Stars and planets bring up life...
SETI@home History In 1981, disaster struck. NASA had been going full steam, building the world's largest radio to search for alien civilizations. But one man objected. And because that man was a powerful US Senator, he was able to kill their budget. Senator Proxmire thought NASA was just wasting the taxpayer's money in the foolish hunt for nonexistent little green men. So he added an amendment to the US budget that cut off the money for NASA's project. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (called SETI, rhymes with "Betty") had become increasingly respectable. Starting with the first modern call for SETI in a scientific paper by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison in 1959, and the first modern radiotelescope search by Frank Drake the next year, a handful of astronomers had been looking for signals. But most of the time there was only enough money for brief searches, mostly with existing equipment. Finally, just when SETI was starting to get the NASA treatment -- a dedicated, long-term project using powerful, specially designed computerized equipment -- they were ordered to cancel the project. The Planetary Society to the Rescue However, one new factor had arisen recently that was beyond the Senator's control. The Planetary Society had just been created, with the goal of supporting both space exploration and SETI. I had become the Society's SETI Coordinator, and one of my duties was to maintain contact with NASA's SETI program. And so it was that I found myself in northern California at my first major meeting with the NASA SETI scientists and other advisors. It was held in a room with a long, six-sided table that reminded me of a coffin, which fitted our mood perfectly. The one bright note was provided by a young Harvard professor, Paul Horowitz, who had been working with the NASA scientists. He described his plan to build a SETI system so small that it would be portable, able to be carried to existing radiotelescopes. He called it Suitcase SETI. We agreed to support it, and within a year, The Planetary Society's first SETI project was scanning the heavens. E.T. Meets SETI In 1982, an event in Hollywood had an unexpected impact on the world of SETI. Steven Spielberg released the movie _E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and it became one of the most popular films in history. Carl Sagan and his wife, Ann Druyan, had met Spielberg several times for informal dinners and long conversations. One afternoon at a hotel in Southern California, Sagan and Druyan were awaiting a visit from Spielberg to show him their newborn daughter, Alexandra. They were shaking their heads over the state of NASA's SETI program. He mentioned his desire for a major SETI project far beyond what we were already doing at Harvard. When Spielberg arrived, the conversation naturally turned to SETI. Suddenly, Druyan looked at Spielberg and blurted out that he "could give Columbus his three ships." She asked Sagan what it would cost. He had actually told her the answer the night before, and she knew that on the scale of Hollywood and the Defense Department, it would not seem out of reach to the director. Sagan said we could mount a credible program for $100,000. Spielberg immediately agreed. Thus was born Project META (Megachannel Extraterrestrial Assay). Horowitz built a receiver covering an unprecedented 8 million radio channels. In 1985, Spielberg personally threw the switch that turned on the new system. SETI took another major step forward. And so The Planetary Society served as the catalyst that allowed science fiction to react with science fact. Over the years, Spielberg's connection with the Society has remained strong, and he is now a member of our Board of Directors. Many Paths SETI touches upon many sciences, leading us to support a fascinating array of projects during our first two decades. We helped arrange for American scientists to travel to the USSR when American government funding was unavailable. We have contributed to the study of dolphin communication, the search for planets around other stars, radio observations in Australia and Ohio, a SETI conference in Toronto and a conference on interstellar flight in New York. Project META was replaced by an even more powerful system, Horowitz's Project BETA, with a quarter of a billion channels. Most SETI has been conducted in the northern hemisphere. But the southern half of the universe is rich with potential sites for other civilizations. So we have been delighted to work with the Argentine Institute of Radioastronomy to help build a SETI observatory there -- META II, the first permanent SETI observatory on the southern half of our planet. One of their scientists, Guillermo Lemarchand, now edits our _Bioastronomy News. This newsletter helps keep the world's SETI community communicating with each other. Desktop SETI The most spectacular success we have had in getting the public interested in SETI came about because of an ingenious idea for analyzing the huge amounts of data that SETI produces. In 1996, David Gedye and Craig Kasnoff had the idea of using the Internet as a supercomputer to process the data. Thousands of computers could handle small pieces of the calculation. Eventually, this came together at the University of California at Berkeley with Project SERENDIP -- the Search for Extraterrestrial Radio Emissions from Nearby Developed Intelligent Populations. Designed by Stuart Bowyer and Dan Werthimer, SERENDIP had been through several versions, and was on the verge of extinction when they came to us for funds. We enabled them to survive, and they went on to build the version that is now attached to the world's largest radiotelescope, the giant Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico. With support from the Society and other sources, the goal of using the Internet to analyze the vast quantities of SERENDIP's Arecibo data became reality. Under the direction of David P. Anderson, Werthimer and their team designed the system called SETI@Home that now allows computer users everywhere to participate in SETI. We had hoped that we could get 100,000 people to participate. We got two million! There are so many computers now that we can look for subtle signal types that no one has had the computing power to search for previously. If you want to try it out yourself, just go to our web site, http://planetary.org. The Light Side of SETI Over the years, there has been a debate within the SETI community about which is better across the galactic vastness -- radio or laser communication. Most astronomers had concluded that radio was the easiest and cheapest way to communicate between distant stars. But a few scientists felt that lasers were the way to go, and during the last few years, they have convinced many researchers that there are solutions to the difficult problem of detecting faint light or infrared signals near a bright star. So now scientists are doing both. The Society, together with the SETI Institute, is supporting light-based SETI projects at Harvard and Berkeley. Optical telescopes search for flashes of light or for light whose energy is concentrated into an unnaturally pure color, either of which could be distinguished from the steady, multicolored natural light of a star. The Future The colorful graph of Arecibo SETI data cheerily greets me every time I return to my computer terminal, like a scene in a science fiction movie. So far, we have not discovered any alien signals. This is disappointing, but every scientist involved in such a search knows that it's a tough job. We have to scan the entire sky, at a huge range of possible frequencies, guessing at the type of signal they might transmit. Nobody knows what the best technique is, or even what frequency aliens might use. It's possible that they use a communication technology we have not yet discovered, but even then, they might use primitive technology like ours to make contact with new civilizations, much as we might use smoke signals to contact a tribe that did not have radio. All we can do is make intelligent guesses and search the sky as thoroughly as possible in as many ways as we can, using the most powerful technology we can afford. But the reward, if we are successful, will be to prove for the first time in history that we are not alone. Carl Sagan's introduction to the book "Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence" expressed eloquently the goal we are still pursuing: "In a very real sense this search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for a cosmic context for mankind, a search for who we are, where we have come from and what possibilities there are for our future -- in a universe vaster both in extent and duration than our forefathers ever dreamed of." The Planetary Society will continue, with your support, to carry on that vision.
