The Parkes Observatory in Australia will join a renewed search for extraterrestrial life (Image: Alex Cherney, Terrastro.com/SPL)
The hunt is on. We have been scanning the skies for signs of life for decades, but the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has never been a high priority when it comes to allocating public money. This has made long odds even longer, says Russian billionaire and venture capitalist Yuri Milner who, alongside Stephen Hawking, today launched a $100 million project called Breakthrough Initiatives to reinvigorate the search for ET.
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The project, which will initially be funded for 10 years, involves an all-star line-up including Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, Frank Drake of the SETI Institute 鈥� who created the famous Drake equation that captures the likelihood of intelligent life in the universe 鈥� and NASA鈥檚 Pete Worden.
But the project will also be open source, and all data will be available to the public. Milner hopes that SETI enthusiasts of all stripes will get involved. 鈥淢aybe they will find the signal, not the experts,鈥� he says.
Alien TV
As in previous searches, the first part of the project 鈥� Breakthrough Listen 鈥� will look for signals that could be alien-made, whether they are messages deliberately sent into space or the alien equivalent of leaked TV broadcasts.
Breakthrough Listen will focus on the million nearest star systems, the core and plane of the Milky Way, and the hundred nearest galaxies. 鈥淭he list of targets is not new,鈥� says Milner. 鈥淏ut we will do it in a systematic way. The search will be 100 to 1000 times more efficient than ever tried before.鈥� The second part 鈥� Breakthrough Message 鈥� is a $1 million prize to design a message to send into space that represents our species and home. Details of this competition will be announced at a later date.
The funding buys the team time on two of the world鈥檚 largest radio telescopes 鈥� the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Parkes Observatory in New South Wales, Australia.
This will let them scan frequency ranges between 500 MHz and 15 GHz, roughly five times wider than previous searches. More computing power will also be thrown at analysing the data, which will allow the team to look for a signal across a wide range of frequencies simultaneously.
Straw view
鈥淩adio telescopes until very recently were soda straws, giving a very narrow view,鈥� says Worden, who was director of NASA鈥檚 Ames Research Centre in Moffett Field, California, for nine years until his retirement in March. 鈥淯nless we were extremely lucky and someone was beaming very powerful signals directly at us, we鈥檇 be unlikely to see anything.鈥�
The Green Bank and Parkes telescopes will also give greater sensitivity. If there are aircraft radars somewhere in the next few hundred stars we could pick that up, says Worden. 鈥淚t鈥檚 really an ideal time to do this.鈥�
Will they find what they鈥檙e looking for? 鈥淚 don鈥檛 think any of us are holding our breath for success,鈥� says Rees. 鈥淏ut it鈥檚 a worthwhile gamble because the pay off from detecting any artificial signal is so colossal.鈥�
Worden is also circumspect. 鈥淲e might not find anything,鈥� he says. 鈥淏ut that begins to tell us something significant about the universe. A null result is still a good one.鈥�
Telescope time worth it
鈥淪ETI is very much a shot in the dark,鈥� says associate director of Jodrell Bank Observatory Tim O鈥橞rien at the University of Manchester, UK, who is not involved in the project. But he agrees that devoting telescope time to the search is worth it. 鈥淚magine if there was a message and we simply hadn鈥檛 been listening.鈥�
Fernando Camilo at Columbia University in New York 鈥� who often uses both the Green Bank and Parkes telescopes to study pulsars 鈥� is also happy to see the hunt for ET get a big new push. 鈥淭he SETI searches of the past are like child鈥檚 play compared to what can be done with modern tools,鈥� he says.
However, buying time on telescopes that are largely funded by public money raises some questions, says Camilo. Is SETI more important than other research that it displaces? And are projects like this a good way to top up inadequate public investment? He wishes Breakthrough Initiatives the best, but he is concerned that under-funded research telescopes have to hire themselves out in this way. 鈥淥n the whole I find this trend very regrettable,鈥� he says.
But for now, Milner鈥檚 project is the best chance yet of finding out whether anyone else is out there. If we are alone it will be very big news, he says. 鈥淲e would have to accept galactic responsibility 鈥� there is no backup. Either way we have to keep looking until we have an answer. The search should never stop.鈥�
