Child prodigy Adora Svitak interviews Jill Tarter and other SETI astronomers “to investigate the reasons we haven’t made extra-terrestrial contact yet — and also to find out when and how this group of clever earthlings hopes to right this grave injustice.”

In August New Scientist published an article on the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) and the first science results. While signs of extraterrestrial intelligence have not yet been found, the power of the first 42 telescopes in the array is producing meaningful information.

…surveys do not distract from the search for aliens, which – if they exist and are attempting to communicate – may send out broadcasts at wavelengths not commonly emitted by astrophysical objects. The ATA can observe a wide range of wavelengths, so it can check stars in the foreground for ETI signals while it watches background galaxies for clouds of atomic hydrogen. The telescope often runs three or four projects in parallel.

“A telescope like the ATA is just a superb instrument. The fact that it can do astronomical and SETI work at the same time is really just icing on the cake,” Tarter told New Scientist. “There’s no other telescope that can do this.”

Eventually SETI plans to have 350 telescopes scanning the sky as part of the ATA. For now, Jill Tarter through her TED Prize wish “is trying to harness the “wisdom of the crowds” to optimise the SETI pipeline and analyse the data.”

We are experiencing the unique insights of the crowd now, even before the wish is complete. The article prompted a water resources engineer in Utah to suggest that IBM’s experimental site “Many Eyes” might allow visualization of SETI data in interesting ways, an important piece of Jill’s wish — so SETI will be talking to IBM.

Anyone else who has some great ideas of how to achieve Jill’s wish please write in here. We are always interested in hearing your offers of support and other suggestions.

I’m recently back from Australia where I visited the Parkes radio telescope (I had lived there for 6 months, while observing in 1995) that you may be familiar with from the charming movie ‘The Dish‘.  That movie tells the story of how the Parkes radio telescope ended up delivering to the waiting world the first televised images from the Apollo 11 landing. The occasion was the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the lunar landing and thousands of people visited the observatory to take a walking tour of the dish and learn about the astronomical research it is used for today.

I also spent 4 days in Sydney, lecturing to the Harry Messel International Science School (probably the brightest group of high school students on our planet), and updating the media on the Allen Telescope Array.  At the Sydney Ideas Lecture I talked about extremophiles and exoplanets on the anniversary of the  lunar landing.  My media and lecture audiences down under  didn’t know a lot about TED, and it was an enjoyable challenge to explain who TEDsters are and that they are actually trying to help fulfill my personal wish to change the world – there’s nothing to compare with such a group in Oz or anywhere in the world!  In contrast, one person who is very aware of TED and its activities is Kia Silverbrook who runs Silverbrook Research in the Sydney district of Balmain.  Kia’s group is about to market a revolutionary new ink jet printer and he’s got lots of clever physicists and engineers working at his labs.  My husband Jack Welch and I gave Kia’s employees a talk about the ATA, the radio science and the SETI search programs it will accomplish, and Jack’s efforts to extend the ATA feed and receiver to higher frequencies.  To do that last trick means reliably and inexpensively manufacturing bits and pieces at much smaller scales than we do presently.  Sliverbrook Research does miniaturization really well, and several of the staff seem interested to help with our challenges.

My TED wish is beginning to take on a more concrete status.  Infosys Technologies in Bangalore is helping us clean up our signal detection software, so that we can publish it as open source code.  GitHub is hosting our open source development efforts and providing required repositories.  We’ve made initial inquiries about donations of a commodity cluster for the ATA to run the detection software in real time.  We’ve also talked to cloud resource providers about donating the storage and computational resources necessary to host about a day’s worth of raw SETI data (~40 TB) each month to enable contests to develop new signal detection algorithms that can effectively find weak, higher dimensional signals that we now miss, and to enable other contests to make those algorithms fast enough to keep up on the telescope in real-time.  Finally, we are investigating a real-time visual parsing effort that might allow eyeballs around the planet to help us find complex signals in noise – signals that no algorithms can yet detect.  In June, we held a workshop at the SETI Institute with attendees from TED, the visualization, gaming, and social network communities.  There are a whole lot of challenges, but something enjoyable, rewarding, and incredibly useful may come out of this work.

On May 17, 1999 SETI@home launched with significant excitement.  Ten years on, it remains the largest volunteer computing project in the world.  SETI@home uses distributed computing from Internet-connected home computers to parse radio data from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.  Although no extraterrestrial signals have been found, volunteers remain dedicated to and involved in the project. (via Planetary News)

It is truly an amazing project fueled by volunteer spirit. The TED Prize is excited to build on that enthusiasm and commitment with Jill’s wish to develop new and exciting ways for open-source technology to allow volunteers to help in the search for extraterrestrial life.

In the three months since TED, a lot of the groundwork has been laid in order to start making Jill Tarter’s wish a reality. A TEDster, Rob Reid, came on board to work with the TED Prize and the SETI Institute to help create a 2-year action plan. We’ve spec’d out the technology requirements and are currently in conversations with companies around supporting those needs. We’re also in the midst of pulling together experts in the open source, gaming and user interface worlds to figure out how to present this data in a way that is engaging enough to keep the MANY eyeballs needed each day to find a signal that the current detection algorithms might miss.

As we move into the execution phase, we’re looking for someone to come on board to manage the process at the SETI Institute.

We are seeking someone with deep experience in managing open source software projects and the communities that power them to drive a bold & agenda-setting initiative. The initiative will involve managing a traditional open source software project, as well as a complex public-facing system that will enlist the general/non-technical public’s assistance in conducting our search. To succeed, a candidate above all needs a history of success in managing major open source projects. While it’s not essential that this person be a coding engineer, it is essential that s/he be comfortable enough with C++ code to have technically meaningful interactions with committers and the broader open source community. It’s also essential that s/he be a strong evangelist – able to speak inspiringly in public, and to energize, recruit, and maintain engagement with key influencers in the open source coding world.

The other part of the job will be governing a project that will in many ways resemble Galaxy Zoo (an intriguing “citizen scientist” system that can be found at www.galaxyzoo.org). This will involve managing a respected Web development company as it creates the site, and thereafter overseeing/”gardening” a large community of non-technical contributors. We expect this community to be self-policing and self-monitoring, like Wikipedia’s editorial community. But it will need leadership and a baseline architecture, and our hire will be responsible for delivering this.

This is a unique opportunity to work in both open source software and social media, on a project whose ramifications are literally beyond global.

This will be a full-time role at the SETI Institute for two years, funded by the money TED has allocated toward granting Jill’s wish. However, because this is a TED Prize wish, one in which many people and individuals are giving a lot to make happen, we do hope to find someone who will do this at a reduced rate. We have a large brainstorm taking place on June 1 and would love to have the right person chosen and at the table for that meeting.

Please send an email to tedprize1@ted.com if you are interested in the position.

Forward and share this opportunity on to anyone you believe possess the right skills.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Livio and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

The SETI Institute is home to incredible scientists dedicated to exploring, understanding and explaining the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe. Research is anchored by two centers: the Center for SETI Research, led by TED Prize winner Jill Tarter, and the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, led by Dr. Frank Drake. While the former focuses on the finding evidence of other technological civilizations, the later focuses on a wide range of disciplines to answer questions such as how did life start and evolve and how many planets exist which might support life. In the past five decades of SETI’s existence vast technological improvements has pushed all of this research ahead by leaps and bounds.

This month’s Discover magazine discusses the shifting perspective of astrobiology, the study of life in the universe.  Astrobiologists are looking into “habitable zones” – regions of space where living things could live and thrive – rather than single locations which might support life.

Adam Frank breaks down this concept into four zones: The Solar System Habitable Zone, The Galactic Habitable Zone, The Temporal Habitable Zone and The Multiverse Habitable Zone. His “Guide to Finding Alien Life” is a must read for everyone interested in what is beyond our own planet.

Some audio files for your commute…

Download the Airspeed interview with Jill Tarter to learn more about her work at SETI, the tools she uses and they ways we all can get involved in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Then check out this series of pieces of rhythmic entertainment from Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead. Using vibrations recorded by radio telescopes, these recordings are meant to connect the listener more closely with the universe.  A new piece goes up on the Grateful Dead site after every concert on their tour (where the pieces are debuted).  Thus far five recordings have been posted including “The Big Bang”, “Jupiter Magnetos” and “Cosmic Debris”.

Here is part of a note from Mickey on this work:

Part of the great power of rhythmic entrainment is that one is typically unconscious of the rhythms one most deeply entrains to, and unaware of all those that operate beyond the limited ability of our senses —voraciously scanning the rhythmscape with a variety of media— to detect. But these rhythms are with us all the time — in here and out there.

Modern technology allows us to capture or imagine them —electric, atomic, magnetic, galactic— and gives us a way to translate these vibrations into sounds which we can hear. Our radio telescopes have recorded the song of the pulsar, our mathematicians have modeled the domain of the Big Bang. The Black Hole in the center of the galaxy Perseus is singing a steady note -57 octaves below middle C. I have gathered together an unruly sonic zoo of 23 of these magnificent, even dangerous space creatures, and I will be introducing them to you, one a night, as we tour the Universe of Sound, the universe will start to sing.

Photo Credit: NASA, ESA, CXC, C. Ma, H. Ebeling, and E. Barrett
(University  of Hawaii/IfA), et al., and STScI

If you live near Mountain View, California, save the date of Saturday, May 16. The SETI Institute will be hosting an interactive Family Science Faire to celebrate science and the imagination.

Meet SETI Institute scientists, including the father of SETi and author of the Drake Equation, Dr. Frank Drake. Learn about the SETI Institute’s pioneering exploration of life, our solar system, and beyond. Hear Andrew Fraknoi speak on “Why Falling into a Black Hole would be a Once-in-a-Lifetime Experience”. Participate in fun, interactive activities for youth aged 8-15 as well as other fun and creative activities for younger up-and-coming scientists.

The SETI Institute is located at 515 N. Whisman Road, Mountain View CA 94043.

Admission is free but you must pre-register!

Jill Tarter and the team at SETI explain why the Allen Telescope Array is so important to the future of their work.

As part of the International Year of Astronomy, there will be 24 hours of continuous streaming video from astronomical telescopes around the world from April 3 9:00 UTC to April 4 9:00 UTC.  The Allen Telescope Array – an effort of the SETI Institute (along with the Radio Astronomy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley) – has its 20 minutes of fame tomorrow at 4:40 pm PDT (23:40 UTC).

If you think big telescopes are cool, take a look at the teaser now, or just tune in on Friday, April 3 to see SETI observing with the ATA.

You can also follow the telescopecast and 100 Hours of Astronomy Events on Twitter.