A note from Jill Tarter…

At TED last February, Chris told the audience that without a White Knight stepping up to support my SETI observing program on the Allen Telescope Array, the antennas would soon be put into a safe hibernation mode in preparation for shutting down the array.  That’s because our University of California Berkeley partner was no longer able to find federal and state funds to pay for operations of the Hat Creek Observatory where the array was built.  No White Knight materialized; hibernation commenced April 15^th.

Since April, the cryogenics have been kept running to protect the delicate low noise amplifiers in the innovative feed/receiver systems on the antennas, physical security has been maintained, our extraordinary computing equipment has been stored in our Mountain View lab for safekeeping, but the weeds on site grew unchecked, and no data were taken from the sky.  Recovery was a 3-part process: first work with UCB to forestall the immediate site remediation activities that would be required at the cessation of the US Forest Service land use permit, second find a new task for the array and a partner to maintain and operate it while sharing time with SETI, and third find support for my SETI team to restore our observing capabilities and once again begin exploring the sky.  It hasn’t been easy, and the future is still a bit uncertain, but as of September 1^st, we were back on site, greasing antenna bearings, reinstalling computers, rewriting software to accommodate new modes of operating, fixing a frozen compressor on the old HVAC system, and yes, mowing down the weeds.  We have a short-term contract to assess the utility of the ATA as part of the US Air Force important space situational awareness mission, and we hope this will turn into a long-term partnership.  We are working with the USFS to have the land use permit transferred.  We also experimented with crowdfunding to raise the money needed for my team to do the work and get the array and our SonATA signal detection system up and running again – thousands of wonderful SETI Stars from around the world came to our aid on SETIStars.org, meeting the 40 day funding challenge we set for them – WOW!

In a delightful coincidence, we were finally ready to relaunch our SETI exploration of the 1235 exoplanet candidates announced last February by the Kepler mission (the worlds that we had been targeting prior to hibernation), and the date of our relaunch was yesterday; the opening day of the First Kepler Science Conference!  We started observing again and the Kepler team announced the discovery of Kepler 22b, the first Earth-size planet in orbit within the habitable zone around a star like our Sun – not quite Earth 2.0, but getting close.  And by the way, they also gave us another 1000+ exoplanet candidates to explore.

So for the next two years or so, we know exactly what we need to do, and where we want to look.  Planets are real, planets are plentiful, and some of the systems are starting to look a bit familiar.  What a great time to be doing SETI!  Federal and institutional funding sources have brought the search for life elsewhere in the galaxy to an exciting threshold – my astrobiology colleagues will be trying to search for biosignatures from exoplanets circling other stars, and at the Center for SETI Research we are moving forward with the public’s quest to know whether there is any intelligent, technological life on these worlds.  As always, the funding for the SETI effort needs to be found: about $100,000 a month, every month, every year.  We are going to repurpose and evolve SETIStars.org to allow supporters to more closely follow our progress, to interact with us in ways that keep them involved and motivated.  The setiQuest community that launched as part of my 2009 TED Wish is already helping us with the technical challenges of our work.  This is humanity’s search, and we cannot do it without global support – some of which I hope will come from the TED community.

It worked! Thanks to the crowdfunding site SETIstars.org, the necessary $200,000 has been raised to get the Allan Telescope Array back online over the next few months. SETIstars.orgwill stay up to help contribute to ongoing costs of running the array. More details in this Nature Blog story >>

A couple months ago the SETI Institute, home of 2009 TED Prize winner Jill Tarter, put the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) into hibernation due to lack of funds for the project. This shutdown came at a particularly bad time. With new planets being discovered in the habitable zones of distant stars, for the first time we know where we might look for intelligent life beyond earth. This knowledge would allow SETI to significantly more efficient; they can point their instruments at specific regions of the sky rather than sweeping the entire sky. The ATA is the only instrument available full time for listening for radio signals from possible intelligent sources.

Public support for getting the ATA back online has been tremendous. And so now the team at SETI has created SETIstars. “It’s a site to focus the activity of SETI enthusiasts who want to help support our search for extraterrestrial life. As a first step, [they] are seeking $200,000 in contributions by August to get the ATA back online. And if [their] predictions about your enthusiasm are right, we’ll be rolling out additional challenges soon — including a couple of firsts for Institutes like SETI.”

Learn more and donate at https://setistars.org/

Cross-posted on Huffington Post: When 2009 TED Prize winner Jill Tarter wished to “empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company,” we looked to the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array (ATA).

With this telescope, Jill’s vision, and the power of open-source initiatives, we were able to globalize the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Because we don’t know what a new signal will look like, it’s hard to create an algorithm to find it, and our own eyes actually work better than computers.

Regrettably, recent shortfalls in operations funding have put the Allen Telescope Array into a state of hibernation. While fundraising efforts are under way to remedy this situation, we must acknowledge this serious blow to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. There is, however, one silver lining: over the past two years, the ATA has stored many terabytes of data in the Amazon Web Services Cloud, and a significant signal might be hidden amid this information.

Working together, and sorting through this data, we could still find it!

In collaboration with Zooniverse, a site that has launched many other citizen science projects -– inspiring volunteers to classify galaxies, explore the Moon and even to discover planets around other stars -– millions of people will soon be able to search the ATA data in hopes of finding a signal.

I can’t express how excited I am that Zooniverse will be working with Jill Tarter and the SETI Institute to develop a project that will unlock the secrets of the ATA archive. And when the ATA comes back online, the volunteers can work alongside Jill’s team in real time to sort through much more data — data that contains so many signals, it actually confuses the computers.

While the project will require some time before it’s up and running, I urge each of you to get ready to share your eyes … and help dig for a signal.

– Amy Novogratz

From Jill Tarter…

I’ve survived/thrived-in a week of TED.  It’s been exciting and exhausting to tell as many TEDsters as I could what we’ve been doing to realize my 2009 wish. Our setiQuest team has now open sourced our signal detection code, publishing it at https://github.com/setiQuest/SonATA.  I’ve been walking around Long Beach demonstrating the setiQuestExplorer on my tablet.  It’s the Android app that Francis Potter of the Hathersage Group developed (with support from Adobe) as the first instance of a citizen science interaction with data from the Allen Telescope Array.  If you’d like to register to beta test it with us go to explorer.setiquest.org.

We are poised to expand on this first platform with the Galaxy Zoo team at the Citizen Science Alliance, to build an even more engaging experience.  We want the volunteers to work with us in real-time to decide whether there are any patterns in the data from the ATA that our computers might be missing.  Our computers do a great job at finding signals we’ve told them to look for, but the human eye is excellent at finding undefined anomalies.  Real-time response is critical so we can follow up immediately and figure out which signals are due to terrestrial interference, and which might just turn out to be ‘theirs’.

Now is the time to do this!   The Kepler satellite has just provided us with 1235 exoplanet candidates – for the first time we can point our telescope at planets – not just stars like our Sun.  We want to spend the next two years exploring these new worlds to see if any of them are home to cosmic neighbors.

BUT, as Chris Anderson told the world from the TED stage on Wednesday night, we now have a funding crisis. Funds that we had planned on to operate the ATA and support our scientists for the next two years have fallen victim to state and federal funding disruptions.  Chris asked for a white knight to ride to our rescue.  That hasn’t happened yet, though some wonderful supporters have begun to fill in the gap.  But the gap is huge.  We need support from others who want to help change the world by calibrating our place in the cosmos.   The ATA is really the only way we can now explore the Kepler exoplanets to see if any of them are inhabited; other missions and spacecraft are decades in the future.  I’m hoping you will become part of our support team.

The following is an equation from a paper Jill Tarter wrote to determine how much of the cosmos has been explored in the search for extraterrestrial life. She encourages you to read it and challenge her in our comments.

—-

Just how much of the cosmic haystack have we explored to date? Start by assuming that electromagnetic signals are indeed the correct manifestation of extraterrestrial technologies for which to search. The electromagnetic cosmic haystack itself is at least 9-dimensional (3-space, time, 2-polarizations, frequency, modulation, required sensitivity). There are ~10¹¹ stars in the Milky Way, not all of them have planetary systems, but some that do probably have more than one habitable planet, so lets take 10¹¹ stars as a good measure of the 3 spatial dimensions to be searched. Radio searches have typically covered both polarizations, so that isn’t a factor. In the radio spectrum there are 9 billion 1-Hz channels within the 1 to 10 GHz terrestrial microwave window, so roughly 10¹¹⁺¹⁰ = 10²¹ combinations of star-Hz to search. How many modulation schemes might we have to explore? The Cyclops Report considered only circularly polarized, narrowband signals because these propagate nearly undistorted through the interstellar medium. But such signals are information poor and can be masked by local RFI. Modern communication theory suggests that with adequate compute power it would be possible to search through a large number of modulation schemes for complex signals with a large number of degrees of freedom, primarily very broadband signals. It might also be necessary correct for the interstellar distortion (mainly dispersion) that broadband signals suffer, although there may turn out to be techniques such as autocorrelation to directly detect the distorted signal. As a rough guess, perhaps a search of 100 different modulation schemes, and 100 different dispersion measures for a total of 10⁴ trials. That brings us to something like 10²⁵ star-Hz-modulations for this portion of the haystack. Project Phoenix searched 10¹² star-Hz for a single modulation type of narrowband signals, and the ATA has already searched a comparable amount, for a total of 2×10¹² star-Hz-modulations. Thus far, the ratio of searched space to haystack space is 2×10^-13. What about required sensitivity and time? A comprehensive search of the haystack that would make a null result significant would be one that would detect the equivalent of our own 21st century technology throughout the galaxy. The current galactic center survey with the ATA requires a transmitter to be 20,000 times as strong as our current most powerful transmitter (the Arecibo planetary radar with an EIRP of 2×10¹³ W EIRP), meaning that our searches to date are only 10^-17 of the 8-dimensional portion of the 9-dimensional haystack, and we haven’t yet factored in time. The duty cycle of the signal is unknown, but if it is a deliberate signal it should be fairly high because the sender wishes it to be received. To date all our searches have required that this duty cycle be unity so that it is detectable with one or a few looks and persists for confirmation; that is to say we have had little or no sensitivity to transient signals, or to signals that undergo strong fading through the interstellar medium. However, this is a small factor compared to the temporal issue of longevity; arbitrarily we set the duty cycle to 1/2. In the 10 billion year history of the Milky Way, the technology has to be transmitting at a time when we are searching. The probability of this is crudely L/10¹⁰ years, where L is the longevity of the transmitter. Although our terrestrial history indicates that the technologies themselves outlast the civilizations of technologists, L is often thought of as the longevity of the technological civilization, and we know nothing about it. We use our own example to set a lower limit of 100 years. However, in our galactic neighborhood, most stars are older than the Sun with an average age of ~7 billion years. If elsewhere the evolutionary timescale to reach technological capability is comparable to our own 4 billion years, then L could be as long as 3×10⁹ years. Using these two limits means that the fraction of the 9- dimensional cosmic haystack searched to date lies between 5×10^-26 and 1.5×10^-18, with a geometric mean of 2.5×10^-22. Coincidentally, the Earth’s oceans hold 1.4×10¹⁸ m3 of water, or 6×10²¹ cups of water. So our search of the 9- dimensional haystack is equivalent to sampling about 1.6 cups of water from the Earth’s oceans. If you were looking for fish instead of extraterrestrial intelligence, I don’t think that you would conclude that there are no fish in the ocean after this meager sampling!

What setiQuest needs now — is a really good, open source, software engineer!

During the months since TED, I’ve given talks at SXSW, OSCON, WEF Davos, UK Astrofest, SETIcon, SPIE and lots of smaller venues talking about our ideas to invite the world to help us with our search and to build a setiQuest community.  Danese Cooper also helped out by introducing us to the Campus Party Brasil and joining a group of successful open source superstars who have been meeting to help us plot a roadmap to success.  You can follow the continuing deliberations of that group and add your ideas on Tuesday mornings at 11 am (Pacific time) at IRC channel #setiQuest.  It’s all good, and we are learning how to turn a scientific exploration into a community.

But there are still ongoing, in-house needs to write and publish and improve actual code to run the Allen Telescope Array, take data, and find signals, while evaluating any new algorithms, strategies, and code contributed by the setiQuest community.  Our team is small and we’ve embarked on a large learning curve under the guidance of Avinash Agrawal, the Open Innovation Director that TED has provided us to help with my wish.  One more really experienced open source software engineer would enormously enhance the productivity of our team.  So if you know anyone who is job-hunting, and who’s intrigued by the way in which searching for an engineered signal from an extraterrestrial civilization could change the world – please pass along the ad below.  Remember, we can always use your support in any way that works for you.

jill

Wanted: Software Engineer

Join the Ultimate Search – the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.

If you want to work on a project that could potentially change how humanity thinks of itself; are driven by the challenges that leading-edge technology brings; consider yourself to be an expert in software engineering; and enjoy the intimacy of a dedicated small team at the same time as working with the global community, we would like to hear from you.

You will work on software that processes data collected from radio telescopes, separating it into individual channels, and looking for evidence of techno-signatures in each channel. Specifically, you will

1. Migrate the software from custom hardware to standard hardware running Linux.
2. Play a leadership role in open sourcing the software, and building and nurturing a community around it.
3. Extend the software by adding new algorithms, and other features.

In order to participate fully, you must:

1. Have been part of a large Open Source program – at the level of committer or community manager.
2. Be a master at software development using C++, with good knowledge of Java
3. Have at least five years of software development experience after a degree in computer science or engineering
4. Have worked with databases, preferably MYSQL.
5. Have experience with multi-threaded and distributed programming
6. Be able to administer Linux systems.
7. Have great oral and written communication skills – you will be dealing with people around the world.

The following additional skills will help you further in this role:

1. Source code control experience, preferably using GIT or SVN
2. Experience with signal processing algorithms
3. Interest in astronomy and/or astronomy software
4. Experience with networking and multicast data streaming
5. Familiarity with agile software development

Please communicate your interest and qualifications by referencing the following contact information.

Application deadline : Open until filled 
The SETI Institute is an Equal Opportunity Employer. 

 Apply online now