The only known intelligent beings in the universe have quit listening for signs of others.
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, Institute, headquartered in Mountain View, switched its radio signal receivers into “hibernation mode” on April 15 when funding—mostly from UC– Berkeley—to operate the Lassen County facility ran dry. (The SETI Institute is not related to SETI@home, the crowdsourcing alien-hunting operation that lets volunteers donate their computer processors’ downtime to the search for alien intelligence.)
The suspension of the search for extraterrestrial life comes just when astronomers have gained a key advantage in identifying habitable alien worlds. NASA’s Kepler telescope, launched two years ago, has detected hundreds of planet groups in the past year that experts say could contain intelligent life.
“It’s like you finally got your ship to Treasure Island but they didn’t give you your shovel,” says SETI’s senior astronomer Seth Shostak. “Suddenly we have this list of planets that we could aim (our radio dishes) at to see if they might have life, and we’ve lost the power to do it.”
Aptos resident Frank Drake established SETI in 1960. In the decades since, Drake says, SETI has detected several “candidate signals” that turned out to be false alarms. But Drake believes maintaining operation of the skyward-pointing radio dishes could eventually produce results, even if it takes generations.
“This is one of the most important projects ever carried out,” he says. “Its value will come if it succeeds. We’d be making contact with an alien civilization, and we could learn a great deal.”
Shostak notes that even if SETI points its equipment at an occupied planet, astronomers could only detect its residents if the aliens, too, had built radio-emitting technology—and secured funding to keep their machinery running, a task at which Earthlings have failed.
Until 1993, SETI used NASA facilities to conduct its work. Subsequently, SETI teamed up with UC–Berkeley and, using a $50 million grant from Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, built 42 radio dishes at the Hat Creek Radio Astronomy Laboratory just north of Mt. Lassen. Maintenance of the equipment, which came fully up to speed two years ago, has been the responsibility of the university. But lacking the $2.5 million needed annually to operate SETI’s radio dishes and to pay a staff of six operators, Berkeley pulled the plug.
Currently, a two-person team is keeping SETI’s radio dish array in “hibernation mode,” essentially a non-functional state of life-support; terminate the employees and turn off the dishes, Shostak explains, and the apparatuses will begin to weather and decay.
“The question is whether money can be found for indefinite hibernation,” Shostak says. And with SETI’s final dregs of funding now running short, time is of the essence. “We can’t stay in hibernation mode forever,” he says. “We have several months, max.”
