What if there's somebody else out there? Video of a talk by Jill Tarter, director for SETI Research

[Better Believe It]

What if there's somebody else out there?
By Jill Tarter, Special to CNN
April 20, 2010

Astronomer Jill Tarter is director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute. She was awarded the TED Prize in 2009. TED, a nonprofit organization devoted to "Ideas Worth Spreading," hosts talks on many subjects and makes them available through its Web site.

You can see the video of her talk "What if there's somebody else out there?" at:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/04/20/tarter.TED.SETI/index.html

It is NOT the video of her commentary posted below this photo.



Commentary by Jill Tarter

At this moment we have reached a major turning point for both science and the public at large. The SETI Institute is now offering the world the first taste of raw SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) data collected by the Allen Telescope Array in California. With this we move closer to fulfilling the institute's mission, which is to search for our beginnings and our place among the stars

Throughout the institute's 25-year history (we are a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to scientific research, education and public outreach), we have analyzed these raw data with custom algorithms operating on semi-custom hardware. Now we are transitioning to readily available hardware and servers because technology has caught up to us -- hooray!

In the future, we hope that a global army of open-source code developers, students and other experts in digital signal processing, as well as citizen scientists willing to lend their intelligence to our exploration, will have access to the same technology and join our quest.

As I look at my team at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, and at a handful of other SETI teams around the globe, I see very clever individuals who have been willing to forgo the traditional challenges and rewards of academic research to work on a program of immense potential -- to do work that can literally change the world. Many see SETI as a fascinating avocation, but few indeed are willing to make it their vocation.

In 2009, when TED awarded me its TED prize and the opportunity to make a wish to change the world - -a wish they would help me fulfil l -- I thought of a mirror. It is the mirror that we hold up to the planet in our scientific search for the answer to the ancient question, 'Are we alone?' It is the mirror in which all humans can see themselves as the same, when compared to the extraterrestrial other. It's the mirror that allows us to alter our daily perspectives and see ourselves in a more cosmic setting. It is the mirror that reminds us of our common origins in stardust.

TED and technology are helping me and my team hold up that mirror to all inhabitants of this planet so that we can see our reflection as Earthlings. I told TED that "I wish that you would empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company."

Soon it will be time for you to get involved by participating at setiQuest.org, a website that will make available the results that we get from our telescopes. Right now the site is geared to those knowledgable about digital signal processing, but in the coming months, anyone -- from a child playing a setiQuest game to an interested adult -- can join the search for intelligent life in the cosmos.

It's been 50 years since Philip Morrison and Guiseppe Cocconi published their seminal scientific paper on SETI in the journal Nature, and since Frank Drake first used the Tatel telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia, to attempt to detect any radio signals from technologies he thought could be orbiting the nearby stars of Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. Since then, only those of us privileged enough to use the marvelous tools of the astronomer have been able to shape this pursuit of cosmic company.

For the past decade, you and any other person around the globe have been able to leave your computer turned on and search through data recorded at large radio telescopes with the SETI@home screen saver. But you couldn't change or improve the search your computer was enabling, you couldn't get involved creatively. You didn't have to see your reflection in the cosmic mirror.

Now that computing has gotten fast enough, now that Amazon Web Services, Dell, Intel, Google and others have donated resources to the SETI Institute, my team and I can benefit from your skills and your energy. You can help us with our search.

Access the raw data we have published at setiQuest and show us how to process it in new ways, find signals that our current signal detection algorithms are missing.

This summer, when we openly publish our software detection code, you can take what you find useful for your own work, and then help us make it better for our SETI search. As I wished, I'd like to get all Earthlings spending a bit of their day looking at data from the Allen Telescope Array to see if they can find patterns that all of the signal detection algorithms may still be missing, and while they are doing that, get them thinking about their place in the cosmos. That's the way we can change the world!

We don't yet know how to get our data out of the observatory and presented to willing citizen scientists in real-time -- but if you are technically savvy, that's where you come in, that's where you can help us make the search better.

The SETI Institute can begin to count anyone in the world as a member of our team. All of the SETI searching over the past 50 years is equivalent to examining one 8-ounce glass of water from the Earth's oceans -- a lot of human effort, but not a lot of exploration. As our technologies improve exponentially, and as the world joins our searches, we may finally have the right tools for exploring the cosmic ocean.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Jill Tarter

[Better Believe It]

1. Scientists find water ice on asteroid’s surface

Scientists find water ice on asteroid’s surface
Discovery could explain Earth’s oceans and set off a Pluto-like spat
By Seth Borenstein
April 28, 2010

Scientists have found lots of life-essential water — frozen as ice — in an unexpected place in our solar system: an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter.

The discovery of significant asteroid ice has several consequences. It could help explain where early Earth first got its water. It makes asteroids more attractive to explore, dovetailing with President Barack Obama's announcement earlier this month that astronauts should visit an asteroid. And it even muddies the definition between comets and asteroids, potentially triggering a Pluto-like scientific spat over what to call these solar system bodies.

This asteroid has an extensive but thin frosty coating. It is likely replenished by an extensive reservoir of frozen water deep inside rock once thought to be dry and desolate, scientists report in two studies in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

Two teams of scientists used a NASA telescope in Hawaii to look at an asteroid called 24 Themis, one of the bigger rocks in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. They examined light waves bouncing off the rock and found the distinct chemical signature of ice, said University of Central Florida astronomy professor Humberto Campins, lead author of one of the studies.

Furthermore, scientists didn't just find ice; they found organic molecules, similar to what may have started life on Earth, Campins said.

Read the full article at:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36830453/ns/technology_and_science-space/?gt1=43001

[RandomThoughts]

2. Well if she is looking for patterns.

Just for fun :D

Turn around :)

The screen has 11 07 42 1, 13 53 13 1 :D



Then in the bottom right it actually says, hybrid out: ph sig is zero,
so not those bad ones from that movie. :D


So if I believed in Aliens, that would be good news :)


Edit: LOL, nope, just looked up PH scale, the person that set the monitor thinks its the acid aliens.

That is so funny. Sounds like a bit of fear mongering. Glad it isn't aliens.

:rofl:


And if they are Seti, why would they be so negative to what they search for? But again I don't believe in aliens.

Edit 2: Maybe she is saying the hybrids are out and they are the acid ones?

Hard to know, since it doesn't really mean anything anyways. :)

[LongTomH]

3. Jill Tarter on: "Should we fear space aliens?"

In another opinion piece on CNN.com, Jill Tarter takes issue with Prof. Stephen Hawking's recent Discovery Channel special. In that special, Dr. Hawking theorized that aliens might destroy us and take our resources; you, know like the aliens in Independence Day or like, well, us every time we've met a 'less advanced' group.

Ms. Tarter thinks that hypothetical aliens might have advanced beyond their warlike, colonizer phase:

............What about physical contact? Well, one thing is for sure: If they can get here, then their technology is superior to ours, and not just by a little! Arthur C. Clarke's third law is, "Any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic."

Can we be certain that their magic would do us harm? I would hope that Hawking would agree that a large value for L (a requirement for that magical, star-spanning technology) could also mean that their distant civilization had found a way to stabilize itself in order to survive and grow old. That might require outgrowing any aggressive and belligerent tendencies that may have characterized their youth.

Such an advanced technology might well send explorers whose size and shape we cannot yet imagine to study and examine the diversity of life that evolved elsewhere -- and rather than exploiting us, they might value and support the natural biodiversity of the galaxy.

Indeed, most of Hawking's Discovery Channel program was devoted to explaining that life as we know it is hugely diverse, and life as we don't yet know it is worth searching for because of all the ways a discovery would inform and surprise us.

Interestingly, the late Dr.Carl Sagan held similar views on advanced races in the galaxy. Dr. Sagan and others opined that races that didn't evolve controls on their worst instincts would destroy themselves before they could move out into space.

Personally, I agree, and I would add: We will need to cooperate on a worldwide basis if we are to move out into the galaxy at large. That will involve considerable ethical advancement.

And yes, I do hold out hope for the human race.

[RandomThoughts]

5. I made that same arguement.

It is not a hard one to make, it is pretty simple. So if there are races of aliens, they would have to develop humanity to survive and travel.

[Better Believe It]

6. Advanced intelligent beings that can visit here would not be primitive like us.

We're still babies with a long way to go before real advanced human civilization is achieved.

A few hundred or perhaps a few thousand years away if we somehow manage to avoid destroying planet Earth.

[RandomThoughts]

4. Doesn't anyone find that the screen says

Hybrid Out: Ph 0 to be funny?

[RandomThoughts]

7. I has having fun with the screen comments.

No offense to the institute or the nice lady, she has a great smile, and actually I think SETI is a good idea when being serious.

One of the computers at a place I worked had the distributed processing of Seti information, that was an interesting program, and one of the first examples of open distributed computing.

And the movie Contact was pretty good, that is what I think of when thinking of SETI, patterns in the noise.


But anyway, what a fun profession that would be, like being an explorer looking for new lands.