SETI: Breakthrough Initiatives

[keg in kc]

Cool stuff...

Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking Announce $100 Million Breakthrough Initiative to Dramatically Accelerate Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe

10-year, Multi-disciplinary Search Effort Will Harness World’s Largest Telescopes to Mine Data from Nearest Million Stars, Milky Way and 100 Galaxies

London, UK – Monday, July 20, 2015 – Yuri Milner was joined at The Royal Society today by Stephen Hawking, Martin Rees, Frank Drake, Geoff Marcy, Pete Worden and Ann Druyan to announce the unprecedented $100 million global Breakthrough Initiatives to reinvigorate the search for life in the universe.

The first of two initiatives announced today, Breakthrough Listen, will be the most powerful, comprehensive and intensive scientific search ever undertaken for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. The second, Breakthrough Message, will fund an international competition to generate messages representing humanity and planet Earth, which might one day be sent to other civilizations.
Breakthrough Listen

Biggest scientific search ever undertaken for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth.

• Significant access to two of the world’s most powerful telescopes – 100 Meter Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, USA (“Green Bank Telescope”)1 and 64-metre diameter Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia (“Parkes Telescope”).
• 50 times more sensitive than previous programs dedicated to SETI research.
• Will cover 10 times more of the sky than previous programs.
• Will scan at least 5 times more of the radio spectrum – and 100 times faster.
• In tandem with a radio search, Automated Planet Finder Telescope at Lick Observatory in California, USA (“Lick Telescope”)2 will undertake world’s deepest and broadest search for optical laser transmissions.
• Initiative will span 10 years.
• Financial commitment is $100,000,000.

Unprecedented scope

The program will include a survey of the 1,000,000 closest stars to Earth. It will scan the center of our galaxy and the entire galactic plane. Beyond the Milky Way, it will listen for messages from the 100 closest galaxies. The telescopes used are exquisitely sensitive to long-distance signals, even of low or moderate power:

• If a civilization based around one of the 1,000 nearest stars transmits to us with the power of common aircraft radar, Breakthrough Listen telescopes could detect it.
• If a civilization transmits from the center of the Milky Way, with any more than 12 times the output of interplanetary radars we use to probe the Solar System, Breakthrough Listen telescopes could detect it.
• From a nearby star (25 trillion miles away), Breakthrough Listen’s optical search could detect a 100-watt laser (energy output of normal household light bulb).

Open Data, Open Source, Open Platform

The program will generate vast amounts of data. All data will be open to the public. This will likely constitute the largest amount of scientific data ever made available to the public. The Breakthrough Listen team will use and develop the most powerful software for sifting and searching this flood of data. All software will be open source. Both the software and the hardware used in the Breakthrough Listen project will be compatible with other telescopes around the world, so that they could join the search for intelligent life. As well as using the Breakthrough Listen software, scientists and members of the public will be able to add to it, developing their own applications to analyze the data.

Crowdsourced processing power

Breakthrough Listen will also be joining and supporting SETI@home, University of California, Berkeley’s ground breaking distributed computing platform, with 9 million volunteers around the world donating their spare computing power to search astronomical data for signs of life. Collectively, they constitute one of the largest supercomputers in the world.

Breakthrough Message

• International competition to create digital messages that represent humanity and planet Earth.
• The pool of prizes will total $1,000,000.
• Details on the competition will be announced at a later date.
• This initiative is not a commitment to send messages. It’s a way to learn about the potential languages of interstellar communication and to spur global discussion on the ethical and philosophical issues surrounding communication with intelligent life beyond Earth.

Project Leadership

• Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, Fellow of Trinity College; Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics, University of Cambridge.
• Pete Worden, Chairman, Breakthrough Prize Foundation.
• Frank Drake, Chairman Emeritus, SETI Institute; Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California, Santa Cruz; Founding Director, National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center; Former Goldwin Smith Professor of Astronomy, Cornell University.
• Geoff Marcy, Professor of Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley; Alberts SETI Chair.
• Ann Druyan, Creative Director of the Interstellar Message, NASA Voyager; Co-Founder and CEO, Cosmos Studios; Emmy and Peabody award winning Writer and Producer.
• Dan Werthimer, Co-founder and chief scientist of the SETI@home project; director of SERENDIP; principal investigator for CASPER.
• Andrew Siemion, Director, Berkeley SETI Research Center.

Yuri Milner said: “With Breakthrough Listen, we’re committed to bringing the Silicon Valley approach to the search for intelligent life in the Universe. Our approach to data will be open and taking advantage of the problem-solving power of social networks.”

Stephen Hawking said: "I strongly support the Breakthrough Initiatives and the search for extraterrestrial life."

Frank Drake said: “Right now there could be messages from the stars flying right through the room, through us all. That still sends a shiver down my spine. The search for intelligent life is a great adventure. And Breakthrough Listen is giving it a huge lift.”

“We’ve learned a lot in the last fifty years about how to look for signals from space. With the Breakthrough Initiatives, the learning curve is likely to bend upward significantly,” added Frank Drake.

Ann Druyan said: “The Breakthrough Message competition is designed to spark the imaginations of millions, and to generate conversation about who we really are in the universe and what it is that we wish to share about the nature of being alive on Earth. Even if we don’t send a single message, the act of conceptualizing one can be transformative. In creating the Voyager Interstellar Message, we strived to attain a cosmic perspective on our planet, our species and our time. It was intended for two distinct kinds of recipients - the putative extraterrestrials of distant worlds in the remote future and our human contemporaries. As we approach the Message's fortieth anniversary, I am deeply grateful for the chance to collaborate on the Breakthrough Message, for what we might discover together and in the hope that it might inform our outlook and even our conduct on this world."


Additional information www.breakthroughinitiatives.org.

Images, video and materials from today’s press conference are available for media download at the below link. Content will be uploaded throughout the day.

Link: http://www.image.net/BreakthroughLif...rseInitiatives

For media inquiries: media@breakthroughprize.org

or

Rubenstein Communications, Inc.
New York, NY
Janet Wootten
jwootten@rubenstein.com / +1.212.843.8024

[Rausch]

Originally Posted by GloucesterChief

If an alien intelligence has faster then light travel capabilities they wouldn't be mining planets for resources.

Genetic material might be the most valuable resource there is...

[Ebolapox]

Originally Posted by Rausch

Genetic material might be the most valuable resource there is...

Uh.... Easy to synthesize. Nyet.

[Lzen]

Originally Posted by Xanathol

Hawking - proof that people will label a glorified comic book writer as a genius if you hang a handicap sticker around their neck.

[Lzen]

This reminds me of this little documentary. Very cool stuff.

Alien Planet

[InChiefsHeaven]

Originally Posted by Dave Lane

We can't even find any here.

Your best post EVAH!

[Lzen]

[keg in kc]

Originally Posted by Rausch

Genetic material might be the most valuable resource there is...

Then the trash can next to my computer desk is a veritable gold mine.

[ThaVirus]

Originally Posted by CrazyPhuD

Think about it....what would have happened if some 'benevolent' species came and saved the dinosaurs from extinction(excluding time lords of course). Would we even be hear today? Likely not....our ancestors would have been toothpicks for T-Rexes.

It's tough to say, really. We could have driven them to extinction by hunting them or hunting their prey.

[arrwheader]

Bigger question:

If we find them, are they Chiefs fans????

[arrwheader]

We have already made contact

[Hydrae]

Originally Posted by keg in kc

There's a school of thought that discovery of an outside civilization might be the thing that finally motivates us all to get along with each other.

Personally I doubt that. I think the thing that really divides us is wealth - race, religion and the rest are just bread and circuses; carefully engineered and managed artificial social structures - and outside intelligence would just be another avenue to exploit for profit.

But it might also help us all see each other as humans. Although that's a bit too wide-eyed optimist for me.

Have you ever read Left Hand of Darkness?

Spoiler!

The main character has dreams that alter reality. When his psychiatrist figures this out he hypnotizes him and has him dream of a world where humans are no longer fighting amongst themselves. When he wakes up, the world has been invaded by an alien species. Humans aren't fighting with each other any more, they are too busy fighting the common enemy!

[Jerm]

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.ph...-1Ep3A.twitter

NASA will host a news teleconference at 9 a.m. PDT (noon EDT) Thursday, July 23, to announce new discoveries made by its planet-hunting mission, the Kepler Space Telescope.

The first exoplanet orbiting another star like our sun was discovered in 1995. Exoplanets, especially small Earth-size worlds, belonged within the realm of science fiction just 21 years ago. Today, and thousands of discoveries later, astronomers are on the cusp of finding something people have dreamed about for thousands of years -- another Earth.

The briefing participants are:

-- John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington

-- Jon Jenkins, Kepler data analysis lead at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California

-- Jeff Coughlin, Kepler research scientist at SETI Institute in Mountain View, California

-- Didier Queloz, professor of astrophysics at Cambridge University, United Kingdom

Launched in March 2009, Kepler is the first NASA mission to detect Earth-size planets orbiting distant stars in or near the habitable zone -- the range of distance from a star in which the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might sustain liquid water. The telescope has since confirmed more than 1,000 planets and more than 3,000 planet candidates spanning a wide range of sizes and orbital distances, including those in the habitable zone.

Questions can be submitted on Twitter during the teleconference using the hashtag #askNASA.

The teleconference audio and visuals will be streamed live at:

http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio

For more information about NASA's Kepler mission, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/kepler

[RobBlake]

yeah - not gonna happen.

[Valiant]

Originally Posted by oldandslow

Not to me. 'Dominant, more tech advanced civs tend to always take over those that are not as advanced in tech or greater population.

I think the first nations in the US can attest to that fact.

Andrew Jackson moved my ancestors from GA to OK (Choctaw). How could he do that? Better tech and more people.

After the Little Big Horn, my wife's people were practically obliterated from the face of the planet (Lakota). How did the US military do that? Better tech and more people.

I say all that to say this - If we make ourselves noticeable to a highly technological, warlike culture who are looking for resources or new colonies...well it's over for us.

[Bowser]

Originally Posted by Xanathol

Hawking - proof that people will label a glorified comic book writer as a genius if you hang a handicap sticker around their neck.

Look at you. Look how ****ing dumb you are.