The nonprofit SETI Institute of Mountain View, California, which was founded in 1984, today will announce the gift.
"For the first time in our history, we have the ability to pursue a scientifically and technologically sophisticated search for intelligent life beyond Earth at the same time we are doing traditional radio astronomy," Allen said in a statement.
Myhrvold added that there is "great uncertainty and some controversy" in the view held by some that intelligent life in the cosmos is widespread.
"One thing, however, is beyond dispute," he said in a statement. "That is, if we don't continue supporting projects like [this] our chances of discovery will remain at zero."
Through the Paul G. Allen Charitable Foundation, Allen will provide $11.5 million. Myhrvold, now president of Intellectual Ventures, also located in Bellevue, Washington, will donate $1 million. The funds will be made available over a three-year period.
The silent treatment
The money will allow the SETI Institute to begin construction of the Allen Telescope Array at the Hat Creek Observatory near Mt. Lassen, some 290 miles (467 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco, California. The primary electronics laboratory that supports the array will be named for Myhrvold.
The remote locale is perfect for SETI since in the ET signal search business, silence is golden.
Thanks to the mountains and the desolate nature of the area, the SETI listening post wont hear the entire buzz and clatter that flood the airwaves due to intelligent life here on Earth.
The
, which will jointly build and operate the cluster of radio dishes, operates the site.Beyond advancing SETI work, radio astronomers can also use the super array to study interstellar chemistry, the structure of galactic magnetic fields or the physics of rotating neutron stars.
"This is going to be a world-class instrument," said Thomas Pierson, chief executive for the SETI Institute.
"Its a very exciting time for SETI. This is the dawn of an era where SETI researchers and radio astronomers no longer have to compete for time on a telescope," Pierson told SPACE.com
In early 2003, enough dishes and electronic equipment will be in place to begin SETI and radio astronomy research, Pierson said. By 2005, the array will be in full operation.
The total estimated cost is $26 million.
"The bottom line is what this new telescope array will do for us," said Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the SETI Institute.
"For the past several years, we have been laboriously looking for signs of extraterrestrial civilizations, checking out a thousand nearby stars. With this new instrument, we can look at a hundred times that many. Maybe a thousand times that number," Shostak said.
Deep dish pockets
The Allen Telescope Array will be constructed using hundreds of mass-produced smaller dishes, said Pierson. Individuals and organizations can join Allen and Myhrvold in the SETI project by naming individual telescope dishes for a contribution of $50,000, Pierson said.
For SETI, more collecting dishes means a more powerful and thorough search.
As example, the 27 dishes of the Very Large Array in Socorro, New Mexico, have about the same combined collecting area as a single 420-foot- (128-meter-) diameter dish.
The whopper of radio telescopes is the 1,000-foot- (305-meter-) diameter radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. But replicating that enormous dish would be far too expensive to attempt.
Shovel versus teaspoon
"In days past, it seemed to be that bigger was better," Shostak said. "But this is one more human activity where bigger may not be better."
Todays miniaturized electronics can be coupled with affordable computer processing, capable of sifting through signals from a farm of perhaps as many as 700 small receiving dishes, Shostak said.
"Digital electronics makes it much more practical to do all of this," Shostak said. "So far, our SETI searching has been like looking for a needle in the haystack and using just a teaspoon. With this new array, we're going to be using a shovel."
Pierson said that improvements to the array over time are possible, and at low-cost. The SETI equipment can be upgraded by software and computing hardware advances. By adding more dishes to the array, its overall sensitivity is boosted, he said.
"Everything we're attempting to do, we know can be done," Pierson said.
A hectare of a search
In April, engineers and astronomers from the SETI Institute and the University of California-Berkeley unveiled a small-scale version of the mega-multiple dish array. The test gear was set up at the Russell Reservation near Lafayette, California.
A seven-dish configuration was tagged the Rapid Prototype Array. It is a precursor to the larger, 107,640-square-foot (10,000-square-meter) collecting area first called the One Hectare Telescope, now renamed the Allen Telescope Array.
Shostak said that full-time SETI has always been dogged by large costs. That changes with the new array.
Both nonstop SETI and cutting-edge radio astronomy research is possible given the electronic prowess of the advanced array.
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