Tag: Jill Tarter

What Scientists Could Learn From Alien Hunters

 

February 10, 2020                           (wired.com)

• Astrobiologists use telescopes to seek biochemical evidence of microbes on other planets. SETI scientists use telescopes to look for intelligent beings’ technological signatures. Then there are those who believe that intelligent extraterrestrials are here, now, buzzing the skies of planet Earth. The respective members of these three groups of ‘alien hunters’ do not necessarily get along with one another. Their interactions demonstrate a concept that sociologists call “boundary-work”, e.g.: building fences and enforcing ideas about who counts as a scientist, and who doesn’t. This ‘boundary’, however, is subjectively based on social mores, social fears, and politics.

• People who find themselves on the outside of mainstream science often foster a sense of antagonism. But the line of demarcation as to what is ‘outside’ of mainstream science shifts with time. Science’s ideas about which ET-seeking methods are valid and which are ‘fringey’ have changed over the past few decades.

• In the early years, astrobiologists and SETI – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, worked together. ‘Perhaps those microbes on a far-off planet evolved and built radio transmitters.’ But then their respective disciplines parted ways. In order to study the conditions of life on other planets, astrobiologists tend to study conditions on this planet – drilling into frozen lakes, doing lab experiments, studying geological evolution, researching our genetics. They use this data to determine which exoplanets have the best chance for evolving life forms. SETI, on the other hand, search for electromagnetic transmissions and signatures of technologies that are not yet understood.

• In the early 1970s, NASA and the National Academy of Sciences considered SETI an important component of the search for extraterrestrial lifeforms. Then politicians such as Senator Richard Proxmire denounced SETI as a wasteful, useless, and futile endeavor. Congressional funding of SETI’s ‘High-Resolution Microwave Survey’ in the early 1990s was cut-off in 1993. The National Science Foundation banned SETI projects from its funding portfolio. Grant opportunities dried up. NASA and mainstream astrobiologists began to distance themselves from SETI.

• In the 2000s, SETI turned to private investors like Paul Allen and Yuri Milner and became associated with searching for ‘little green men’ and UFOs. The mainstream considered SETI ‘laughable pseudo-research’ outside the bounds of proper science. At the same time, astrobiology became a “legitimate” science. Astrobiologist Sara Seager told Congress in 2013, “We’re not looking for aliens or searching for UFOs. We’re using standard astronomy.”

• But SETI scientists have been clawing their way back to legitimacy. In April 2018, Congress directed NASA to start including searches for “technosignatures” in its broader search for life beyond Earth. The House Appropriations Committee is deciding whether SETI’s work will be sanctioned in the 2020s.

• One thing that both “legitimate” astrobiologists and SETI have in common is that they both consider ufology silly. They keep their distance from anyone who believes in UFOs or an extraterrestrial presence. But for someone at SETI who imagines light-years-away microbes growing into sentient beings that broadcast radio waves and beam lasers, is it that much harder to imagine these beings traveling here to Earth?

• Mainstream academic researchers claim that virtually no hard UFO data exists beyond personal accounts. Ufology doesn’t explain how or why alien spaceships could or would come all the way here. Then there are the standard variety of banal explanations for bogus UFO sightings. Ufology is not science in the way SETI researchers do science.

• Greg Eghigian, a Penn State researcher, points out that “From the early-1950s through the 1970s, a number of academics took the study of UFOs seriously and regularly engaged with ufologists.” Back then the military had official UFO research programs, even though their conclusions usually amounted to “nothing to see here.” Those programs ended. The Air Force-sponsored 1968 ‘Condon Report’ concluded that studying UFOs was a waste of time, and UFO research was consigned to the fringes.

• In 1983, Thomas F. Gieryn published his paper: “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science.” When researchers do ‘boundary-work’, they create and maintain lines around who qualifies as a scientist and who doesn’t, and what is and what is not science. In so doing, they bestow legitimacy onto themselves and deny it to others. But this can backfire on them. When the public perceives scientists arbitrarily establishing exclusive scientific authority, people themselves feel alienated, fostering conspiracy theories about the mainstream scientists’ true motives.

• Similar to anti-vaccination activists, GMO no-goers, and people who say climate change has nothing to do with people, many ufologists have decided that scholars and politicians are at best, narrow-minded or, at worst, engaged in a deliberate attempt to hide information.

• Psychologist Stuart Appelle wrote that ufology “is not simply rejected as a legitimate discipline, it is categorically dismissed.” Rejection suggests a conclusion based on close examination and careful reflection. But dismissal is a judgment that close examination is not warranted at all, which is not very scientific. This silencing is a form of ‘social stigmatization’.

• Adam Dodd, a communications instructor at the University of Queensland (in Australia) sees mainstream scientists’ dismissal of the UFO phenomenon as ‘saving face’ in order to maintain their reputation among their own peers. An example of this is when Stephen Hawking concluded that the absence of any evidence of aliens essentially equates with evidence of the absence of aliens. And therefore, for a ‘true scientist’, UFOs and aliens are not worthy of consideration.

• This ‘boundary-work’ by mainstream scientists is both frustrating and patronizing to UFO researchers who find themselves outside of the mainstream fence. They suspect a mainstream agenda is being formed against them. Ufologists become mistrustful of so-called ‘experts’, while the mainstream regards UFO followers as ‘cranks’. So they each band together to create an ‘us versus them’ scenario, and keep their distance from each other. Scientists cannot afford the professional consequences of being associated with fringe ufologists. As a consequence, science probably loses out on the ‘kernels of truth’ in the nut bin.

• The thing that both sides generally have in common is the desire to get to the truth. But with the elitist scientists’ blanket denial of all that is lumped together as ‘fringe conspiracy theories’, these ‘hard science’ practitioners also tend to ignore cultural knowledge, emotional knowledge, spiritual knowledge, and personal knowledge. Their plodding and myopic focus on hard science may slow the rate of scientific achievement.

• Today, mainstream science seems to be more willing to embrace SETI. In 2014, SETI astronomer Jill Tarter received radio astronomy’s highest honor, the Janksy Lectureship award. And this is slowly expanding into the field of ufology. The chair of the Harvard astronomy department has publically suggested that the ‘asteroid’ Oumuamua could be a visiting spaceship.

• A NASA scientist notes that both SETI and ufology are about ‘finding the signal in the noise’. There may be ‘signals’, however small, that indicate a phenomena associated with UFOs that cannot be explained or denied that should be taken into consideration. Rather than dismissing the research of a particular ‘fringe’ group outright, scientists might listen. If so, the reaction by the fringe might be to consider mainstream ‘expert’ analysis more. There can be important truths revealed from both sides of the spectrum.

 

Aliens—hypothetical beings from outer space—fall into roughly three categories. They could be far-away microbes or other creatures that don’t use technology humans can detect; they could be far-away creatures that use technology earthlings can identify; or they could be creatures that have used technology to come to Earth.

         Senator Richard Proxmire
          Sara Seager

Each of these categories has a different branch of research dedicated to it, and each one is probably less likely than the last to actually find something: Astrobiologists use telescopes to seek biochemical evidence of microbes on other planets. SETI scientists, on the other hand, use telescopes to look for hints of intelligent beings’ technological signatures as they beam through the cosmos. Investigating the idea that aliens have traveled here and have skimmed the air with spaceships, meanwhile, is the province of pseudoscientists. Or so the narrative goes.

Although these three groups have a common goal—answering the question “Are we alone?”—they don’t always get along. Their interactions demonstrate a concept that sociologists call “boundary-work”: designing and building fences around Legitimate Science, and enforcing ideas about who counts as a scientist, who doesn’t, and why. Those fences are supposed to defend science’s honor, demonstrate scientists’ objectivity, and uphold the profession’s standards. That’s good! We want that! But the fence posts also demarcate a boundary that isn’t objective but is, in fact, a function of time, location, culture, social mores, social fears, and politics. The enforcement of this sometimes-shifting boundary can send people who find

     Greg Eghigian

themselves on the outside further away from mainstream science, fostering a sense of antagonism and slighted outsiderism. The history of hunting aliens is a good way to understand those unintended consequences of boundary-work in other disciplines. Because even though none of the groups actually knows, or has gained access to, whatever ET truth is out there, science’s ideas about which ET-seeking methods are valid and which are fringey have changed over the past few decades.

Astrobiology v. SETI

   Thomas F. Gieryn

In the early years of astrobiology and SETI, the two groups worked more side by side than they later would. After all, they just existed at different locations on a spectrum: Maybe microbes arose on a far-off planet, and maybe those microbes evolved and built radio transmitters. Astrobiology technically just means the study of life in the universe. But that encompasses a lot: Astrobiologists look into questions like how life started, how it evolved, and what environments can support it. To study these questions, scientists can gather data on this planet, drilling into frozen lakes, doing lab experiments involving the chemistry of early Earth, studying geological evolution on Mars, or gaining a better understanding of genetics to get a better sense of what alternatives might exist to our own DNA. They also investigate what life might look like on another world, whether it has existed on other solar-system planets, and how to pick out a habitable or perhaps inhabited exoplanet from astronomical data.

         Stuart Appelle

SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, falls logically within the scope of astrobiology. But this search, usually for electromagnetic transmissions, is more speculative, since it deals less explicitly with the kinds of chemistry, geology, physics, and biology we can observe in the solar system—and so perhaps beyond—and instead seeks signatures of technology whose nature we don’t yet, and may never, know.

          Adam Dodd

Still, NASA initially supported both sorts of searches (although it called astrobiology “exobiology”). The venerable National Academy of Sciences, in its 1972 recommendations for the search for life beyond the solar system, listed SETI as an important component of exobiology, stating that “SETI investigations are among the most far-reaching efforts underway in exobiology today.” Trouble bubbled up between the groups, though, after SETI became the object of political ire. The search for smart aliens had already proven to be a favorite football for politicians, a frequent contender for cancelation—because of the low probability of success, the speculation required, and the money that they said could be better spent on Earth. For instance, in 1978, Senator Richard Proxmire awarded the nascent project his infamous Golden Fleece Award, for wasting government funds on what he considered a useless, futile endeavor. In the early 1990s, NASA finally began its first SETI observations, part of the project that had been on the drawing board when Proxmire mocked it: then called the High-Resolution Microwave Survey. But the year after the survey began, in 1993, Congress shut down the program.

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To Find Intelligent Alien Life, Humans Need to Start Thinking Like an Extraterrestrial

 

Article by Adam Mann                            January 22, 2020                               (livescience.com)

• Claire Webb is an anthropology student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 2017, Webb has worked with Breakthrough Listen to examine how SETI researchers think about aliens and place anthropocentric assumptions into their work. On January 8th at the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu, Webb pointed out the potential flaw in SETI’s $100 million Breakthrough Listen Project, which scours the cosmos for intelligent alien signals, being that scientists tend to bring with them their human biases. Webb’s job is to get SETI researchers to be mindful of their human behavior in order imagine new ways to perform scientific studies.

• At the conference, Webb pointed out how Breakthrough Listen scientists use artificial intelligence (or ‘AI’) to sift through large data sets to uncover potential ‘technosignatures’ to indicate technology or tools use by alien beings. Researchers that employ AI “tend to disavow human handicraft in the machines they build,” said Webb. “I find that somewhat problematic.” AI is trained by human beings. In doing so, they predispose their algorithms to certain biases.”

• Most SETI research assumes that beings on different worlds will be able to communicate in the same way that we do, says Webb. It presumes a technological compatibility in using radio telescopes and understanding the universal language of science and math. “(But) if E.T. was looking at us, what would they see?” Webb asks.

• Biases also come from assuming that other species’ technological development would mirror our own, such as dealing with nuclear weapon proliferation and climate change. We can’t automatically assume that the history of another species will unfold in the same way, says Webb.

• Veteran SETI scientist Jill Tarter suggested that we may be looking for a better version of ourselves, hoping that a message from advanced beings will include blueprints for a free energy device that can alleviate poverty. This assumes that an advanced species will have an equal moral advancement. Says Tarter, “I think that’s something that can be contested.”

• “One thing Jill [Tarter] has said many times is, ‘We are doing what we think makes sense now, but we might one day be doing something totally different… We reserve the right to get smarter.'”

 

HONOLULU — Our hunt for aliens has a potentially fatal flaw — we’re the ones searching for them.

         Claire Webb

That’s a problem because we’re a unique species, and alien-seeking scientists are an even stranger and more specialized bunch. As a result, their all-too human assumptions may get in the way of their alien-listening endeavors. To get around this, the Breakthrough Listen project, a $100-million initiative scouring the cosmos for signals of otherworldly beings as part of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), is asking anthropologists to help unmask some of these biases.

“It’s kind of a joke at Breakthrough Listen,” Claire Webb, an anthropology and history of science student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said here on Jan. 8 at the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Honolulu. “They tell me: ‘We’re studying aliens, and you’re studying us.'”

              Jill Tarter

Since 2017, Webb has worked with Breakthrough Listen to examine how SETI researchers think about aliens, produce knowledge, and perhaps inadvertently place anthropocentric assumptions into their work.

She sometimes describes her efforts as “making the familiar strange.”

For instance, your life might seem perfectly ordinary — maybe involving being hunched over at a desk and shuttling electrons around between computers — until examined through an anthropological lens, which points out that this is not exactly a universal state of affairs. At the conference, Webb presented a poster looking at how Breakthrough Listen scientists use artificial intelligence (AI) to sift through large data sets and try to uncover potential technosignatures, or indicators of technology or tool use by alien organisms.

“Researchers who use AI tend to disavow human handicraft in the machines they build,” Webb told Live Science. “They attribute a lot of agency to those machines. I find that somewhat problematic and at the worst untrue.”

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NASA Launches Team of Experts Dedicated to Finding Alien Life on Other Planets Alongside Scholars from Leading Universities

by Joe Pinkstone                    February 19, 2019                    (dailymail.co.uk)

• NASA’s newly formed ‘Center for Life Detection Science’ (CLDS) will tackle the question, ‘Are we alone?’ NASA will work alongside a team of non-NASA scientists and scholars from Georgetown University and Georgia Tech University to track down any signs of extraterrestrial life on other planets.

• Tori Hoehler, the principle investigator of CLDS and a researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, said, ‘We now have the scientific and engineering expertise to address this profound question with the clarity of scientific evidence — and we have a great community of scientists ready for that grand challenge.” “[W]e need to develop tools and strategies that are tailored to detecting life in the unique conditions of other worlds, which are very different not only from Earth but also from each other.”

• TechnoSearch is an online portal to help researchers access exoplanet data from NASA’s SETI project. Jill Tarter, a co-founder of the SETI institute, spearheaded the project which has collated data from as far back as 1960 and continues to add the latest findings.

• Says Sarah Stewart Johnson of Georgetown University, the goal of her team is to try to recognize life ‘as we don’t know it’, through examining biosignatures of very different lifeforms. Britney Schmidt of Georgia Tech will investigate the possibilities of past or present life in the oceans of the icy, outer moons of our solar system, or on ancient Mars. More researchers will be added as the program matures.

[Editor’s Note]   So long as these types of deep state institutions lead the effort to detect signs of extraterrestrial life, you can bet that we will never find any.

 

NASA has put together a team of scientists to track down alien life on other planets.

                  Tori Hoehler

The newly-formed Center for Life Detection Science (CLDS) will tackle the question, ‘Are we alone?’ and NASA claims science may soon provide a definitive answer.

Experts from within NASA will work alongside people outside the space agency to track down any signs of extraterrestrial existence.

    Sarah Stewart Johnson

Tori Hoehler, the principle investigator of CLDS and a researcher at Nasa’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, said: ‘We now have the scientific and engineering expertise to address this profound question with the clarity of scientific evidence — and we have a great community of scientists ready for that grand challenge.
‘The search for life beyond Earth cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach.

‘To give ourselves the best shot at success, we need to develop tools and strategies that are tailored to detecting life in the unique conditions of other worlds, which are very different not only from Earth but also from each other.’

             Britney Schmidt

NASA’s finest minds will work alongside scholars from Georgetown University and Georgia Tech University.
Sarah Stewart Johnson of Georgetown University defines the goal of her team as trying to recognise life ‘as we don’t know it.’

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How Paul Allen Saved the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

by Daniel Oberhaus                   October 16, 2018                (motherboard.vice.com)

• On October 15th, Microsoft co-founder and billionaire Paul Allen (pictured above) died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of 65. In addition to owning the Seattle Seahawks and the Portland Trail Blazers, Allen founded a brain science institute, an AI institute, and Stratolaunch Systems, which was exploring private spaceflight. In addition, Allen almost single-handedly rescued American SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) by donating over $30 million to scientists scanning the cosmos for intelligent radio signals.

• During the 1980’s, SETI was generally funded through participating university programs and endowments. In the 1990’s as university funding diminished, NASA began helping to fund SETI. But that only lasted a year before some in Congress complained that we were wasting money on a “great Martian chase.” SETI realized that the only hope for the future was private funding.

• Barney Oliver, the founder of Hewlett Packard laboratories and SETI supporter, contacted his billionaire buddies Bill Hewlett and David Packard, Intel founder Gordon Moore, and Paul Allen to successfully raise $20 million to keep SETI’s research moving forward.

• SETI was leasing global telescopes for its projects. But ultimately, SETI wanted its own dedicated array of radio telescopes to target hundreds of stars at a time. SETI’s founder, Jill Tarter, put together an array of 350 20-foot radio telescopes, but needed $25 million to purchase it. Paul Allen stepped up and footed the bill to create the first American SETI telescope array located in northern California. “There’s no doubt that Paul saved American SETI,” said Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute.

• By 2007, the SETI array consisted of 42 telescopes. At the dedication ceremony, Paul Allen pushed the button to turn the system on. Over the past ten years, the SETI array has analyzed 200 million signals from thousands of stars, studied unusual high-energy radio emissions, and even scanned the “spliff-shaped” Oumuamua asteroid for signs of intelligent life. Paul Allen had turned his attention to other projects, and the array was shut down for a year in 2011 due to lack of continued funding, however. But Allen remained a public supporter. Said Allen, “I think everybody would admit [the prospect of communicating with extraterrestrials] is a long shot, but if that long shot comes in…”

 

On Monday evening, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of 65. At the time of his death, Allen was the 47th richest person in the world, with a net worth of $26 billion. For the last few decades of his life, Allen used his wealth for a staggering variety of business and philanthropic interests. In addition to owning the Seattle Seahawks and the Portland Trail Blazers, Allen founded a brain science institute, an AI institute, and Stratolaunch Systems, which was exploring private spaceflight.

Yet one of the research areas where Allen made the biggest impact was also the one he spoke about the least: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Indeed, Allen almost single-handedly rescued American SETI by donating over $30 million to scientists scanning the cosmos for intelligent radio signals.

SETI’s early years in the United States was mostly defined by intermittent searches bankrolled with public funds, such as the National Science Foundation-funded program at Ohio State University which discovered the Wow! signal, or university endowments, such as Harvard’s Project Sentinel. By the early 90s, however, many of the early SETI programs had ended. The best hope for detecting extraterrestrial intelligence seemed to be NASA’s first foray into SETI, the Microwave Observing Program, which began observations in 1992.

             SETI founder, Jill Tarter

Less than a year after the start of NASA’s SETI program, it was killed by members of Congress who didn’t want to waste money on the “great Martian chase.” The SETI Institute, a nonprofit founded in 1984 by the radio astronomer Jill Tarter, wasn’t going to let SETI die at the hands of a few cynical congressmen, but it also realized that the only hope for the future was privately funded searches.

Fortunately, one of the earliest SETI Institute supporters was Barney Oliver, who founded and directed Hewlett Packard laboratories. So in 1993 Oliver called Bill Hewlett and David Packard of Hewlett Packard, Intel founder Gordon Moore, and Paul Allen to ask for their support.

“It probably only took Barney a few hours on the phone to get each of them to commit $1 million every year for the next five years,” Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, told me on the phone. “I’m not sure any of them were particularly interested in SETI, but they were interested in whatever Barney thought was a good idea.”

This $20 million commitment bankrolled Project Phoenix, a SETI program that ran from 1995 to 1998. Over the course of three years, Project Phoenix rented time on the Parkes radio telescope in Australia and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to scan for signals from 800 stars within 200-light years of Earth.

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If Universe is Ocean, Humans Have Searched For Aliens in Swimming Pool, Claims New Study

by Nirmal Narayanan                  October 10, 2018                   (ibtimes.sg)

• The Italian/American physicist, Enrico Fermi, famously asked, if there are millions of galaxies and stars out there in the deep space, why humans have not met any advanced intelligent alien forms until now?

• ‘It is idiotic to conclude intelligent aliens do not exist nearby just because humans haven’t found them,’ said SETI astronomer Jill Tarter.

• Scientists haven’t found any intelligent extraterrestrials yet just because we have not started looking for them vigorously. A new study conducted by researchers at Pennsylvania State University has revealed that humans have searched just 0.00000000000000058% of the universe to find potential alien signals. In other words, if the universe was an ocean, humans have searched for aliens in barely a swimming pool’s worth of water.

• For its part, NASA recently revealed that it is working to locate alien civilizations by examining “Technosignatures” of life, including laser emissions, Dyson spheres and heat signatures in deep space.

 

A new study conducted by researchers at Pennsylvania State University has revealed that humans have searched just 0.00000000000000058% of the universe to find potential alien signals. In layman’s language, if the universe is an ocean, humans have searched for aliens in barely a swimming pool’s worth of water.

        Enrico Fermi

The study, published in the journal arXiv, could have also found the solution to the billion dollar Fermi paradox, which states if there are millions of galaxies and stars out there in the deep space, why humans have not met any advanced intelligent alien forms until now.

The study reveals that scientists haven’t found any intelligent extraterrestrials yet just because we have not started looking for them vigorously. Researchers who took part in the study believe that aliens, somewhere in that ocean of space might be signaling their existence, but until now, we have not looked into that deep corner.

               Jill Tarter

“Suppose I tell you there’s a cool thing happening in Houston right now. I do not tell you where it is. I do not tell you when it is happening. I do not tell you what it is. Is it in a bookstore? Is it a music concert? I give you absolutely no priors. It would be a difficult thing to try and find it. Houston, we have a problem. We do not know what we’re looking for … and we don’t know where to start,” said Shubham Kanodia, a graduate student in astronomy who co-wrote the study at a NASA workshop on Technosignatures.

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Astronomer Portrayed by Jodie Foster in ‘Contact’: Man Will Discover Alien Life by 2100

by Rick Neale            March 24, 2018            (floridatoday.com)

• Jill Tarter (pictured above) is a former project scientist and current research chair for the NASA-funded SETI program (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Tarter was the astronomer portrayed by Jodie Foster in the 1997 movie “Contact”, and in 2004 she was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world.

• Speaking at the Florida Institute of Technology’s Cross Cultural Management Summit in Orlando, Tarter told the audience, “I think that in this century we are going to be finding life beyond Earth.”

• The problem thus far is that the galaxy is just so big. “We’re out in the boondocks. And our star, the sun, is only one of 400 billion other stars in the Milky Way galaxy.” So it is like searching for fish in the ocean by using a water glass, says Tarter.

• Tarter’s conference discussion, entitled “A Cosmic Perspective: Searching for Aliens, Finding Ourselves”, was one of about 75 talks she plans to deliver this year to fundraise for Allen Telescope Array upgrades. In recent years, scientists have focused the ATA on roughly 20,000 nearby stars – mostly small, dim red dwarf stars. Tarter also expressed hope for a new “Laser SETI” initiative. She said the first prototype will be installed within a month and a half at the Lick Observatory, near San Jose, California.

[Editor’s Note] How can such a brilliant scientist be so oblivious to the ET presence, beings that have studied and manipulated humans on Earth for thousands of years, up to and including the present day? Note that her paycheck comes from SETI, funded by NASA.

 

ORLANDO — Though scientists have scanned the cosmos for signals from alien civilizations for a half-century, Jill Tarter likens mankind’s micro-scale campaign to searching for fish in the world’s oceans — by withdrawing a 12-ounce glass of water.

“We’re out in the boondocks. And our star, the sun, is only one of 400 billion other stars in the Milky Way galaxy,” Tarter told a conference-room crowd Saturday afternoon.

“And our Milky Way galaxy is only one of about 200 billion other galaxies in the observable universe,” she said.
Tarter — whose astronomical career was portrayed by Jodie Foster in the 1997 movie “Contact” — served as closing speaker during the Florida Institute of Technology’s third Cross Cultural Management Summit at Caribe Royale in Orlando.

The former project scientist for NASA’s SETI program, Tarter is research chair at the nonprofit SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, She has received two NASA Public Service Medals, and in 2004 she was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world.

SETI stands for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The SETI Institute owns the Hat Creek Radio Observatory, and Tarter helped develop the facility’s Allen Telescope Array in the Cascade Mountains about 290 miles north of San Francisco.

       Jodie Foster in “Contact”

 “I think that in this century we are going to be finding life beyond Earth,” Tarter told the audience.
“We can discover it: We can find biomarkers on planets or moons of our solar system. We can find artifacts in the solar system as we explore. We can look for remote biosignatures in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets,” Tarter said.

“Or, perhaps we can detect the work product of technological civilizations: technosignatures,” she said.

Tarter displayed PowerPoint photos of telescopes, stars and galaxies to the audience. Included were “selfies” of distant Earth, as photographed by Cassini from Saturn’s orbit (2013) and Voyager 1 as the spacecraft was passing Neptune (1990).

“We’re really working on an ancient human question. And that’s very, very rewarding. We might, within the 21st century, have the answer to whether there is life beyond Earth. And we’ve been asking that question for a very, very long time,” she said.

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