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The Death of SETI
The Death of SETI
I had been hearing rumblings in this direction for a while now, but it's finally official: SETI is being shut down.
It's funny how the news of SETI's death is being bemoaned by the same people who are still a little outraged that Pluto is no longer a planet. People like me, who allow their sentimentality to cloud their view of astrophysics. And why shouldn't we? The only reasons to pursue astronomy and astrophysics are sentimental. We aren't going to get there any time soon. It's all just an excuse to satisfy our curiosity.
I saw an interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson where he talked about how he was always being accosted by irate Pluto-lovers on the street. (Even though he had as much to do with that as a weatherman does the weather. Still, though, people yell at weathermen all the time in public, so there you go. Shoot the messenger.) I imagine now he will be getting yelled at for this, too.
SETI was always a gamble with an incredibly unlikely payoff. In order for SETI to "work," you had to believe that:
A) An alien race was out there.
B) They were broadcasting on a spectrum we were able to detect.
C) We happened to listen to the exact right (and infinitesimally small) direction at just the right time.
In addition to being open and honest about the nerdishly unlikely chance of positive results, SETI earned a lot of social capital by letting us help. There were few computer geeks in the early 2000s who didn't install the SETI@Home screensaver on at least one computer. You could compare your stats with those of other competing geeks, and you always hoped that your computer would be the one to crunch the right set of numbers and find proof of alien existence.
Was SETI a waste of money? If so, most of it was private money. And SETI projects did turn up some pretty interesting hits. In 1977, Dr. Jerry R. Ehrman was working on a SETI project which detected what became known as the "Wow! Signal," after a note he scrawled in the margin of the report. ("Wow!")
The signal came from the constellation Sagittarius, near the Chi Sagittari star group. It fulfilled all of the benchmarks which had been set up as thresholds for extraterrestrial contact. It was detected for the full 72-second sweep, and then never heard from again.
Later, in 2003, scientists detected a signal which was extremely suggestive of intelligent communication. It was given the much clunkier name of "Radio Source SHGb02+14a," and it came from a dark area in between the constellations Pisces and Aries.
Although SETI itself is shuttering its doors, this is just one of many projects searching for extraterrestrial signals out there. The Arrecibo Observatory is still up and running, leasing out time to scientists studying a variety of projects. And several other privately-funded projects are staying on the hunt. Maybe one day we will finally get an answer to the Fermi paradox, after all!
It's funny how the news of SETI's death is being bemoaned by the same people who are still a little outraged that Pluto is no longer a planet. People like me, who allow their sentimentality to cloud their view of astrophysics. And why shouldn't we? The only reasons to pursue astronomy and astrophysics are sentimental. We aren't going to get there any time soon. It's all just an excuse to satisfy our curiosity.
I saw an interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson where he talked about how he was always being accosted by irate Pluto-lovers on the street. (Even though he had as much to do with that as a weatherman does the weather. Still, though, people yell at weathermen all the time in public, so there you go. Shoot the messenger.) I imagine now he will be getting yelled at for this, too.
SETI was always a gamble with an incredibly unlikely payoff. In order for SETI to "work," you had to believe that:
A) An alien race was out there.
B) They were broadcasting on a spectrum we were able to detect.
C) We happened to listen to the exact right (and infinitesimally small) direction at just the right time.
In addition to being open and honest about the nerdishly unlikely chance of positive results, SETI earned a lot of social capital by letting us help. There were few computer geeks in the early 2000s who didn't install the SETI@Home screensaver on at least one computer. You could compare your stats with those of other competing geeks, and you always hoped that your computer would be the one to crunch the right set of numbers and find proof of alien existence.
Was SETI a waste of money? If so, most of it was private money. And SETI projects did turn up some pretty interesting hits. In 1977, Dr. Jerry R. Ehrman was working on a SETI project which detected what became known as the "Wow! Signal," after a note he scrawled in the margin of the report. ("Wow!")
The signal came from the constellation Sagittarius, near the Chi Sagittari star group. It fulfilled all of the benchmarks which had been set up as thresholds for extraterrestrial contact. It was detected for the full 72-second sweep, and then never heard from again.
Later, in 2003, scientists detected a signal which was extremely suggestive of intelligent communication. It was given the much clunkier name of "Radio Source SHGb02+14a," and it came from a dark area in between the constellations Pisces and Aries.
Although SETI itself is shuttering its doors, this is just one of many projects searching for extraterrestrial signals out there. The Arrecibo Observatory is still up and running, leasing out time to scientists studying a variety of projects. And several other privately-funded projects are staying on the hunt. Maybe one day we will finally get an answer to the Fermi paradox, after all!
Photo credit: Flickr/Chris Radcliff