for estimating the number of advanced civilizations in the galaxy. Or guesstimating is more accurate. Most of the parameters in the equation, such as the probability that a star has planets and the fraction of such planets that could support life, were poorly known or not known at all.  The exoplanet discoveries finally provide hard data to determine some of these parameters.

Billings also reviews the formation of the solar system and the geologic and biologic history of the earth.  Earth’s development provides provide clues as to what to look for when seeking exoplanets with life.

Zooming in on earth-like planets and seeing them directly remains a key goal for exoplanet searchers. The most straight-forward way to do this is to build observatories in space and use special techniques to mask out the tremendous glare of the star so that the meager reflected light from the exoplanet can be examined. Most of the designs for such observatories will take considerable resources and Billings laments the lack of funding for such projects. He fears that just as we are finally gaining the capability to see and study distant earths, the implementation of that capability is receding into the future as NASA’s budget remains flat or falls.

(Recently Billings wrote about designs for relatively low cost space observatories specialized to see earth-sized planets around nearby stars if such planets exist : Planet Hunters Bet Big on a Small Telescope to See Alien Earths – Scientific American.)

It has been nearly five billion years since the formation of our solar system and our earth. Billings message is that we have now proven that earth is not the only rocky planet in the Milky Way. The next step is to study these exo-earths and determine if humans remain in solitude or have companions in our galaxy as well.