Its Big - Really Really BIG
Space … is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is.
—Douglas Adams, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Its Big – Really
BIG
Some
thoughts I had on the Search
The
basic problem is just the size of the thing. The universe is so damn big
and even though our Milky Way is such a small part of it, infinitesimal really,
yet even it has over 100 billion stars and many more planets than that.
And that's not the worst of it. Our star and its gaggle of planets are
stuck off in the byways of the galaxy with not much to recommend it and no way
to draw attention to ourselves. There is every reason to think that we
will be ignored for the remainder of our existence even if life fills
the cosmos.
The Allen Telescope
Array (ATA) is a beautiful machine and is really something
to be proud of. If we as a species could stop trying to kill each other
for a few minutes and spend a very small amount of our treasuries to build the
full ATA and several others like it on the Earth and at least one on the moon
then we might have the barest of chances of hearing something of another
intelligent being. Not to be able to communicate with that being but
simply to know one exists would be enough to fill our kind with hope for the
next several centuries at least.
But
we don't seem to be capable of even that. Do you realize that there are
only five SETI stations on the face of the earth and most of them are not
really serious about operating? My station required most of twenty
years to get to the point I am now and I would have quit long ago if I
expected some return on investment other than simply the doing of the
thing. The most important undertaking of our species and it is left to a
handful of people with no resources but the farsighted support of one or two
rich men. We humans are not a rational
group of beings are we?
I
calculated the number of places in the address space available to my
station. These are the places I can
point the antenna, multiplied by the channels I can tune my receiver to. It came to over twelve million, and if I
were to look at each one for about an hour, which is the time I spend on each
one now, it would take me over 3,000 years to look through the whole list once. This was before I expanded my search area to
what it is now. It’s huge.
My
little station in truth can't be expected to hear even the strongest beacon
even if it were located on our closest star. The ATA is many times more sensitive than my
station and even it has little or no chance of hearing that same beacon. Think of this; if a civilization somewhere in our galaxy
wanted to advertise itself with an intentional beacon with a huge power output,
and if that civilization had access to an antenna the size of the Arecibo dish
and it that civilization were to steer its beam to each of the stars in the
galaxy and hold it on each star for one year, then it would take 300 billion
years for that ET to complete the circuit. Even if we knew we were being painted by the beacon, and that this was
our year, we still have no idea what frequency they are transmitting on or from
which star.
Like
I said my simple system has over 12,000,000 possible places to look. Sounds hopeless I know. The odds against that
first hello are immense and the rational thing would be to quit altogether
except that the payback is so large compared to the small outlay that to not do
the search would be truly foolish.
I
know of no way to make a smaller, cheaper system than my own that could be of
any use to anyone when mine is so marginal. Its not that it’s impossible to build such stations it’s just that it
takes so much time and effort that most people will not ever attempt to think
about it. Consider this; I have made my
station available on line for anyone to use and to search at any time and it’s
free but no one is interested. You would
think that in this whole round world there would be ten or twenty people
interested, but it seems not. The hope
that you could find a large group of people that could build stations and then
spend the time to run them seems vanishingly small.
One
last thing - I have concluded that it is not possible to confirm a signal from
ET. When you think about the way that
the human mind works, you can see why it’s impossible. If a rash astronomer were to proclaim that ET
had been found he would be asked to prove it, and there is no way to prove it
other than by two way communications:
“Question
– Are you an ET?”
“Answer
– Why yes I am. Thank you for asking”.
You
can see that confirmation is impossible. The only action we are capable of doing is to falsify hits – that is to
insure ourselves that any signal we see is NOT from ET. Falsification is possible and is what I do
every day for every hit I come across. While
confirmation is not possible, falsification is the one capability we may have
to share with the folks at ATA – to help them falsify hits as they come into
their system.
Finding
hits is a strictly mechanical operation. You set the receiver starting frequency and the antenna tracking point
and then you integrate as long as you can and then look for signals. Then you move the receiver and/or the antenna
and start over again. My station does
this automatically without my oversight and will usually sound the ET Found
alarm once or twice a day. When the station detects a hit that’s when I
swing into action. Falsification is a human activity. You have to take each hit and look for man
made finger prints on it. Things like;
does it move in frequency like it should, is it too strong, is it modulated, is
it an image, etc. These actions all take
a human hand and the time to spend on each hit. This is where we could become a service to the ATA. It would take a quick link from ATA directly
to stations like mine with pointing angles and frequency information. This is doable.
Thanks
for letting me think out loud and I hope we can continue the conversation.
Like
I said it’s big, *really* big.
James Brown – SysOp and owner of this station (www.SETI.Net)
