SETI researchers continue search for alien life in Shasta County
HAT CREEK - In the small town of Hat Creek in Shasta County, a few hours north of the Bay Area, a radio observatory is looking for a lot more than just stars.
The sensitive receivers scan the radio spectrum spanning from 0.5 gigahertz to 11 gigahertz, a range of 10 billion channels.
The radar dishes are searching for something humans have hoped to find for generations: signs of a remote, technologically-capable civilization.
It's not unthinkable. In August of 1977, Ohio State University's 'Big Ear' radio telescope picked up a strong narrowband radio signal which so impressed astronomer Jerry Ehman that he circled a printout recording the signal and wrote: "Wow!" in its margin. And so it's gone down in history as the "Wow!" signal, and remains the strongest candidate for the reception of a non-natural E.T. signal.
"Yeah," said SETI's Senior Astronomer, Seth Shostak. "The 'Wow' signal. It looked like the real deal. It really looked like the kind of thing you'd expect from some alien transmitter. But it was seen once, well, twice within one minute. Twice. And then it was never seen again. Five minutes later it wasn't seen. An hour later, not seen. Years later, not seen. Many people have done many experiments trying to find that 'wow' signal again. And well. The wow is gone."
For now, anyway. But at Hat Creek Radio Observatory, the search goes on. Wael Farrah, Phd., is a project scientist at the telescope array: "There ought to be something out there."
His small office has windows that look out onto the array of scopes, installed by a grant from Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen in 2007. In part, they search for radio signals from another star system that are clearly generated by some sort of intelligence, wittingly or unwittingly.
"We are listening for radio signals and our experiment's really simple," says Dr. Shostak. "We take these 42 antennas, we point them all at some nearby star system, and we listen at multiple frequencies to see if we pick up any sort of signal."
That's been the idea since Nikola Tesla suggested the scheme in 1908, and Dr. Frank Drake implemented the first search at Green Bank, West Virginia in 1960.
The observatory's radio telescopes, and the software routines that help sort the vast amount of data brought in by the array recently got a major upgrade, thanks in part to a $100 million dollar grant from Russian billionaire Yuri Milner.
"The big difference in the way we're looking for ET today compared with the 1960s," says Dr. Shostak, "is mostly in the equipment. The equipment isn't just millions; it's billions of times better. It means that you're covering a lot of the radio dial at once, so that increases your chances of finding something."
The equipment picks up signals from intelligent life often, but that intelligent life is closer to home than the researchers would like.
"Human made signals. They could come from a communication satellite, a cell phone, a radio, a cell phone tower. Or an electronic device that is slightly misbehaving," said Dr. Farrah.
With 400 billion stars in our Galaxy alone, and with an average of one planet per star, that makes for around 400 billion planets to sift through.
"If that isn't enough to guarantee at least a couple of intelligent societies," says Dr. Shostak. "I mean, if I bought a couple of hundred billion lotto tickets, I'd have a few winners in there, right? And if it's not true; if humans really are the smartest things in the Milky Way galaxy, then we're some sort of miracle. And it's hard to believe that we're a miracle."
Despite the daunting odds and scant results, the astronomers are dedicated to their mission.
"No success yet," says Dr. Farrah, "but, it's...it's a no-brainer. There ought to be something out there. One of these nights it's going to happen. It's just that we're not there yet."
Hat Creek Radio Observatory is open to the public from 9am-3pm on Thursdays and Fridays. For more information, or to make a donation, visit www.setistars.org or email them at teamseti@seti.org.