chicot60
04-27-2011, 03:26 AM
Adriana Barton
If an alien sends a signal into outer space, does anybody hear?
Not any more, now that the Seti Institute (a.k.a. the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has run out of cash, Scientific American reports.
On April 22, SETI CEO Tom Pierson announced that the $50-million Allen Telescope Array, a field of 42 radio dishes in rural northern California, has been put into “hibernation.”
In a letter to donors, he explained that “starting this week, the equipment is unavailable for normal observations and is being maintained in a safe state by a significantly reduced staff.”
SETI is the scientific endeavour made famous in the Carl Sagan novel Contact (later made into a movie starring Jodie Foster. For five decades, various radio dishes and antennas have scanned deep space looking for signs of alien life, the Guardian reports.
The non-profit SETI Institute, founded in 1984, has relied mainly on private donations for its far-out research. Bankrollers of the project include Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
But the centre lacks the $2- to $3-million a year that is needed to keep research programs growing, and another $5-million to fund a two-year project to listen for any radio signals coming from possibly habitable planets found by NASA’s Kepler satellite, according to SETI senior astronomer Seth Shostak.
Now that citizen scientists are helping to sort through heaps of satellite data through the institute’s SETI@Home project, it would be a pity to stop looking for signals from extraterrestrials at this point, he told the Guardian.
“If this experiment is going to work, it's going to work in a few dozen years,” he said, adding that “in the grand scheme of things, this is not a whole lot of money.”
But unless SETI manages to get billionaires like Oprah all starry-eyed, we may never hear from intelligent life forms on planets far, far away.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/the-hot-button/sorry-mulder-the-hunt-for-aliens-has-run-out-of-cash/article1999994/
If an alien sends a signal into outer space, does anybody hear?
Not any more, now that the Seti Institute (a.k.a. the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has run out of cash, Scientific American reports.
On April 22, SETI CEO Tom Pierson announced that the $50-million Allen Telescope Array, a field of 42 radio dishes in rural northern California, has been put into “hibernation.”
In a letter to donors, he explained that “starting this week, the equipment is unavailable for normal observations and is being maintained in a safe state by a significantly reduced staff.”
SETI is the scientific endeavour made famous in the Carl Sagan novel Contact (later made into a movie starring Jodie Foster. For five decades, various radio dishes and antennas have scanned deep space looking for signs of alien life, the Guardian reports.
The non-profit SETI Institute, founded in 1984, has relied mainly on private donations for its far-out research. Bankrollers of the project include Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
But the centre lacks the $2- to $3-million a year that is needed to keep research programs growing, and another $5-million to fund a two-year project to listen for any radio signals coming from possibly habitable planets found by NASA’s Kepler satellite, according to SETI senior astronomer Seth Shostak.
Now that citizen scientists are helping to sort through heaps of satellite data through the institute’s SETI@Home project, it would be a pity to stop looking for signals from extraterrestrials at this point, he told the Guardian.
“If this experiment is going to work, it's going to work in a few dozen years,” he said, adding that “in the grand scheme of things, this is not a whole lot of money.”
But unless SETI manages to get billionaires like Oprah all starry-eyed, we may never hear from intelligent life forms on planets far, far away.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/the-hot-button/sorry-mulder-the-hunt-for-aliens-has-run-out-of-cash/article1999994/