[/caption]
After thirty-five years of listening for extra-terrestrial intelligence, astronomer Jill Tarter is stepping down from the research and will now be doing a more Earthly task: making sure there’s enough money for SETI to continue its search.
Tarter, who was the inspiration for the character Ellie Arroway in Carl Sagan’s novel and film “Contact,” announced today that Dr. Gerry Harp will step into the directorship role at SETI, “to continue our strong tradition of excellent research, freeing me up to focus on finding stable funding for it. I want to make the endowment of SETI research a success, so that my colleagues now, and in the future, can focus on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence for all of us.”
Tarter, 68, signed on to the NASA SETI program in the 1970s when a small group of NASA researchers were developing novel equipment and strategies to make systematic radio SETI observations. Since the decision by Congressional in 1993 to no longer fund the program, she has led the efforts at the non-profit SETI Institute to continue the work. Tarter spearheaded a decade-long program, dubbed Project Phoenix, that used large antennas in Australia, Puerto Rico and West Virginia to examine approximately one thousand nearby star systems over an unprecedented wide range of radio frequencies. Astronomers suspected that planets existed around other stars, but that was only a hypothesis – until 1995. Recently NASA’s Kepler telescope, launched in 2009, has discovered thousands of new planetary systems, some of them containing planets as small as the Earth.
“Kepler has been a paradigm shift—starting with the first data release in 2010 and second in 2011 and third in 2012, we have altered our SETI search strategy. We are no longer pointing our telescopes at Sun-like stars in hopes of finding something; we are now observing stars where we KNOW there are planets. Exoplanets are real. We’ve gone from having 20-30 potential targets to having thousands of targets. Kepler is telling us WHERE to look, and we are focusing there,” said Tarter.
SETI research is now only funded by private donations, “limiting how quickly we can search these newly discovered planets for intelligent life,” said Tarter. “The best reason to support SETI research is because it is an investment in our own future. The scientist Phil Morrison said that ‘SETI is the archeology of the future.’ Think about it. If we detect a signal, we could learn about THEIR past (because of the time their signal took to reach us) and the possibility of OUR future. Successful detection means that, on average, technologies last for a long time. That’s the only way another technological civilization can overlap with us in time and space. Understanding that it is possible to find solutions to our terrestrial problems and to become a very old civilization, because someone else has managed to do just that, is hugely important! Knowing that there can be a future may motivate us to achieve it.”
Tarter will be both celebrated and be one of the featured speakers at the gala dinner during the SETI Institute’s public event, SETIcon II, to be held at the Santa Clara Hyatt Hotel on June 22 – 24. See here for information on how to attend.
To give a donation to SETI, see their website.
lol @ the photoshopping job on that computer monitor
Maybe some of those History Channel aliens will provide for more funds ?
ET phone home ?
Jill is right, just not proven yet. Someday proof will surface of intelligent life
other than on earth . . . .
She was good payed for hidding truth,…Even Romans-Julius Obsequinu wrote book about UFO in 4th century A.D., there is doomsday chronicle from 11th century A.D. describing exactly UFO landing,..Tulis paper from Egypt 13th. century B.C.
In an interview some years ago Dr. Jill Tarter mentioned how she read the entire Project Cyclops Report cover to cover in one sitting…… now that is enthusiasm!
The prospect for detecting a signal from some ETI in our galaxy is probably very small. It will be enough to find an extra-solar planet with biological signatures. SETI may in time provide a bound on the probability for finding ETI close enough to detect them.
There are probably ETI in the rest of the universe, but the closest one to us and on our past light cone might be 50 million light years away. At these distances it is not possible to detect any signals they may be sending into space. The 1/r^2 attenuation of signals and the further loss by ions in space make that impossible, unless for some reason such ETI are sending many billions of gigawatts of electromagnetic energy into space. Finding that we are not alone might prove to be a thankless task.
LC
Non religious update of universe-life comprehensions…
Natural Selection Is Ubiquitous
Higgs Particle? Dark Energy/Matter? Epigenetics?
These Are YOK!
Update Concepts-Comprehension…
http://universe-life.com/2011/12/13/21st-century-science-whence-and-whither/
Evolution Is The Quantum Mechanics Of Natural Selection.
The quantum mechanics of every process is its evolution.
Quantum mechanics are mechanisms, possible or probable or actual mechanisms of natural selection.
=================
Universe-Energy-Mass-Life Compilation
http://universe-life.com/2012/02/03/universe-energy-mass-life-compilation/
A. The Universe
From the Big-Bang it is a rationally commonsensical conjecture that the gravitons, the smallest base primal particles of the universe, must be both mass and energy, i.e. inert mass yet in motion even at the briefest fraction of a second of the pre Big Bang singularity. This is rationally commonsensical since otherwise the Big would not have Banged, the superposition of mass and energy would not have been resolved.
The universe originates, derives and evolves from this energy-mass dualism which is possible and probable due to the small size of the gravitons.
Since gravitation Is the propensity of energy reconversion to mass and energy is mass in motion, gravity is the force exerted between mass formats.
All the matter of the universe is a progeny of the gravitons evolutions, of the natural selection of mass, of some of the mass formats attaining temporary augmented energy constraint in their successive generations, with energy drained from other mass formats, to temporarily postpone, survive, the reversion of their own constitutional mass to the pool of cosmic energy fueling the galactic clusters expansion set in motion by the Big Bang.
B. Earth Life
Earth Life is just another mass format. A self-replicating mass format. Self-replication is its mode of evolution, natural selection. Its smallest base primal units are the RNAs genes.
The genesis of RNAs genes, life’s primal organisms, is rationally commonsensical thus highly probable, the “naturally-selected” RNA nucleotides.
Life began/evolved on Earth with the natural selection of inanimate RNA, then of some RNA nucleotides, then arriving at the ultimate mode of natural selection, self-replication.
C. Know Thyself. Life Is Simpler Than We Are Told, Including Origin And Nature Of Brain And Of “Spirituality”***
The origin-reason and the purpose-fate of life are mechanistic, ethically and practically valueless. Life is the cheapest commodity on Earth.
As Life is just another mass format, due to the oneness of the universe it is commonsensical that natural selection is ubiquitous for ALL mass formats and that life, self-replication, is its extension. And it is commonsensical, too, that evolutions, broken symmetry scenarios, are ubiquitous in all processes in all disciplines and that these evolutions are the “quantum mechanics” of the processes.
Human life is just one of many nature’s routes for the natural survival of RNAs, the base primal Earth organisms.
Life’s evolution, self-replication:
Genes (organisms) to genomes (organisms) to mono-cellular to multicellular organisms:
Individual mono-cells to cooperative mono-cells communities, “cultures”.
Mono-cells cultures evolve their communication, neural systems, then further evolving nerved multicellular organisms.
Human life is just one of many nature’s routes for the natural survival of RNAs, the base Earth organism.
It is up to humans themselves to elect the purpose and format of their life as individuals and as group-members.
Dov Henis (comments from 22nd century)
***????? ?????? ?? “?????????”, ???? ??????????,
?????????? ?????? ?????????, ?????? ??????? ????
An Embarrassingly Obvious Theory Of Everything
http://universe-life.com/2011/12/10/eotoe-embarrassingly-obvious-theory-of-everything/
Tags:
brain origin, gravitation, gravitons, lifeevolution, nerved organisms, RNAlifehood, spirituality, universeevolution