SETI Goes Into Hypersleep

Aliens of the galaxy, your attention please!

Earth’s primitive alien-searching technology has been all but switched off. If you guys were planning to invade our planet (you know, superhuge spaceship hovering over every major city, that sort of thing) – now’s your chance.

The SETI Project‘s funding for running the Allen Telescope Array – you know, that huge field of radio telescopes Jodie Foster was in charge of in First Contact – has been cut.

The Array (originally funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, with help from his colleague Nathan Myhrvold) is now officially in “hibernation state”.

So what are we going to do? Just let the 12-foot-tall aliens walk in here unannounced?

Don’t panic – there’s still a chance for the Allen Array. Public donations is the most obvious next step; anything that will, in the words of the SETI folk, “make the science less vulnerable to government budget cycles”.

How many donations? Well, quite a few. They need $1.5 million per year to run the Array, and another $1 million per year to do the science work.

The SETI team have a list of 1,235 exoplanets they want to look at in more detail. I make that just over four thousand dollars per exoplanet. Maybe they could sell planetary sponsorships…

(Via ReadWriteWeb)

RichardSRussell

We’ve had radio on this planet for something over a century. During that time we’ve used 3 different formats (AM, FM, and digital) to use radio waves to communicate. Each of them sounds like noise to the other 2. So, unless you’ve got the right kind of receiver, we can’t even understand or translate our OWN radio signals. And let’s not even get started on compression technologies, which are very efficient power users but which really ARE noise unless you have the decompression key. And this is even assuming that aliens use radio instead of, I dunno, neutrinos or gravity waves or something. Time to face reality, folx. If there was anything worth hearing on the radio out there, we would have heard it by now. This is not to say we’re alone in our galactic naborhood, but we’re not gonna find out otherwise with our present SETI technology.
glossgreen

Hate to nitpick, but First Contact was a Star Trek movie. Just plain Contact was the Jodie Foster one.

As far as the article goes, I hope they can raise the funds to continue operations. The search for extraterrestrial life may not have borne fruit yet, but that does not mean that it won’t in the future. Well, unless they can’t fund it, then it really won’t.
dineshcc

geez, so they finally took over earth after all, and cut the funding to prevent us from finding the truth…
The truth is out there folks.. and we stopped looking for it!
redraobyek

Another nit: Jodie Foster/Ellie Arroway did not do any work at the ATA, as the first phase of the ATA didn’t even go operational until a decade after the 1997 film. Rather, Ellie spent some of her time at the VLA in New Mexico.

A little fact-checking never hurts, guys.