Page Content (OCR)
42 The Planetary Society and the SETI Institute support Project SERENDIP, an innovative low-cost approach invented by astronomers Stuart Bowyer and Jill Tarter in the late 1970s. SERENDIP piggybacks receivers on radio telescopes conducting more conventional astronomical research. Although SERENDIP can not choose its targets, it can listen 50-70% of the time. Originally a Northern Hemisphere search, this project initiated a Southern SERENDIP in Australia in 1998. The program also is supported by the Friends of SERENDIP, a fund-raising group headed by Arthur C. Clarke.** The search involved the public in an unprecedented way with the SETI at Home project, in which private citizens make their computers available to process data acquired by radio telescopes. SETI at Home went public in 1999 and claimed 5 million participants as of 2004. The volunteers seemed to have three predominant motivations: wanting to use their com- puters and the Internet productively, wishing to participate in an intriguing and worthwhile scientific project, and desiring to be connected to some- thing bigger than themselves.” Astronomer John Kraus and electrical engineer Robert Dixon began using Ohio State University’s “Big Ear” radio telescope to search for signals in 1973; this became the world’s first telescope dedicated to SETI. By the time the Big Ear was shut down in 1998 to make room for a golf course, the Ohio State program had become the longest-running search. One of its goals was to develop the technology for a proposed phased array known as Project Argus that could image the entire sky at one time.*” The nonprofit SETI League, founded in 1994, organizes search efforts by amateurs using small dishes, hoping to network these capabilities into a global SETI system of 5000 observing stations. The League’s long-term goal is the realization of Project Argus. SETI Institute physicist Kent Cullers, pointing out that there are some good frequencies left for pros- pecting, raised the possibility that an amateur astronomer might be the first to detect evidence of extraterrestrials.*! Transient Events Some believe that the Wow! signal recorded by Ohio State University’s Big Ear in 1977 met most of the criteria for a signal generated by extra- terrestrial intelligence. This strong flash of energy was not noticed until an astronomer examined a printout later, and the signal was never reacquired. Few scientists would consider a one-time detection to be proof of a broader phenomenon; verification requires that the signal be found again. The Planetary Society’s META searches, for example, detected a small number of tantalizing signals that met all the criteria of an extraterrestrial intelligent origin, except for the essential element of repeatability. Searching for Intelligence