It was a project that launched thousands of dreams among the stars.
Fifty years ago, NASA published a thick 253-page book called Project Cyclops. He summed up the NASA workshop on the discovery of alien civilizations. The assembled group of astronomers, engineers and biologists came to the conclusion that a cyclops, a wide array of radio telescopes with 1000 antennas 100 meters in diameter, was needed. At the time, the project cost US$10 billion. Astronomers have said it can detect strange signals up to 1,000 light-years away.
The report began with a quote astronomer Frank Drakenow professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz:
At this very moment, almost certainly, radio waves sent by other intelligent civilizations are falling on Earth. It is possible to build a telescope that can be pointed to the right place and tuned to the right frequency to detect these waves. Someday, somewhere among the stars, answers will come to many of the oldest, most important, and most exciting questions that mankind has asked.
Cyclops report, long sold out But it is available onlineThis will be the bible for a generation of astronomers who dream that science can answer existential questions.
Jill Tarter, who read the report in graduate school and dedicated her life to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, “for the first time we have technology that allows us to conduct experiments instead of asking priests and philosophers,” he said in Interview from ten years ago.
Cyclops and the work that inspired me this week reminded me when The word shone all over the world that Chinese astronomers discovered a radio signal that had the characteristics of an extraterrestrial civilization, i.e. had an extremely narrow bandwidth of 140,604 MHz, a precise nature that it would normally not be able to achieve on its own.
They made this discovery with a new giant telescope called the 500m Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope, or FAST. The telescope was aimed at an exoplanet called Kepler 438 b, a rocky planet about 1.5 times the size of Earth and orbiting the so-called habitable zone of Kepler 438, a red dwarf hundreds of light-years away in the constellation Lyra. Its surface temperature is estimated at 37 degrees Fahrenheit, making it a candidate for the existence of life.
Just as quickly, an article about the discovery in the state newspaper Science and Technology Daily disappeared. Chinese astronomers douse themselves with cold water.
Zhang Tongjie, Chief Scientist at ET. China Civilization Research Group, newspaper quoted Andre Jones, journalist Those who follow Chinese developments in space and astronomy say: “The possibility that the suspicious signal is a form of radio interference is also very high and needs to be further confirmed or ruled out. It can be a long process.”
“These signals are radio interference; they are due to radio contamination from earthlings, not from aliens, ”he wrote in an email.
It has become a familiar story. For half a century, SETI, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, has been the mole, finding promising signals before tracking them on orbiting satellites, microwave ovens, and other terrestrial sources. Drake himself pointed a radio telescope at a couple of stars in 1960 and soon thought he had found gold, only to find that the signal had been lost by the radar.
Recently, a signal has been traced that appears to have come from the nearest stellar explosion, Proxima Centauri. Radio interference in Australia.
Just as NASA announced last week that it would make a modest investment in Scientific study of unidentified flying objects The intention was to bring the precision and practicality of what many have criticized as security thinking, such as the agency’s Cyclops Seminar held at Stanford for three months in 1971. The conference was hosted by astrobiologist John Bellingham and Bernard. Oliver, head of research at Hewlett-Packard Corporation. The men also edited the report of the conference.
In the preface Dr. Oliver wrote that if anything happened to the Cyclops, that year would be considered the most important year of his life.
Said Paul Horowitz, professor emeritus of physics at Harvard University, who went on to develop and start his own listening campaign called Project META, funded by the Planetary Society. Filmmaker Steven Spielberg (ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind) attended the official opening in 1985 at the agency’s Harvard-Smithsonian Station in Harvard, Massachusetts.
“SETI was real!” Dr. Horowitz added.
But what dr. Initially, Oliver received only the Golden Fleece Award from Senator William Proxmire, a Wisconsin Democrat who opposed what he saw as a waste of power.
“In my opinion, this project should be delayed by several million light years,” He said.
On Columbus Day 1992, NASA did begin a limited search. A year later, Congress repealed it at the request of Senator Richard Bryan, a Democrat from Nevada. Following the denial of federal support, SETI’s activities, supported by grants from the nonprofit SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, have since slowed down. Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner recently created a new initiative called Hacking Listen with a $100 million donation. Dr. Horowitz and others have expanded the study to include what they call “optical SETI,” where they watch the sky for laser flares from distant civilizations.
Dr. Horowitz said that the Cyclops was never built “because by today’s standards it would have been a huge and expensive animal.” Technological advances, such as radios that can listen to billions of radio frequencies at the same time, have changed the rules of the game.
New large fast telescope in China, also known as “Sky Eye”, was built in part with SETI in mind. Its antenna is located in a crater in Guizhou in southwestern China. The antenna is larger than the famous Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Disgracefully collapsed in December 2020.
Now FAST and its observers have gone through their own false alarm tests. SETI astronomers say there will be more.
Those who persist pray that the so-called great silence will not push them away. They say they have always looked for the long term.
“A great silence is not expected,” Horowitz said, not least because only a fraction of the Milky Way’s 200 million stars have been explored. No one ever said that detecting this stream of cosmic radio signals would be easy.
“It may not happen in my lifetime, but it will,” Wertimer said.
“All signals detected by SETI researchers so far are from our own civilization, not another civilization,” Wertheimer said in a series of emails and phone calls. He said the earthlings might have to build telescope on the moon To avoid the growing radioactive contamination on Earth and Interference from constellations of orbiting satellites.
He said that the current time could be a unique window for Earth’s SETI tracking.
“A hundred years ago,” he said, “the sky was clear, but we didn’t know what to do.” “In a hundred years there will be no more paradise.”
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