seti_opener_000417 The grand task of searching for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe has always lacked a key component: a telescope dedicated to the task.
That could change Wednesday, when the SETI Institute, an organization devoted to searching the skies for signals from extraterrestrials, activates a telescope array in northern California.
The array is actually a prototype of what would be the world's first telescope devoted to the search for intelligent life -- a massive lineup of around 500 small satellite-dish telescopes whose power would rival one large telescope 328 feet (100 meters) in size.
The Rapid Prototype Array (RPA), made of seven satellite dishes 12 feet (3.7 meters) in diameter, will be used by the SETI Institute to prepare for supporting the
One Hectare Telescope -- or 1HT, as the final telescope array is called. On Wednesday, April 19, the SETI Institute will unveil and activate the RPA at a site in Lafayette, California. The 1HT array is slated to be completed in 2004. While 1HT will mark a milestone in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, it's not the first.
Since the 1960s, astronomers have scanned the skies for radio signals that could have originated from intelligent life on other planets. Frank Drake is credited as conducting the first such search, pointing an 85-foot (26-meter) antenna at two sun-like stars.
A young Frank Drake
In the 1970s, NASA entered the search, creating a study called Project Cyclops that analyzed issues in the search for life. That report provided a firm foundation for later work in the field.
NASA even briefly participated in the search with a sky survey of their own, but Congress cut the program in 1994, less than a year of the search's start.
That left SETI to the private sector. The SETI Institute, founded in 1984 to research life in the universe, had assisted NASA with its search, and took over the practice after it ended. The institute rents time on large telescopes around the world, and points them toward stars similar to our own to search for signals characteristic of intelligent life.
The Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico is sometimes used for SETI.
Finding what signals would indicate intelligence is an imprecise science; Project Phoenix looks for signals in a specific area on the radio dial that indicate by their characteristics that they are not just natural background noise, but an intentional transmission.
Project Phoenix has already examined about half of the stars on its list, without success.
While humans have wondered for ages whether they are alone in the universe, some say that searching radio signals for signs of intelligent life is a hopeless venture.
"I think that the technological life of the kind we can detect with a radio telescope is very rare and may not exist other than ourselves," said Prof. Benjamin M. Zuckerman, a professor of astronomy and physics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Zuckerman is also coeditor of the book, Extraterrestrials, Where are They? (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
But the SETI Institute defends their work as worthwhile.
"People in general, in poll after poll, are very interested in the question: 'Are we alone in the universe?'" said.Greg Klerkx, director of development at the SETI Institute. "In the interest of pure curiosity, it's an important search. It also has a very strong scientific grounding."
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