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.

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.