Jill Tarter reports on last month's SETIcon...

The weekend of August 13^th -15^th, was a big adventure for us at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, CA – we held our first ‘con’ event.  It was a little like throwing a party and wondering whether anyone would come, or maybe worrying whether thousands would show up dressed as space aliens!   Neither happened.  SETIcon-2010 was a wonderful mixture of science fiction and science fact – where the ‘science’ was a broad smorgasbord of topics relating to life elsewhere in the universe (including SETI) and in extreme environments here on Earth (all of which are studied by investigators at the SETI Institute), a debunking of pseudo-science staples, the joys of amateur astronomy, and behind-the-scenes creativity to depict the science of the future on small and large screens.  For those of the ~1000 attendees so-inclined, there was even music, dancing, and banqueting.  This year we celebrated the 50^th anniversary of the first SETI radio search and the 80^th birthday of Frank Drake (the original searcher), as well as the 25^th anniversary of the SETI Institute itself.  In future years we won’t have these milestones to commemorate, but everybody had such a good time, we’ll do it again anyway.

Mickey Hart showed us his music video ‘Rhythms of the Universe’ and the 18 Hz sub-woofers from Meyer Sound Labs resonated deep within us, as did the voiceover line ‘it’s us’.  This is a work in progress to be taken into 3-D and performed live on future big platforms, but Friday night’s audience reveled in an intimate conversation with Mickey himself.  Having been warmed up, many attendees then enjoyed a Rock Party hosted by the Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait – who knew he could do that!  If our summer interns had known, they would have recruited him for their setiGurls music video that they debuted to surprise us just before SETIcon.  The weekend was filled with panels and one-on-one Q&A opportunities with the local and visiting ‘talent’.  It was a special treat for all of us to hear Tim Russ (aka Tuvok from Star Trek: Voyager) talk about his passion for the night sky as an amateur astronomer, and to listen to Seth Shostak and Robert Sawyer trade one-liners, and to marvel at Rusty Schweickert and his job of trying to protect the planet from a trashing by near-Earth objects .  Trashed or not, one thing for sure – the audience loved planets!  Whether it was planets in our own solar system, planets that got demoted (Pluto), planets that never got formed (incoming asteroids), or planets orbiting other stars now being sought by the Kepler spacecraft and telescopes at Lick and Keck Observatories, it didn’t matter, the audience wanted more and was caught up in the quest to find the first Earth analog.  Stay tuned on that last point. For me, Saturday afternoon was a special treat as we held a special setiQuest Summit.  Three dozen leaders of successful open source and crowd source projects gathered to give their advice on how best to garden our setiQuest community in fulfillment of my TED wish.  They looked over our ambitious goals and offered their advice on prioritization, pitfalls to avoid, and a set of alternative plans for moving forward.  Best of all they identified themselves as part of that community and opted for future meetings with actions to be completed beforehand.  Houston, we have lift-off!  The world at large knows Scott Hubbard as the former NASA Ames Center Director, but Saturday night they got to discover his talents as a jazz musician, part of the warm-up act for the banquet honoring Frank Drake. Sunday continued the pace of presentations and participation, if anything the crowds were larger!  Biology and microbes of the extreme variety got to shine in the spotlight, as did the extreme real estate that might just turn out to be habitable in our own solar system. Educators, entertainers, and public speakers who struggle to overturn misperceptions and fears based on media hype, superstition, naive science, willfully bad science, and just plain greed, discussed ways to be more effective.   Their sad consensus is that it is getting harder every day, even as Hollywood and the National Science Foundation are forging a link to improve the scientific accuracy of the content of popular entertainment offerings. There were a number of lessons-learned from this first outing, to be applied to the next event.  The one that sticks in my mind is that we could have made our lively Saturday afternoon live-auction an even bigger success if we had kept a few of the items for offer after the wine and food of the evening banquet!  Yup, we’re newbies – I’m sure many of you could have told me that!

SETIcon will never replace TED.  Its topics are more constrained and its parallel sessions afford the audience a chance to get more up close and personal with the presenters and panelists, while forcing a choice of whom to cozy up with; as opposed to TED’s eclectic and heady offerings for everyone.  But like TED, SETIcon lets people expand their minds and contemplate how to participate and thereby become more than they were – always an idea worth spreading.

“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.”— Dr. Carl Sagan.

Where do you want to go this summer? How about helping harness the power of citizen scientists to improve the search for extraterrestrial signals?

The Quest

setiQuest is an effort to tap into the global brain trust, harness the power of citizen scientists, and educate the next generation of Earthlings to improve current searches for extraterrestrial intelligence and better understand our place in the cosmos. We are creating a community—or if you prefer, a tribe—to actively involve the world in the ultimate search for cosmic company. setiQuest is the concretization of Jill Tarter’s 2009 TED wish to change the world. We are looking for a summer intern, Community Manager to help harness and harvest the power of this tribe.

Training

While at SETI you will have access to some of the most prolific scientists in astronomy and astrobiology who are focused on scientific research, education and public outreach. Their work, along with The Quest, has the possibility to change our understanding of life, the origin of life, or to discover if other planets in our universe can support life.

Talents

We are looking for an individual who is passionate about all forms of communication and exploration. You are someone who is comfortable with working with limited direction, but still very focused on meeting targets and deadlines. You are open to new ideas and like meeting new Earthlings, virtually or in-person. A good day is when you discover something new or when you are challenged to rethink everything you thought to be true.

Experience

You have a strong knowledge of the many social media platforms including Twitter and Facebook, as well as a good understanding of web analytics. You host your own blog and/or often contribute to other public online forums. You have some experience in defining and executing against an editorial calendar. A background in best practices in web design and/or web development would also be welcomed.

Responsibilities

Working with the community guidelines, you will grow the setiQuest community; increase community engagement, while also leveraging other social media platforms. Your daily communication with your tribe will be predominately on the setiQuest forums. Utilizing the brainpower of the SETI Institute’s team of scientists you will address any key questions and seed the forum with new discussions. You will also provide guidance and input into the setiQuest site as it relates to community.

If you are ready to join the Quest and guide this tribe, please send your resume and brief note describing your place in the cosmos to: jobs@setiquest.org

The setiQuest intern must be able to work in SETI Institute’s Mountain View offices. The internship is unpaid.

Photo by Robert Leslie

Last night at the Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, Nobel laureate Sir Paul Nurse moderated a discussion centered around the age-old question: Are we alone? Four scientists, including 2009 TED Prize winner Jill Tarter, shared their latest projects, which are better equipping Earthlings to answer this exciting question.

Steven Squyres, who works on NASA’s Spirit Mars Rover mission, announced that recent studies of Martian rock samples from 2005 show evidence of a wet, non-acidic environment that could have been favorable to life at one time. Lab tests confirmed the presence of high concentrations of carbonate, a precipitate of water. Carbonate dissolves in acid, so the remainder of carbonate in these rocks suggests neutral, life-friendly conditions. Squyers also mentioned the possibility for a life-friendly environment on Jupiter’s moon, Europa. Beneath Europa’s frozen outer layer may be an ocean supported by the moon’s internal heat, which could provide the metabolical energy necessary for life.

David Carbonneau explained how his hunt for exoplanets — planets orbiting nearby sun-like stars — could lead to the discovery of life elsewhere. Locating exoplanets involves monitoring certain constellations for eclipses caused by exoplanets passing by stars. As part of the NASA Kepler Team, Carbonneau searches for Earth-like planets that orbit their star’s habitable zone where there is potential for liquid water and life to exist.

Michael Russell proposed that our search for life shouldn’t be guided by the question, “What is life?” but rather “What does life do?” By studying the chemical and biological origins of early life on earth, particularly the circumstances under which protein and RNA came about, he says our search for life elsewhere can be better informed.

Jill Tarter spoke about her latest work with SETI to build the Allen Telescope Array in northern California. So far they’ve built 42 dishes, but hope to fill out the array with 350. The dishes will scan 24/7 for radio signals from afar. Any signal discovered would have originated in the past (due to the time taken for the signal to travel vast intergalactic distances), and most likely would come from an older civilization that’s had technology for longer than Earth. While Jill admitted that we may be searching for the wrong thing, or we may not yet have the technology to recognize signals from intelligent extraterrestrial life, she affirmed that we should keep looking and push technology ahead to better our chances.

At the event’s conclusion, Sir Paul Nurse asked Jill her opinion on Stephen Hawking’s statement that humans should avoid alien contact because they would most likely be hostile. She replied that if she discovered an alien signal, first of all, she would have a glass of champagne to celebrate. Then, should would have faith that the likely older civilization would’ve had to have mastered control over their aggression in order to survive, so they should be peaceful beings. Instead of inspiring fear, she hopes such a profound discovery would trivialize humans’ differences so they could see themselves as fellow Earthlings.

- Jenny Zurawell

(Photo: TED / Asa Mathat)

SETI Institute, an interdisciplinary scientific organization that explores the nature of life throughout the universe, announced that starting today it will make large quantities of astronomical radio telescope data accessible to astronomers and other scientists as part of an effort to build a global community of searchers for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.

Today’s announcement represents the latest milestone in SETI Institute’s mission to facilitate mass collaboration in the search for civilizations beyond earth. The radio telescope data will be released by setiQuest, a program formed in 2009 after SETI Institute director Dr. Jill Tarter was awarded the2009 TED Prize, whose benefits included $100,000 and the assistance of the global TED community to help realize her “One Wish to Change the World.” Accepting the prize, Dr. Tarter asked the TED community to “empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company.”

After months in development, the setiQuest program has reached the point where it is able to invite the global scientific community to access radio signal data collected by SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array (ATA). Commissioned in 2007, the Allen array is operated jointly by SETI Institute and the University of California at Berkeley. It is a “Large Number of Small Dishes” (LNSD) telescope array designed to conduct surveys for both conventional radio astronomy by the university, as well as for SETI Institute’s research.

SETI Institute analyzes the ATA radio data in real time with special software to detect technological signals from a distant extraterrestrial civilization. The process is analogous to listening to one hundred million radios, each tuned to a different channel and attached to an antenna that is highly sensitive to just one millionth of the sky, to find faint signals.

To date, SETI Institute’s methods have focused on the search for what are called narrowband signals. One of the benefits of opening the ATA data to the global scientific community is to invite development of techniques to analyze broadband signals.

The radio telescope data will be made available through setiQuest’s website, www.setiquest.org, in the form of files containing streams of data samples from specific targets in space. Data can be accessed by registered participants in the setiQuest program. SETI Institute hopes that by making the ATA data widely available, scientists around the world will develop new and innovative ways to process the massive quantities of radio signals streaming from space every second.

SETI Institute search programs have processed data in real time and discarded it shortly after the observation. They are capturing these new data sets to invite the public to expand the search. Now, setiQuest will provide a day’s worth of ATA data each week, and will leave the data on its website for up to six months.

While astronomers and specialists with experience in digital signal processing (DSP) may be the likely initial population of scientists and technologists with an interest in setiQuest, the program welcomes scientists and technologists of all disciplines. Those interested in learning how they can be part of the setiQuest project can find more information at www.setiQuest.org.

A report from Jill who just presented at SXSW:

I’m sitting in the Austin airport, waiting to head home from the South by Southwest conference. I hope I managed to encourage some of the code and game developers here to get involved with setiQuest. There were some familiar faces from TED here at SXSW this week. So I’ve been thinking about what TED and SXSW have in common and how they differ. Both have enormous energy. SXSW is bigger and the attendees are younger. At SXSW it’s about sharing the people who represent new ideas, at TED the ideas get shared directly. At TED, it’s about changing the world, at SXSW it’s about changing the bottom line, so that it might then be possible to change the world.

In the past month since TED, we’ve made some real progress garnering the resources we need to implement setiQuest. That web site has captured the contact information from more than a thousand individuals who want to help us develop code, and algorithms, and serve as human pattern detectors. There are tens of thousands of ‘waterfall’ plots now residing in the cloud for the data visualization specialists to experiment. We’re on schedule to start publishing our massive signal processing code in June, and we’ve hooked up with Jane McGonigal to start thinking about the parameters of a SETI game based on real data. I wish I could stay home more to work on making the searches better, instead of hitting the road to raise the needed funds. Avinash Agrawal is holding all the bits and pieces together, and helping our small team figure out what it needs to get done, by when. There is no denying that it’s been a privilege to participate in both TED and SXSW in 2010, and Davos as well. Onwards to the next plane.

SETI Quest — a place to build a network of committed Earthlings who want to help in the hunt for extraterrestrial life — is the result of Jill Tarter’s 2009 TED Prize wish.

How can you help? From the site:

If you are good at writing efficient code and like to participate in open source projects — we need you. If you are knowledgeable about digital signal processing and pulling signals out of noise — we need you. If you are eager to use your eyes, ears, and mind to help us find anomalies in the data streaming from the Allen Telescope Array — we need you. We need your help to manipulate and explore the real-time data from the telescope, and to create the environments that will allow global participation by Earthlings of all ages.

Visit the site now to sign up for project updates and learn how you can be a part of the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

For those who want a detailed understanding of the Allan Telescope Array and how it connects with SETI activities around the world, check out this talk from Jill Tarter.

After a lot of searching to find just the right person, Avinash Agrawal recently became the project manager at SETI for Jill’s TED Wish.  This position will last two years and is incredibly vital to maximizing the tangible and human resources made possible by from the TED community.  It took time for us to find the right individual for this job because of the many different areas of expertise required, from technology to business to management to communications. Avinash will be a spokesperson for the Open SETI project and we look forward to hearing more from him as the project develops.

A quick story from Jill Tarter…

I hope they have iphones on Kappa Ceti, because there’s a message on route to them right now thanks to the combined efforts of Joe Davis and the Arecibo Observatory radar transmitter. See here for the full story or here for part 1 with more pictures.

Who knew?  I wasn’t aware that Joe was working on this 35th anniversary transmission; should he have done this? Mike Nolan expresses the tricky spot he finds himself in as the representative of Arecibo Observatory and the quirky, treacherous history of federal funding for SETI, and perhaps, by association, funding for Arecibo.  Others might think he shouldn’t have done that because it potentially puts the Earth at risk (see discussion on Active SETI, perceived risk, and David Brin’s article in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_SETI).  At the SETI Institute we have long sought a way to have an INCLUSIVE conversation on this topic, one that would represent nationalities, ethnicities, gender, religions, traditions, and cultures.  So far our efforts have selected primarily first-world, Anglo-Saxon males.  One of the things I’m excited about is that my TED wish may find a way to use new social-networking technologies to actually enable this global dialog.

This story by Joe Davis exposes the silly, the political, the passionate, and the innovative sides of science and scientists of the SETI variety – I think you’ll really like it.