Hello? Is anybody out there?
By Marco R. della Cava, USA TODAY
ORINDA, Calif. The recent news that two high-tech
titans have donated $12.5 million to energize the hunt
for extraterrestrial intelligence invites cynicism.
To the world at large, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen
and former chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold
might appear to be two men gripped by midlife crises
of the billionaire kind.
Allen, 47, just tossed millions at Seattle's Experience
Music Project, while Myhrvold, 40, indulges in
dinosaur hunts.
In that light, donations of $11.5 million and $1 million
respectively to SETI, the 30-year-old Mountain View,
Calif.-based Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence
Institute, seem par for this rarefied course.
So far, their money hasn't bought any shiny new gizmos
reminiscent of the movie Contact.
In fact, a visit to the seven-dish prototype of the (Paul)
Allen Telescope Array squatting here on a tree
sanctuary just east of San Francisco, furrows the brow.
Far from space age or futuristic, the site looks like a
bunch of backyard TV dishes.
But, as with many things scientific, appearances can be
deceptive.
The dishes actually represent a quantum leap in the
specialized realm of radio astronomy, and in particular
for the oft-underfunded SETI project. SETI's network
of radio telescopes collects all manner of radio signals
that bombard Earth from outer space. Its astronomers
are searching for a narrow-band signal that remains at a
fixed point on the radio telescope dial. The fixed nature
of the noise implies it was transmitted from a foreign
source, unlike other radio noise, such as that made by
pulsars and quasars, which wander over the radio
spectrum.
Allen's and Myhrvold's interest in SETI combines
childhood passions for science fiction with a sense of
responsibility toward funding research in an age when
government and industry scan not the heavens but the
bottom line.
They're not alone in such thinking. Nor are they the
first.
SETI is a 15-year-old non-profit research organization
that relies on outside funding for its $4 million to $5
million annual budget. When the government cut
NASA's funding for the project in 1993, Silicon Valley
legends Bill Hewlett and David Packard chipped in $13
million. Another well-known donor was Intel
co-founder Gordon Moore.
Space quest, tech minds
"There are a bunch of people in the tech business that
have resources, skills and money and are interested in
this problem," says Myhrvold, co-president of a new
investment and philanthropic firm, Intellectual
Ventures. "We realize that if we don't do it, it simply
won't get done."
The SETI project is more than just a hunt for E.T. It
may well represent a blueprint for the future of
scientific exploration, one that leans on the minds and
wallets of New Economy stars.
A quick look at SETI's scientific advisory board reveals
names from Silicon Valley companies such as Sun
Microsystems, Agilent (formerly part of
Hewlett-Packard), Intel and Interval Research.
"Any of these leaders in our tech industry understand
the basics of science and physics, and the possibility
that life exists elsewhere," says Tom Pierson, SETI's
CEO.
There is a beauty in this union of space quest and tech
minds.
Exponential leaps in the digital realm, specifically
computing power, benefit projects like SETI, which at
its heart requires a colossal amount of data crunching.
Besides, the silicon brain trust, for whom finding the
New New Thing is no longer so wildly exciting, now
has a different challenge.
"Much of the Valley today is about marketing and
advertising, and less about hard science," says David
Kaplan, author of The Silicon Boys and their Valley of
Dreams, a history of the recent tech boom.
"It doesn't surprise me at all that scientifically curious
people are jumping into this ripe area," he says. "
What's a donation like that to them? It's jet fuel for a
few transcontinental trips."
Greg Papadopoulos, 42, grew up in tiny Lafayette,
Calif., a few hills away from where the current Allen
Telescope Array prototype now sits. As a child of "the
Apollo age," he spent many nights stargazing through a
homemade telescope.
"I wanted to be a physicist," says Papadopoulos, who
became an engineer and is chief technology officer at
Sun Microsystems. Both the peers SETI attracted and
the questions it asks lured him to the project; now he's
on the board.
"The search for extraterrestrial life is as deeply
philosophical as our continued exploration of the atom
or DNA," he says. Finding someone else out there
"won't cure our problems, but I think it would sure
change our way of thinking."
Papadopoulos is particularly intrigued by the
sustainability of a high-tech society that threatens its
own existence through war. Since signals from even
the nearest stars would take thousands of years to get
to Earth, he says receiving them would mean another
technological civilization had managed to keep itself
alive for many centuries.
"Finding another advanced society that's managed to
stick around would be good news," he says.
Physicist and SETI adviser Len Cutler, 72, semi-retired
from Agilent, says he's "more interested in the technical
aspects of SETI than in perhaps contacting other
intelligent life forms in the cosmos."
Cutler is helping to ensure that the dishes of the new
Allen Array all stay synchronized at the same point. He
also is challenged by the fact that the array would be
listening for a specific sort of radio signal in a sea of
stellar static. "There's just not a lot of that sort of
science going on in the commercial field," he says, or
even by government.
And that, Myhrvold says, is a tragedy. "Think about it
we are all now beneficiaries of this incredible
high-tech economy that has its roots in the Internet."
The Net, he notes, got 25 years of federal funding when
few thought it would ever be more than a military
communications network.
Myhrvold grows animated on the subject of SETI,
where, unlike his former boss, Allen, he plays a
hands-on role.
His interest in astronomy includes the almost requisite
childhood passions for "the planetarium and Star
Trek." They later blossomed into postdoctoral work
with the renowned cosmologist Stephen Hawking.
Myhrvold bemoans the fact that the U.S. government
has gone on "a jihad against all SETI-like projects."
"An unfortunate combination of a sci-fi culture and
UFO fanatics makes it easy to laugh stuff like SETI
off," he says. "But it's highly scientific. We are
carefully scanning the sky for whatever we may find."
In a recent article in Science magazine, he noted that
society's heightened awareness of asteroids stems
directly from research on the fate of dinosaurs. And
yet, "the entire cost of funding dinosaur paleontology,
from its inception in 1841 to the present, is less than
the production cost of the film Jurassic Park.
Paradoxes like this abound."
Myhrvold, with his passion for SETI, is no lone voice
in the void.
Just a few weeks ago, an anonymous donation in the
millions was announced by SETI@home. The
15-month-old project based at the University of
California at Berkeley (not connected to SETI itself)
uses idle home computers loaded with special
screensavers to process signals received by a giant
radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico.
Interest is booming. More than 2 million people have
SETI@home screensavers; 3,000 join daily.
"SETI@home certainly has raised our visibility, and it
speaks to a broader interest in this type of science and
technology," says Greg Klerkx, SETI head of
development.
Klerkx and SETI have high hopes for the Allen Array,
which ultimately would consist of between 500 and
1,000 12-foot-diameter dishes planted on two acres at
the University of California's Hat Creek Observatory,
near Mount Lassen, 250 miles north of San Francisco.
The plan is to spend the Allen-Myhrvold donation over
the next two years, refining the hardware and software
for the seven-dish prototype at the university-owned
Russell Reservation. The final version would be
installed by 2005 and would require an additional $13
million to erect and operate.
Two things make SETI's new radio telescope unique:
It is the project's first radio telescope; until now,
officials have had contracts for only 20 listening days a
year at Arecibo and Jodrell Bank Observatory in
England. The Allen Array would operate 365 days a
year in SETI's service.
The electronic guts of the array both the dishes
themselves and the programs used to sort through
cosmic noise will be upgraded to keep up with
progress in both areas. Until now, radio telescopes
"were like kit cars," says Klerkx, "one-of-a-kind things
that could not be altered."
Better chance of finding E.T.
The result of both a SETI-dedicated telescope and
upgradable technology means significantly improved
chances (if still remote) of picking up E.T.'s dial tone.
In the past five years, SETI has scrutinized radio
frequencies from 500 stars. In its first year, the Allen
Array would target 100,000 stars, with a goal of 1
million a year.
"With the Milky Way Galaxy being home to around
400 billion stars, SETI really is a numbers game,"
Klerkx says.
The issue boils down to finding innovative ways to
listen to and rule out potential stellar sites of
extraterrestrial intelligence as quickly as possible.
To digital pioneers, that's an irresistible challenge. "I
see this and think, 'That's a cool problem and I know
how to solve it,'" says Myhrvold, who helped make
Microsoft a household name.
"We use our current high-tech gains to make
someone's Web site go faster," Myhrvold says. "So why
not use it for science, and toward making what would
be one of the greatest discoveries in history?"