“Where is everybody?”
It is hard to imagine this simple question, uttered in a lunchroom among friends in 1950, would spawn one of the most persistent global scientific initiatives in modern history. The speaker was Enrico Fermi, an Italian nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and constructed the world’s first functioning nuclear reactor at Chicago’s Pile-1. While discussing the topic of interstellar alien civilizations over lunch with his friends, as one does, Fermi made a startling observation. According to known science, the Milky Way Galaxy is billions of years old, and yet, an advanced alien civilization would need only a few million years to colonize the entire galaxy. If the galaxy really was teeming with alien life, as the vastness of the cosmos seems to suggest at face value…why hadn’t we met them by now?
This question became the foundation of what we now call the Fermi Paradox. Despite ample time for interstellar aliens to evolve, develop spaceflight, and make contact with Earth, we have no concrete evidence that an intelligent species other than humanity exists. To date.
Enter the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) initiative. Nations, individuals and scientific bodies had long been interested in receiving radio signals from aliens. Both Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi attempted to use their radio receivers to pick up messages from Martians, and in 1924 the U.S. observed a “National Radio Silence Day” so that a dirigible from the Naval Observatory could scan the skies for messages from Mars.
Nevertheless, attempts to use radio telescopes to sniff out alien broadcasts in deep space ramped up after the World War II, with big names in astronomy and cosmology like Frank Drake (author of the Drake equation) and Carl Sagan leading the charge. There were high points and low points.
In 1971, astronomers at the Big Ear radio observatory in Ohio received the famous “Wow! signal,” a strong narrow-band radio broadcast originating in the constellation Sagittarius, that has never been adequately explained by natural or man-made phenomena, but which has also never been repeated. In 1993, after years of battling over funding, the US government stopped funding NASA’s SETI program and has, to date, refused to divert research-funding to deep space radio surveillance.
As a result, SETI research is conducted primarily by non-governmental organizations and not-for-profit companies. Universities, especially, have developed extensive SETI programs. The previously-mentioned Big Ear observatory is maintained by the Ohio State system and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) offers undergraduate and graduate programs in the field using the Green Bank telescope in West Virginia. Most notably, the University of California at Berkeley maintains a SETI Center and an ongoing effort known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Radio Emissions from Nearby Developed Intelligent Populations (SERENDIP). SERENDIP collects data from large radio telescopes such as the one at Green Bank and the 305-meter telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico while other astronomers are using them for their own observations. That data is then used for SETI research.
Since 1999, data collected from SERENDIP was used in the SETI@home program, a distributed computer program that used the spare processing power of the personal computers from public volunteers to run SETI research. Over 2 million people participated in SETI@home, which ran right up until March of 2020, after which Berkeley researchers put the project on permanent hiatus. One reason for halting the program was the massive amount of data that members of the public had generated, going back years, which the small research team of 4 full-time employees was going to need to sift through. Another was more tragic.
Subsequent to the end of the SETI@home program, the Arecibo facility in Puerto Rico had been damaged by storms such as Hurricane Maria. A series of repairs and collapses began in August 2020 and ended with a complete collapse of the facility on Dec. 1, 2020. The facility’s destruction also meant that a bulk of the data that was being funneled to the PCs of volunteers was no longer being received.
One might think that a year which ended with the collapse of the second-largest single-aperture radio telescope in the world would mark the decline of the search for extraterrestrial life. On the contrary, SETI has been going stronger than ever in recent months.
In 2015, Yuri Milner, a Russian investor with $100 million burning a hole in his pocket, decided to launch Breakthrough Listen, part of his wider Breakthrough Initiative in SETI. The ten-year project uses Milner’s mountains of cash to buy thousand of hours of observation time at the Green Bank and Parkes telescopes, and it’s already yielded results.
In October, 2020, an intern in the UC Berkeley SETI program and undergraduate at Hillsdale College, Shane Smith, was parsing radio data from the Parkes observatory and made a discovery. A radio transmission, laser-focused on the 982.002 megahertz band, was uncovered. The fact that a transmission this focused occurred in a spectral band not known to contain human communications or natural radio emissions from stellar objects peaked researchers’ attention. But what’s more, the transmission emerged from the Proxima Centauri system, the closest neighboring star to the Sun at 4.2 light years away and home to at least one potentially-habitable planet, Proxima-b.
Researchers are almost certain that the transmission is not evidence of an alien civilization, a “technosignature.” Nevertheless, the potential still exists. It’s the best chance SETI researchers have had in a while to potentially make a breakthrough and provide incontrovertible evidence of intelligent life outside the Solar System. Most excitingly, discoveries like this testify to the work that college-aged scientists are doing in fields of true scientific importance, like SETI.
Image Credit / InnovationNewsNetwork.com
