About SETI Australia
About SETI
SETI Australia Science
SETI celebrates its 40th
There was a chill in the Spring air in the hills around the Green Bank National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia, USA on April 8, 1960. The young Dr Frank Drake and some students had set out on one of the most audacious of all experiments.
The telescope being used was the 85 foot, the net a single radio channel and the quarry two relatively nearby sunlike stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. Drake's quest was simple. He was taking humanity's first opportunity to do more than wonder about the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial civilisations. In his hands was the means to go beyond that wonder that had existed for thousands of generations - to scientifically search for evidence to answer the question 'are we alone?'. Drake's Project Ozma would search Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani for two hundred hours.
So why celebrate 40 years of SETI? After all that time shouldn't we hang up the phone on the cosmos convinced that we are truly alone?
On the contrary...SETI has barely begun. The technology to do SETI has dramatically improved over the years, and continues to improve. In SETI Australia - only five years' old - we are searching with not one radio channel, but 58 *million* channels. We are not searching within a mere ten light years, but up to around 1,000 light years (a light year is the distance light travels in one year at around 300,000 kilometres per second). Even that is small compared to the size of the Milky Way, the galaxy that is our celestial home - 100,000 light years across. The one thing to be learned early on with SETI is that space is filled with an awful lot of space!
All SETI can do in this vastness is to work with the best instrumentation available and the biggest radio telescopes in the world. By the time SETI celebrates its 50th birthday we may well be on the threshold of being able to hear not only messages zipping across the cosmos, but to 'see' the kind of radio noise we've been tossing out into space from radio and television transmissions and radar. At that point the sky could 'light up' with many such sources. This requires huge radio telescopes, like the planned Square Kilometre Array, and an improvement in the computing capability of SETI equipment, but both are in the 'likely to happen' basket in the next decade or two.
In the meantime, the search is relatively cheap to do and in most cases it requires no specific telescope time of its own. As was said as far back as 1959, just months before Drake initiated Project Ozma, if you don't look the chances of success are zero. Since 1960 there have been some 60 projects. Today there a number of international projects, the three biggest being Project Phoenix (SETI Institute), SERENDIP (University of California Berkeley) and Southern SERENDIP (SETI Australia, University of Western Sydney).
SETI Australia continues its project because the chances of success are NOT zero and it is a reasonable experiment to do given the clues that life might be quite common in the universe. It is also possible to do other good science with the same technology while searching. In addition, it has spin-offs such as our science education project. In 2000, with help from our friends at the SETI Institute, SETI entered the New South Wales science curriculum as a context for teaching science and in a way that allows high school students to learn and use the tools of science.
Carol Oliver
The young Frank Drake ready for Ozma
(Photo courtesy of NSRA/AUI)
Drake today with the
famous Drake Equation
(Photo courtesy of Seth Shostak, SETI Institute)