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N1YVV > SETI 30.04.03 05:03l 133 Lines 6666 Bytes #-7324 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Darling's Newsletter #11
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From: N1YVV@WX1CT.CT.USA.NOAM
To : SETI@WW
From: "LARRY KLAES" <ljk4@msn.com>
To: "setipublic" <public@setileague.org>
Cc: "BioAstro" <bioastro@setileague.org>
Subject: SETI public: Fw: [DarlingsSpace] David Darling's Newsletter #11
Date: Tuesday, April 29, 2003 2:28 PM
----- Original Message -----
From: daviddarling123
Sent: Tuesday, April 29, 2003 1:44 PM
To: DarlingsSpace@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [DarlingsSpace] David Darling's Newsletter #11
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Issue #11
April 29, 2003
e-mail: darling@uslink.net
website www.daviddarling.info
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Searching for ETI in New Jersey: A Report from SETICon03
Where can you meet a bunch of the brightest known minds in the
Galaxy talking about innovative strategies to make contact with
intelligence "out there?" The answer is at the annual conference of
the SETI League (http://www.setileague.org) which, this year, as in
the previous two years, was held at the College of New Jersey
(http://www.tcnj.edu) in Ewing. This was my first time at the event -
- and what a pleasure it proved to be. Allen Tough (founder and
coordinator of the Welcome to ETI project, at
http://members.aol.com/WelcomeETI, of which I'm a member) and W.
Paul Shuch (a.k.a Dr. SETI, executive director of the SETI League)
had kindly invited me to give the Banquet Speech on "Astrobiology
and SETI: A Promising New Partnership" on Saturday (April 26)
evening. (Pictures of this will be on my website as soon as
available.)
The SETI League was founded in 1994 as a grassroots international
organization dedicated to searching for signals from intelligent
races beyond Earth. Its main goal at present is to develop and
expand Project Argus -- a collection of amateur radio dishes built
and operated by individual SETI League members all across the globe.
Currently some 120 dishes are operational across 22 countries. The
ultimate goal is to deploy several thousand instruments to provide
continuous monitoring of the whole sky at microwave frequencies. I'd
urge anyone with an interest in electronics, radio astronomy,
communications technology, ham radio, or practical SETI to join the
League and considering setting up their own Argus station. Step-by-
step instructions are available on-line at the SETI League's
website. This gets you into real science and engineering -- a huge
leap beyond the popular SETI@home screensaver. Imagine being the
first person to pick up THE message! Of course, many people join
simply to be part of the enterprise and cheer from the sidelines.
What I can tell you is that the people at the heart of the group are
among the friendliest, most talented, and most open-minded folk you
could wish to meet.
Topics discussed at this year's conference included the need to
extend the search for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI)
from outside the Solar System (the traditional focus) to within our
own planetary system. There's a growing recognition among SETI
scientists and engineers that we haven't spent enough time looking
for traces of ETI on our own cosmic doorstep. These traces could
take the form of alien robotic spacecraft in the vicinity of the
Earth-Moon system, in the asteroid belt, or in some other convenient
orbit around the Sun. Or they might take the form of beacons or
other artifacts on or below the surface of Solar System bodies,
including planets or their moons. We have the capability to look for
such probes and artifacts or to try to trigger a response from them.
Yet, for no particularly good reason other than that it's become an
established paradigm, virtually all our efforts have been channeled
into searching for microwave signals across interstellar distances.
A number of panel discussions at SETICon03 were brainstorming
sessions where everyone had a chance to put forward an innovative
idea for a new way of searching for ETI or of triggering a response
from a nearby probe. One of my suggestions was to organize an "Open
Earth Day" where, over a 24-hour period, we'd send out a huge
calling card in the form of radio and TV broadcasts, laser pulses,
artistic and musical greetings, school and college SETI projects,
etc, to say to ETI, across many frequencies and registers, "Here we
are, come and meet us!" My idea is that perhaps ETI needs to hear
such a greeting on a global, species-wide basis, rather than simply
from special interest groups. Others proposed extending our
listening range to include gamma-ray frequencies, affixing
holographic messages to space probes, building a SETI receiver on
the farside of the Moon to avoid radio interference, and looking for
von Neumann probes (self-replicating spacecraft that may have
populated the Galaxy).
For me, the climax of the event was the Awards Banquet held at the
Campus Center of the college on Saturday night. In my talk I tried
to show how astrobiology (the study of the life in the universe) and
SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence), which have
grown up side by side over the past century and more, will come
closer and closer together in the years ahead. In fact, SETI is
really part of astrobiology and stands to learn a great deal from
it. The more we know about life and its occurrence throughout the
Galaxy, the better we can target our SETI projects to find signs of
alien intelligence and technology. Personally, I think we have a
good chance of finding life on both Mars and Europa. But I think we
may get our first almost-uncontestable evidence of life beyond Earth
from instruments, such as the Terrestrial Planet Finder, that will
be able to analyze the spectra of extrasolar planets, sometime
between 2010 and 2020. Similar, but vastly more powerful, devices
are probably being pointed at us from planets hundreds or thousands
of light-years away, informing other intelligences of our presence.
We're on the brink of discovering that we're not alone. I can hardly
imagine a more exciting time in which to live. My talk and Q&A
session ended at 8 p.m. in time for an inspirational phone call to
the audience from one of the father's of SETI and co-author of the
seminal paper on the subject in 1959, Philip Morrison, now aged 87.
Do check out the SETI League's website and consider becoming part of
cutting-edge SETI research. Also, as usual, stop in regularly at my
website for all the latest news and information on astrobiology,
space travel, and related topics.
Until next time,
All the best,
David Darling
73!
de Dave, N1YVV
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