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ET PHONE HOME! CALL COLLECT!
The search for extraterrestrial life has always fascinated me.Every since a child in the sixties space travel and the meeting of others out there seems to me a logical extension of our fledgling space program.
How disappointed was I when the Apollo program ended,ended without the promised space station colonies and Moon settlements that the science fiction writers had assured us were just a decade if not a few years away.What was even more surprising to me was that we had not yet picked up signals from the outer reaches,signals of an obvious intelligent source that is.
Radio telescopes were going up all around the world,surely it would only be a matter of a short time before we were watching the soap operas from Proxima Prime.
The very first thing I did when I went on air just a few short years ago,was to do a Google of a program I had been hearing about on science programs for years.That search was for BIONIC,the shareware program that combines the power of millions of PC's around the world,united them in a series of scientific research projects.The one that attracted me the most though,and the one that is silently running right now on this PC I am sitting in front of-the BIONIC SETI program.
SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a scientific area whose goal is to detect intelligent life outside Earth. One approach, known as radio SETI, uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space. Such signals are not known to occur naturally, so a detection would provide evidence of extraterrestrial technology.
Radio telescope signals consist primarily of noise (from celestial sources and the receiver's electronics) and man-made signals such as TV stations, radar, and satellites. Modern radio SETI projects analyze the data digitally. More computing power enables searches to cover greater frequency ranges with more sensitivity. Radio SETI, therefore, has an insatiable appetite for computing power.
Previous radio SETI projects have used special-purpose supercomputers, located at the telescope, to do the bulk of the data analysis. In 1995, David Gedye proposed doing radio SETI using a virtual supercomputer composed of large numbers of Internet-connected computers, and he organized the SETI@home project to explore this idea.
So why haven't we heard from ET yet?The reason is a simple as a hydrogen molecule,and as complex as how that hydrogen molecule came to be.
Take into account the fact that intelligent life may not be all that common.Life,yes,I believe the Universe abounds with life,anywhere that the chemical conditions exist life will begin and thrive.We only need to look to the boiling depths of geysers and the frozen wastelands Of Antarctica to find life in places thought impossible a few years ago,so the wind swept methane clouds of Jupiter could just as easily have life.Intelligent life on the other hand may be a lot rarer,look to all the conditions that happened BEFORE man came along.Comet and asteroids all had a major role in us being the species with the telescopes.Would we have made it as a species if Nature first had not removed many of our major competitors?Only the adoptable will become super intelligent,but first there has to exist an environment in which we at least ave a chance,and I do not believe our ancestors would have made it is a world ruled by Giant Dinosaurs,and we certainly could not have co-existed peacefully,no matter how much the animal rights activists would wish it.
So intelligent life will be rare,but even rare will still mean millions of planets with life,only a few may have what it takes to make that phone call.
Next addition I will touch on just where we have been looking,and why it just may be the wrong place.So till then I bid you farewell.Live Long and Prosper!
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