It is clear that this quintessential quest is on the brink of a renaissance.
For one, the number of extra-solar planets either inferred or actually spotted is on the rise. Add in the fact that sharp-eyed spacecraft equipped to scan for Earth-sized worlds are coming off the drawing boards and will soon head for the launch pad. Now toss in the express lane revolution that's speeding up in microelectronics, computer and software technology. For good measure, stir in healthy doses of astrobiology research to the mix.
What you get is a stew of promising and fresh ideas to look and listen for celestial citizenry on worlds orbiting distant stars.
"This is not a U.S.-only phenomenon. People worldwide are captivated," said Jill Tarter, Director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute. Finding the funds, however, to support efforts around the globe is a daunting challenge, she added.
"Although there is an enormous amount of interest...there's no great big bankroll for SETI anywhere in the world," Tarter told SPACE.com.
Dishing it out
Work is moving forward on the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), being developed through a collaborative agreement between the SETI Institute and the Radio Astronomy Lab at the University of California, Berkeley.
The ATA project was seeded by Paul Allen (cofounder of Microsoft) and Nathan Myhrvold (former Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft). Allen will provide $11.5 million and Myhrvold $1.0 million for a total of $12.5 million over three years. Total estimated cost through construction of the Allen Telescope Array and support facilities -- including the Myhrvold Laboratory packed with high-tech signal processing gear -- is $26 million.
This novel project involves clustering an array of some 350 inexpensive commercial satellite dishes. Working in unison, the 20-foot (6-meter) mass-produced dishes mimic the collecting area of a far larger single unit, even exceeding that of a 328-foot (100-meter) radio telescope. Unlike conventional radio telescopes, the ATA is also expandable - just add on more dishes.
The ATA is to take root at the existing Hat Creek Observatory -- pending permit approval for land use -- located northeast of San Francisco in the Cascades just north of Mt. Lassen in California.
Listen up
The SETI Institute's hope is to crank up the volume on the ATA project and its related processing gear in 2005, although there are critical milestones along the way.
What ATA will do is expand the Institute's Project Phoenix stellar reconnaissance skills, an effort presently underway that has a "hit list" of about one thousand target stars.
But Project Phoenix entails observations made during just two three-week sessions each year, one in the Spring and one in the Fall, using the huge radio telescope at Arecibo, in Puerto Rico. A second antenna based at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in England is used to test potential ET signals.
In contrast, once fully operational, the Allen Telescope Array will have on-going duties to probe 100 thousand or even 1 million nearby stars.
Tarter adds, however, that the needed money to keep a step-by-step buildup to the fully up-and-running ATA has proven hard to come by.
"The economy tanked and 9/11 has made philanthropy just impossibly difficult. So we're looking for angelsfolks to come in and help us with financing the signal processing equipment that can look at multiple stars simultaneously in the large field of view that the telescope provides," Tarter said.
An estimated $10 million is needed over the next few years.
"So that's a tall order," Tarter added, "and a challenge to bring about the processing tools that will enable the telescope to do SETI a hundred times faster."
SETI Roadmap
Despite current financial woes in beefing up ET searches, the long-term future of SETI research appears bright.
The SETI Institute recently released SETI 2020: A Roadmap for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The report plots out a plan to evolve SETI science and technology for the next two decades.
One recommended avenue, among many, is to support experiments that delve into recognizing infrared or optical signals of extraterrestrial origin. This work would be done using existing telescopes outfitted with photon counting detection technology. Such searches for nanosecond flashes are already underway, including a project led by renowned SETI Institute guru, Frank Drake.
The relentless march of technology is assuredly a harbinger of things to come in the world of SETI, suggests the Institute's Kent Cullers.
By 2020, SETI efforts "will be a million times more powerful than the searches of today," Cullers points out. "In the more distant future," he adds, "the scope of this search will be limited only by our imagination."
Public-private partnership
It has been years since federal money dedicated to SETI was shut off. Congress terminated the work in what some politicos panned as little more than radio rummaging for "little green men".
Tarter senses that the time may be right for the U.S. government to renew investment in SETI.
"Government funding is certainly not out of the question, not at all," Tarter said. "It wasn't until last year that we finally were able to get words removed from the National Science Foundation (NSF) astronomy program guidelines. Those words were inserted immediately after the termination of the NASA SETI program in 1993, stating the NSF would fund no SETI research. It took until last year to get those words removed," she said.
SETI should never again become solely a federally funded enterprise, Tarter said. It should be a public-private partnership.
"To be honest, what is perhaps multi-generational in nature, SETI isn't a good fit with annual funding cycles of the government. We never want it to be cut off completely again, Tarter said. "That roller coaster, well, you ride it once. But you probably don't want to go on it a second time."
In coming years, projects like NASA's Kepler spacecraft and the Terrestrial Planet Finder, as well as the European Space Agency's Darwin mission are slated to peruse the heavens for terrestrial planets circling nearby stars. Furthermore, powerful space-based analyzers are to inspect newfound worlds in the hopes of identifying the whiffs of life, better labeled as biosignatures.
"I think that's all fabulous. But actually the public wants to know whether any ozone found indicates mathematicians are there, as well as microbes," Tarter said.
Surf and turf
Tarter doesn't try to dodge the "wild card" nature of surfing the sky in the hopes of snagging an ET signal.
"It's a bit of a lottery. The payoff would be enormous," Tarter said.
And like the lottery, people are willing to place their bets on SETI. That's obvious in view of more than 4 million people representing 226 countries that have downloaded the SETI@home screensaver.
Managed by a group of researchers at the Space Sciences Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, with The Planetary Society as its founding sponsor, the SETI screensaver project is the first attempt to use large-scale distributed computing to perform a sensitive search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.
Interrogating the stars in both targeted and sky survey mode maximizes your chances of winning the SETI sweepstakes, Tarter said. Doing so means you're looking close to home for weak transmitters, and you are looking much farther away for stronger transmitters.
"Beyond that," Tarter said, "it's a question of are you looking in the right way?"
"We can't promise success. "We're trying to answer this question about intelligent creatures elsewhere in the Milky Way Galaxy. That's our turf," Tarter said. "We may have to get a lot smarterlearn some new physicsdevelop some new technology before we do the right thing," she said.
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