Last night, I started getting emails and tweets asking about a possible detection of a radio signal coming from two of the newly-discovered planets orbiting other stars.

Cutting to the chase: yes, a signal has been seen, but no, it’s not coming from some alien civilization. It’s almost certainly something much closer, like a satellite interfering with the observation.

So what’s the deal?

You talkin’ to me?

The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a privately-funded group of scientists and engineers who are trying^* an ongoing effort to figure out ways to detect signals from space that could be coming from other intelligences: aliens. They focus (haha) mostly on radio signals, since it’s very easy to send radio waves across the vast light years separating stars, it’s easy to detect radio waves (so primitive life like us can pick up the call), and it’s easy to encode information that way. Heck, we’ve been broadcasting coded radio waves for over a century now!

Currently, no unambiguous alien "Hello there!" has been detected. The sky is big, there are a lot of stars out there, and the radio spectrum is really wide, too. Think of how many radio stations there are on a typical radio dial from top to bottom; now divide that up into a billion tiny slices and try to find the one that’s playing the song you want to hear. It’s something of a painstaking process.

Recently, astronomers came up with a clever idea: the Kepler space mission is finding tons of planets orbiting other stars. It may find an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star at just the right distance to allow life to evolve, though no such planet has been found just yet. Still, why look all over the sky when we know where there are lots of planets?

Can’t stop the signal

So a search targeting those stars with planets has been set up. And that’s where our story picks up: using the ginormous 100 meter Green Bank Telescope, astronomers from UC Berkeley found what look like artificial signals when observing two different stars. The stars are called Kepler Object of Interest 812 and 817 (or just KOI 812 and 817 for short). Here’s an example of a signal they found from KOI 817:
(more…)

Via Alan Boyle’s Cosmic Log blog, I am very pleased to find out that the mothballed SETI telescope array will soon be operating again!

As I reported here a few of months ago, the SETI Allen Telescope Array had to be shut down due to a lack of funds. It costs roughly $2.5M per year to keep it running, and the funding agencies were pulling back. The folks at SETI decided to create a public fund drive called SETIstars, hoping to raise the $200,000 needed to kickstart the project again.

As of a few days ago, that goal was reached! I was happy to see that people such as Jodie Foster (who played SETI astronomer Ellie Arroway in the movie "Contact") and science fiction author Larry Niven were among people who had contributed, as well as Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders.

The $200k donated is enough to get things started again, but not enough to continue operations, so it looks like there will be more fund (and awareness) raising soon by SETI. I think this is a pretty interesting endeavor; SETI has long been a political and scientific target, but they are doing good work in a variety of fields of astronomy and biology (for example, I recently wrote about a new meteor shower discovered that indicates there’s a previously-unknown near-Earth comet out there — this was funded in part by SETI). I don’t know how sustainable direct public funding of scientific projects can be, but SETI is making a pretty good stab at it. I’ll be very curious to see how this pans out.

Back in April, I reported that SETI’s Allen Telescope Array — a 42-dish setup in northern California that scans the skies, listening for signals from potential alien intelligences — had to be shut down due to lack of funds.

This bad news resulted in something of a public outcry, and a grassroots organization sprung up to try to help rectify the situation. They started the website SETIstars, where people can donate to restart the ATA. They have the relatively modest goal of reaching $200,000 in donations, which is enough to get the array restarted; SETI can then leverage on this to try to get more funding flowing (the array takes about $2.5M a year to run). You can learn more about this on their info page.

As I write this they’ve raised over $20,000, 13% of the goal, with just over a month to go. If you support them, please go take a look and do what you can.

[UPDATE (Monday, May 2): There have been a lot of interesting comments on this post since I put it up, but I have to give the honors to this one. Thanks, Jill!]

John at μcosmologist has created an interesting infographic depicting how much it would cost to run SETI from one year ($2.5 million) versus various other things we spend money on. In the graphic, each radio dish represents $2.5 million. Here’s a (small) piece of it:

[Click to enalienate.]

The whole thing is much larger, and you really need to see it. Especially the bit about how much people spend on Starbucks. Yegads.

John made this because of SETI having to mothball the Allen Telescope Array, and I strongly suspect because people were trying to say there are better things to spend money on. I’ll tell you, I think that argument is a crock. First off, it’s a false dichotomy; we can afford to do more than what we need to survive. And moreover, there is always something better to spend money on, yet we still seem to be able to justify (or rationalize) the way we spend the money we do.

In the United States alone we spend five times as much on tobacco products as we do on the entirety of NASA. How’s that for rationalization? And what we spend on NASA is much, much more than we spend on SETI (7500x more, actually). And we don’t spend enough on NASA, either.

On the other hand, as a skeptic, I understand the desire to ask why we should spend this money on SETI, why we should spend it looking for alien intelligences? There are lots of reasons, actually, but I still think the best one is simple: Because we should.

After I posted about SETI this morning, I found this video on YouTube. The master of communicating science, Carl Sagan, explains why we need to listen to the skies.

Tip o’ the radio dish to reddit.

If aliens call, who will listen?

For the past couple of decades it’s been astronomers and engineers at SETI, the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence. But a desperate lack of funds has forced them to mothball their Allen Telescope Array, a group of 42 radio dishes in northern California.

That sucks.

The budget crisis has hit nearly everyone, and with states nearing bankruptcy it’s no surprise that a lot of science is getting curtailed. But SETI represents something noble and good about science, something we do both because of its deep philosophical ramifications and also simply for the joy of finding things out. So it hurts a little bit more to hear this.

SETI astronomer Seth Shostak gives the rundown on the situation. And there’s a little bit of salt in the wound because SETI was just ramping up to start investigating the exoplanets recently found by the Kepler mission as well. For the first time in human history we’re finding systems outside our own where habitable planets may exist. I think it’s worth giving them a listen.

But that won’t happen for a while at least. The array costs about $2.5 million per year to run, and that money simply isn’t coming in; there are several funding agencies — including the eponymous Paul Allen — but as the SETI press release puts it:

In an April 22, 2011 email (PDF) to Allen Telescope Array stakeholder level donors, SETI Institute CEO Tom Pierson described in detail the recent decision by U.C. Berkeley, our partner in the Array, to reduce operations of the Hat Creek Radio Observatory (and thus the Allen Telescope Array) to a hibernation state effective this month. NSF University Radio Observatory funding to Berkeley for HCRO operations has been reduced to approximately one-tenth of its former level and, concurrently, growing State of California budget shortfalls have severely reduced the amount of state funds available for support of the HCRO site.

Knowing my readers, some of you will want to help. SETI has a donation page. I talked with Seth yesterday and he told me "every little bit helps".

And hey, if you happen to know a millionaire who happens to be able to look a little bit beyond the next day or two of market fluctuations, you know where to send them.

The newest edition of the SETI radio show "Are We Alone" is up, and in the segment called Skeptic Check astronomer Seth Shostak and I poke fun at the latest silliness about Betelgeuse and the Mayan doomsday. The rest of the show is, as usual, really good and fun to listen to (all about ESP — but you knew that already), so head over there and give it a download. But do it before December 21, 2012.

Or wait until afterwards. It’ll still be around, as will the Earth.