New telescope scans the sky for alien life

[tocqueville]

By Toni Clarke
1 hour, 16 minutes ago

BOSTON (Reuters) - A Massachusetts observatory unveiled a powerful new telescope on Tuesday designed to capture possible light signals transmitted to Earth by extraterrestrials.

The telescope is the first to be developed solely to search the skies for light pulses from aliens and will be able to cover 100,000 times the amount of sky covered by current equipment, its developers said.

"The opening of this telescope represents one of those rare moments in a field of scientific endeavor when a great leap forward is enabled," said Bruce Betts, project director at The Planetary Society, a group in Pasadena, California, that advocates space exploration and funded the telescope's development.

"Sending laser signals across the cosmos would be a very logical way for E.T. to reach out, but until now, we have been ill-equipped to receive any such signal," he said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060411/sc_nm/science_aliens_dc_1

[electropop]

1. Excellent!

I'd love to know how they capture nanosecond light pulses in high volume. I have dealt with nanosecond pulses and it's pretty tricky electronics.

[sutz12]

2. Sounds good....

SETI always seemed a bit off to me. Listening for radio waves is fine, but if we are really searching for a superior race of beings, would they really be still using radio waves? I think they would have more sophisticated communications than second generation Marconi sets.

[Phoonzang]

4. Yep...

I've heard that criticism of SETI as well. Alien species may be using wideband communications and you'd need to listen to multiple frequencies to get the whole message. Simply listening to the hydrogen band isn't enough. Also, we're making the assumtion that the alien species (which might be waaay ahead of us) in our neighborhood will be using radio signals. Who knows what other methods of communication a million years ahead of us might invent. Optical SETI is a good start.

Anyway, if SETI wants to find radio signals they'll need alot more money and they'll need to search alot more sky.

[Peace Patriot]

3. Some day, this will be the only thing that matters in the history of the

human race--our stepping on the moon, the Mars and planetary flyby missions, Viking, Hubble and the search for extraterrestrial life.
:grouphug:

[Meldread]

5. I really don't understand.

I believe the Universe is full of life, and when we actually get a chance to look and explore the Universe we will be shocked at what we find. Yet, at the same time I believe intelligence - like us - is relatively rare. In fact, I believe it is highly likely that we might be the most technologically advanced civilization in this Galaxy.

I should probably draw the distinction between intelligence and technology. It seems that for some reason people like to combine the two, but really they are completely different things, having little or nothing in common with each other. We are lucky, evolving the way that we have. We have hands - thumbs - and we live on land. We can grasp objects and manipulate them. We can create and then harness electricity.

Now, for a moment, let's say Dolphin's begin to evolve that are, intellectually speaking, more intelligent than Humans. It will face certain limitations. First, it will lack hands to manipulate their environment, and that begs the question: How will they build technology? Second, a measure of our own success, really our entire technological revolution, is based around the discovery and harnessing of electricity. Yet, even if intellectually superior Dolphin's had hands, how would they harness electricity? Water and electricity just don't mix.

It might be easy for us to dismiss a Dolphin as being intelligent by saying, "It has no computers!" or "It doesn't even have a radio!" Yet, it might be able to perform more complex calculations in it's head than ten of our greatest scientists combined. We might look at primitive Humans in such a way that we would see them as unintelligent. Yet, we are no more or no less intelligent than our ancestors, we've just been able to build upon generations and generations of experience - generations and generations of trial and error.

There are many barriers to having a planet like our own. There are many possible evolutionary paths, perhaps endless in number. It seems to me that to get to a civilization like our own you require several things:

First, you need a habitable planet. Out of several billion stars in our galaxy perhaps, maybe 200-300 have habitable planets for life, and most of those perhaps would not be habitable for "Earth-like" life. The "Earth-like" planets, places in which we could (at least in theory) live probably only number somewhere around fifty.

Second, you will need to have evolved to live on land. On a planet with little water, this is a high possibility, on more Earth-like planets with lots of water, the chances I'd say would be smaller.

Third, you will need some way to manipulate the environment around you. There may be other ways of doing this than just using hands, perhaps on low gravity planets or planets with a high concentration of certain gasses there might be methods... but having hands would be perhaps, at least as far as my imagination can go, would be ideal.

Forth, you will need to have the actual intelligence to put it all together. It does you no good to live on land, have the ability to manipulate your environment, and still lack the intelligence to do anything worthwhile. I believe that life is very common in our universe, but I'd wager intelligent life - intelligence equal to or greater than our own - is limited. Out of those possible candidates, only a small handful of them will develop civilizations because of one limitation or another. In my estimate (read: guess) I'd wager that once the entire universe is explored from top to bottom we'll find no more than fifty to one-hundred civilizations that could possibly one day equal, is equal, or is greater than our own. This would be out of perhaps billions of planets with life, and millions of planets with intelligent life, only a handful of those will grow civilizations, and perhaps an even smaller number of those will develop technology.

So, in summary - what's the point of this post? Well, a number of things. I think looking for "alien civilizations" is more or less a waste of time with our current technology. We operate on limited resources and I believe looking for habitable worlds where intelligent life might exist will be a much better bet than looking for civilizations, especially advanced civilizations, it is - to put it bluntly - a waste of time, resources and valuable scientific minds. My second point was to change the definition of what we are looking for - are we looking for intelligent life or are we looking for technology? More importantly, if we find a planet with life how do we know it is intelligent or not if it doesn't have technology? Judging by how Humans treat the life on our own planet, if we discovered another planet that was habitable for us and that had life... well at least with our current culture... I don't see us being too kind to it. So I guess a question that has to be asked is, what is intelligence and who gets to decide what is intelligent and what isn't? Perhaps an even deeper question is, what is life and who gets to decide what planets are dead and what planets aren't? After all, life on non-Earth like planets will be radically different from our own. How would we tell an animal from a plant? Would we be able to tell the difference - or even would there be such a difference?

There are so many questions that need to be asked, and this is why we must search out these planets, and none of those questions can really be answered if we waste our time looking for civilizations that have a level of technology at least equal to our own.

Besides, if we want to find planets with technology why are we trying to intercept their communications? The best way of doing that is finding a way to measure how much electricity is being used on a planet, if there is such a way of doing that. If we found a way to do that, it would be like finding a footprint in the mud - we'd know it was a technologically advanced civilization with intelligence. Any planet that has managed to harness the power of electricity will then also have technology and as a result must therefore be intelligent.

[windy252]

6. I wonder if it's like a comedian said

To paraphrase, they know about us, but they think of us as the ignorant planet.

[sutz12]

7. Well reasoned thoughts....however...

First off, there are over 100 Billion stars in our galaxy alone, I believe, so increase all of your subsequent statements by about 100,000 or so. :)

Yes, there are serious moral as well as scientific questions about how we treat whatever life and/or intelligence we encounter. Our past has not been good, for sure.

Contact was one of my favorite movies of the past few years.

[Meldread]

9. I still think people are over looking a lot of factors.

Don't get me wrong. More than anything in this world I'd love to find another civilization of intelligent creatures that has technology that is the equivalent or greater than our own. (Well, only if they are peaceful - we have enough problems here on Earth without getting involved with a hostile species.)

Even you are correct (and you very well may be) about the number of possible worlds you have to understand the distances between stars. It's insanely huge. Even if we consider for a moment that technological civilizations exist all over the place, communication from those places would take centuries to reach us. How long have we been broadcasting signals into space? For all we know there could have been civilizations out there that were just as technologically advanced as we are, yet blew themselves to smithereens with weapons of mass destruction. As a result the signals from that planet ended generations before we started listening.

There are just so many factors involved that it is literally mind boggling to consider. A species that develops technology will have to also have the ability to have an imagination, which means their minds will have to evolved in a certain way. All of our technology starts out with the question: "What if..." and someone has to imagine how it will work, how it will be built, and how to go about gathering the materials to do that. Imagination is simply essential. Then there is the fact that they will need some way to manipulate objects around them, so they'll need something that functions at least as well as our hands. A dolphin or a whale might very well be as intelligent as we are, and have an imagination, but a lot of good it will do them if they can't manipulate the world around them. Then they will also have to be land-based creatures so they can use electricity.

We also have to consider that if evolution works similar on other worlds, and things are even remotely the same that the species that evolves to be the "intelligent" species will be predators by nature. So that invokes a whole class of problems in and of itself. Human society is by and large no different from some animal societies, the only difference is the complexity in what we do. We still are protective of what we consider ours, be it our land, our family, our country, so forth and so on.

The fact that such a species evolves in such a way increases the likelihood they will destroy themselves as their technology and knowledge advances as Humans are poised to do here on Earth.

Really, the whole looking for aliens is a bit like gambling. You're hoping just to get lucky. Sure, you *MIGHT* hit it big and find what you are looking for, but more likely you are going to lose more than you intended.

The problem I think we have is that we only have one type of life to study, and that is Earth based life. If we could find one planet, just one, with life - even basic life - then we will be able to compare. We will be able to understand so much more about ourselves and our universe. Does evolution work the same on every planet? Is DNA a common development? Does life always require water? How is it different from us? These are fundamental questions and being able to answer them will bring us closer to understanding just how likely we are to find other technological civilizations.

I just have to wonder how many people think, for example, once we get to look at Europa's Oceans that we will find fish. I wonder how many people are imagining Earth-like life on other planets. I firmly believe that the universe is much, much more complex and complicated than we currently believe. For all we know Mars might be teaming with life, and every time we look through the camera we are looking dead at it, but because it isn't something we're familiar with we just consider the place dead. We, literally, only have one example of life. DNA evolved here on Earth. DNA is why we are here today. What if there are other ways? What happens then? What will life look like then? Could intelligence evolve? Would there even be evolution? ...well this whole concept is another discussion all together.

[frogmarch]

8. If

If technologically advanced species capable of communicating with us exist, maybe they already know our species by now, and know it well enough to realize that contacting us could spell trouble for them.

For that matter, it could spell trouble for us. I believe basic evolutionary priniciples would apply on other worlds as well. Our species, technologically advanced as it is, didn't reach this point of development by being a magnanimous lot...or, according to some scientists, by being herbivorous.

But do technologically advanced ETs actually exist in our galaxy? What are the chances that our blink of existence as a technologically advanced species coincides with the blinks of existence of technologically advanced ETs?

[Solon]

10. Possible, but its also likely that they simply don't know about us...

Even if they are within range of our radio transmissions so far(about 100 light years radius from Earth). The reason is actually simple, first, of the transmissions we first transmitted, most were absorbed or reflected by the Ionsphere, never left Earth, in other words. Of the ones that did escape to space, they were extremely weak, and would be hard to interepret, especially the TV signals. It wasn't until about 40 years ago that we even sent a purposeful message to any alien life out there, and that message was brief, though hopefully interepretable. Since then, with our technology advancing, we have actually reduced our radio transmissions overall, opting for more efficient and higher bandwidth satellite, optic fibre, and hard wired communications. Of the communications that we do transmit to space, those are for our own space probes and other space craft, they are directed using special transmitters that direct the radio waves in a specific direction.

The point being that its very likely that, assuming that the Kentaurus system(3 stars only about 4 light years from us) has an advanced civilization inhabiting it, that neither we nor them would know about each other. Even for interplanetary communications of high bandwidth, which would be necessary for interplanetary or interstellar civilizations, laser and other means besides radio would be used to communicate. Radio, as a general broadcasting wavelength is too energy intensive and inefficient for such uses. Not to mention interferences encountered in space such as dust, gasses, and various masses, like black holes and neutron stars, that would stop those signals in their tracks.

Also a point on whether alien civilizations exist at all at this point in time, it seems statistically likely, and also, another thing to think about, Humans, as a species, has only existed for 200,000 years, and only for a 150 years as an industrial civilization, and only 100 years as a society that could detect or even communicate with other sentient species in the Galaxy. Civilizations on a interplanetary or interstellar, even Galactic scale could exist for millions of years in one form or another, on a variety of planets, space habitats and interstellar craft. Given just the distances to our nearest neighbors, if we expanded into the Local Neighborhood, we would quickly change our thinking about time as short term meaning a few centuries and long term in thousands of if not millions of years.

Again, given the time factors, we have been here for an eyeblink, so far, but other civilizations could possibly trace back their heritage to soon after the formation of the Galaxy itself.