Jill Tarter: People have been wondering whether there’s life elsewhere for millennia, and what we used to do is ask the priests and the philosophers what we should be believe.
Astronomer Jill Tarter is director of the Center for SETI Research. SETI stands for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.
Jill Tarter: What was so cool is that in the middle of the 20th century, we got some new tools –radio telescopes – that would allow us to do an experiment to try to answer the question scientifically.
Tarter explained that the organization started its search for extraterrestrial life in the 1960’s, using one 85-foot telescope to monitor radio signals from two stars.
Jill Tarter: Today we’re looking at many stars at once, with hundreds of millions of spectral channels. Our tools for searching are getting better, and faster, exponentially.
2010 will mark SETI’s 50 -year anniversary. Tarter said that, as far as scientists know, no SETI device has ever received a signal from extraterrestrial intelligence. But Tarter believes that SETI can still change life here on Earth.
Jill Tarter: Getting people actively involved in doing SETI gives us an opportunity to get them to change their perspective, to actually look at themselves within a vast cosmos. And that, if you really take it seriously, has the effect of trivializing the differences among people, and that’s got to be good.
Tarter said that she doesn’t believe seeking signals from outer space is a shot in the dark.
Jill Tarter: But it certainly is like looking for a needle in a really large haystack. Our haystack’s perhaps nine dimensions if you consider three spatial dimensions and the dimension of time and two polarizations and frequency all of those. So, a lot of different places where a signal could reside. Which means that it may take us a very long time to search through the haystack.
She said that, if we get a message, it might prove a real puzzle for scientists.
Jill Tarter: If we get a message and it has information content, how are we going to interpret it, how can we decode it? You can hope, it’s a deliberate message, someone will have gone to the trouble of making it anti-cryptographic. That is, easy to understand. But what’s easy for them to understand may not be easy for us.
She said SETI sent out its own message in the 1970’s to a globular cluster about 25,000 light years away from the Arecibo radio telescope.
Jill Tarter: It was an attempt in two dimensions to give a counting lesson, to talk about our carbon chemistry and DNA, and how many people are on the planet, and how big we are. Because one of the things about a radio message is that you automatically have a ruler. You can say, “We’re three wavelengths tall.”
Tarter said that, in some ways, humans aren’t fully equipped to properly monitor and broadcast signals to space because the effort would have to be constant over thousand or ten thousand years period. We don’t have the equipment or capability, as yet. But that has a flip side, she said. If we ever get a message, we’ve discovered the archaeology of the future.
Jill Tarter: Phil Morrison of MIT had this lovely way of characterizing SETI. He said it is, in fact, the archaeology of the future. Any signal we receive is going to tell us about their past. Because it only could travel at the speed of light to get here. And if we detect a signal, then in fact we know it’s possible for technologies to last for a long time. Because no two civilizations will ever co-exist in time to find one another.
Tarter said that polls show that up to 50% of Americans believe that we’re not alone in the universe…that’s there’s some form of extraterrestrial life out there. Even without proof.
A audio/visual radio transmission, even at numerous times the speed of light eventually fades away, gets distorted under way, bending when encountering: gravity-forces/giant galactical objects many times larger than our sun/black-holes/gamma and sigma (= compressed laser-gamma rays)ultra rays/nebula’s with magnetic gas-fields/solarparticle activities/star-cluster hurdles to evade while trying to penetrate into their planetary-systems/rotational intergallactic-spins (both clockwise/counter-clockwise/eliptic vertical vs. horizontal planetary and solarsystem motion/time-delayed spacial layers folding as the universe expands and contracts at different parts of the cosmological universal omniverse/time-increased speed many times faster than our known speed of light caused by Supernova blasts (firstly center-outwards increasing mindblasting speeds: uncalculational, then from the outer rims sucking back (= time-slowing down from Eternity into Infinity) towards its inner core to become a black hole: temporary time/space flux in which all matter is drawn and converted into anti-matter)/and the distortion of overcrowded interstellar communications between solar and even starsystems far beyond our Human sight somewhwere out there where innumerous civilizations of a multitude and diversity of (for us: in our eyes) ALIEN life-forms: some highly evolved and intelligent like ourselves (at least: humans believe to be) and ants, bees and dolphins, others as seemingly ‘dumb’ as a donkey, rooster or a pig…
If alien (to them WE are the aliens!!!) intelligent lifeforms are to receive human transmissions sent out only a couple of decades ago (we can all calculate the distance these transmissions have to travel untill they finally stretch / elongate and wither away when they reached point zero: flat waveband reception) at all…it would be hard to recognize because of their own Far Advanced Communication System Networks out there: interstellar space-communication preceeds any space-travel as you might well know…
Well…that’s my contribution to this scientific theory which may prove in time to approximate reality with great Accuracy…
now dont u think thats really stupid to be sending out were we are and how many people actually live here if in any case that there is extraterristrals they now know are corridants and are population if there population is bigger they already have us beat with numbers because of the fact we told them i think this idea is insanly stupid to protect the survival of humanity. if we try to make contact it shud be of friendly meanings and cover the basics of are languages not our population and location. think about it from a terrorist point of few. If osama bin laden knew were bush was exactly and how many people he had around him he could easly use that to his advantage. Come on now your supose to be scientist and this plan doesnt seem very smart. I do believe that it will do us some good just need to think everything through from every aspect before you do it because space is like the deepest depths of are ocean unknown.
I agree with Charlie….though not his clerical errors. In any case, I agree with the spirit of making first contact, but giving our location (not that they couldn’t extrapolate it), population, and friggin DNA is pretty stupid. I can’t believe that this was allowed, and nobody said “um, gee, maybe we should rethink this part right here”.
This isn’t about paranoia, but common sense. Just because an alien species might be advanced, does not mean they are friendly. Case in point. When the sufficiently advanced Europeans began to explore other parts of the world, people started dieing (disease, war, enslavement) Africans, Natives from both North and South America, Australia, you name it, if the culture wasn’t sufficiently advanced to defend itself, it was destroyed, subjugated, or incorporated in some fashion.
Knowing this….knowing this, communicating our biological makeup is an EPIC FAIL….you just can’t get any bigger than this.
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Aye. Hello everyone
For me its like – durin’ a heavy war – hello!, im here!!!
hahahahhaa plus the speed of that message…
SETI is useless,costness,and very hopeless,its like a
White Noise movie,hahaha
Dear Jill,
Thanks for such a thoughtful and informative interview. Good to see your direction in answering this question for us. All the best to you and EarthSky, keep up the good (and vital!) work..