Computer Hysteria: Ears for ET

      by Berry F. Phillips   February 2006

When ET, the Extra-Terrestrial, (1982 motion picture) "phones home," we will be listening with two "new ears" to hear! When SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) lost their NASA funding about a decade ago, their private funding made them even stronger and more innovative. SETI's financiers represent founders of some of the worlds top technology companies, Microsoft's Paul Allen, Intel's Gordon Moore, Cisco Systems' Sandy Lerner, and Sun Microsystem who donated state of the art equipment to SETI projects with Hewlett Packard contributing executive input.

The first "new ear" is ATA, the Allen Telescope Array, named after its generous donor, Paul Allen. ATA is currently under construction at the Hatfield Observatory in California and will be powered by the University of California at Berkley for SETI. When fully operational there will be 350 or more small silver dishes that will be spread over 90 acres in a randomized pattern. Once completed the ATA will eliminate the need for SETI to borrow time from the world's leading radio telescopes as well as improve their capability and range of listening for sound patterns from outer space that could confirm the presence of alien civilizations. SETI was a project by the late Carl Sagan popularized in the movie, Contact., based on his book. SETI is a joint project of thousands of computer users just like you who can download the free SETI
screensaver to help process data in our quest to make contact with ET. Contact SETI@home for more information and a free screensaver download.

The second "new ear" to be developed loosely based on ATA is SKA, the Square Kilometer Array, which is in the design stage projected to have an array of 4400 twelve meter fully steerable paraboloid radio dishes. The project is being developed by a consortium of institutions headed up by Cornell University and funded by the National Science Foundation
among others.

The 1.4 billion dollar SKA project will be approximately 10 times the sensitivity of the "largest ear" on Earth located at Arecibo in the jungles of Puerto Rico popularized in the James Bond Movie, "the Golden Eye." The SKA project should have a final design and location by 2007,
with construction beginning by 2010, and it should be complete and operational by 2015 powered by Cornell University. Universe Today writes, "it will probe the dark ages before the era of ionization and perhaps before the birth of the first stars. It will observe the
formations of the first galaxies. It will map the web of neutral Hydrogen that is spread across our universe near and far."

Currently "ears," radio telescopes, in various locations on Earth are tuned to the heavens listening. Soon we will have "new ears" to probe even further in our ever unfolding voyage to learn the secrets of the universe. "Let us go where no man has gone before." However, the
real quest is to answer the question, are we alone? "Beam me up ET!."
 

Berry Phillips is a member of the CCOKC and a regular writer for the CCOKC website and the eMonitor