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T A B L E__T A L K Do programmers think differently than the rest of civilization? Join the discussion on hackers in Table Talk's Digital Cul ture area - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Web-ability The gene
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THE GEEKS AND THE ALIENS | PAGE 2 OF 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Technology executives are a coveted demographic for fund-raisers: open-minded, forward-looking and, most importantly, loaded. So it was perfectly natural that the SETI astronomers, led by Silicon Valley legend Barney Oliver, should turn to the inventor's high-tech friends for help. They listened: Hewlett-Packard founders William Hewlett and David Packard, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen anted up a total of $20 million. When Oliver died in 1995, he left the bulk of his estate (more than $20 million) to SETI. "They are the main funders of our effort -- what will help assure our long-term survivability," says Tom Pierson, executive director of the SETI Institute. Although the participation of the original four contributors has always been "from a distance," Pierson affirms that the surviving three visit the institute and keep up with the issues. He points out, "These are very smart people, and very well read and studied, and they understand the sciences behind it. You don't give million-dollar gifts annually to a corporation if you don't know what it's going for." Reborn as Project Phoenix, SETI's current modus operandi is to search the airwaves for signals from the 1,000 stars within a 200-light-year distance that are the most like the sun. Feeding millions of frequencies through a custom-made supercomputer, they listen to any signal that might be strong enough to reach us, including "beacons" (intentional signals sent out by extraterrestrials who, like us, might be wondering if someone else is out there) as well as leakage similar to the radio cloud that Earth sends out every day. And even as the SETI Institute scans the sky, so are other smaller SETI-related researchers -- including SETI programs at UC-Berkeley and Harvard, in Australia and Italy, and the 900 or so amateur astronomers of the SETI League, who tune in via backyard satellite dishes hoping to hear mysterious messages from outer space. It's a long shot, and the people involved know it. But they're still optimistic. Says Greg Klerkx, SETI's director of development, "If there were only 10,000 stars and we searched 1,000 and didn't find anything, it'd be a little more discouraging. But if you have got 400 billion to pick from, it's like standing on a beach and grabbing a pinch of sand and looking for a diamond. It's unlikely. That pinch is what we're looking at with Project Phoenix, and with the next generation search we'll expand that to a handful." This, of course, is why the technology industry is so crucial to SETI. Scanning the signals from each star takes a long time and requires tons of computer processing power and enormous telescopic arrays. If that computing power is increased exponentially, so is the amount of information SETI can examine and the sensitivity of the signals it will detect. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Hollywood's recent obsession with all things alien has certainly helped the SETI cause. So has the exploration of Mars and recent scientific discoveries like the promising-looking clouds of dust that appear to be developing planetary systems likeours. SETI's work has never been more visible, but Project Phoenix is at a critical point. The Cyclops blueprint for SETI's search is almost 30 years old. The current Project Phoenix survey of 1,000 stars is expected to be completed in 2000. With the end of their project looming, the question the astronomers are asking is, simply, what next? Last year, SETI formed the Science and Technology Working Group, an advisory board with the sole function of examining the premise of Project Phoenix and envisioning how SETI can exploit the technical accomplishments of the 21st century. Besides 27 astronomers and scientists, the group boasts a small who's-who of high-tech brain power: Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems; Nathan Myhrvold, CTO of Microsoft; Danny Hillis, Disney fellow and founder of Thinking Machines; David Liddle, Xerox PARC alumnus and co-founder of Interval Research; Len Cutler, 41-year veteran of Hewlett Packard Labs; Richard Wirt, director of Intel's Microcomputer Labs. The techies have met several times with their scientist counterparts for three-day brainstorming marathons, where they discuss science, engineering, computer and signal processing and telescope design and suggest how SETI might utilize upcoming breakthroughs in these fields. Their job is to envision where human technology -- and, for that matter, alien technology -- could be going. Myhrvold, for example, believes that his background in physics and computers (he holds degrees in geophysics, space physics and math, plus a Ph.D. in theoretical and mathematical physics) helps him "envision alien computer science." Envisioning alien computer science? Well, consider the fact that SETI has focused its search on interstellar microwave leakage. In Myhrvold's view, an alien civilization with technology more advanced than ours would never be leaking radio noise unintentionally. He postulates, "Human signals have been simple and easy to detect. But very soon there will be no more simple signals on earth -- everything is moving to compressed digital transmission, which is difficult to tell from white noise. If the aliens have any computer science, then their own signals will be nearly impossible to detect -- except for a brief 100-year or so window of simple signals. Many other SETI people have not had that view, but I believe it very strongly, because computer science and economics both take you inexorably in that direction." Besides brainstorming, the participating technologists are also contributing to post-meeting calculations and research. Hewlett Packard's Cutler, for example, is researching precision timing to extrapolate how upcoming satellite arrays might coordinate their searches. Cutler says he's excited by the technical challenges -- and by the chance to make history. He solemnly explains, "It certainly would be interesting if other civilizations were found through this -- it would probably be one of the most exciting things for mankind in many, many centuries." Not all the contributors are so sober about their contributions. As Myhrvold puts it, "One friend of mine says that the SETI Institute isn't interested in talking to me because they think I am smart or knowledgeable. They just aren't sure I am human!" The participating technologists say that their industry colleagues haven't given them much grief about their new pet project (Myhrvold's comment: "When you compare it to some of the other crazy things I do, it isn't really all that odd"). But you can't, after all, be completely serious about a topic like aliens -- especially when the SETI astronomers and their contributors have to deal with conspiracy theorists who suspect them of hiding Roswell aliens (or perhaps just ET) in their laboratory, and government officials who think they're off their rocker. So SETI's astronomers have learned to be lighthearted about their job: as astronomer Seth Shostak recently answered the phone, "Oh, it's been a bad day. The power went out and the aliens in the freezer defrosted, and now they're abducting our next-door neighbors for experiments." - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Currently, the SETI Institute is using one custom-designed supercomputer and one main telescope to conduct its surveying; its plans are much more ambitious. In the works, if the funding comes through, is an array of thousands of off-the-shelf radio antennas, strung together, which would increase their sensitivity to weak signals at least tenfold. But the more stars they can survey, the more processing power they need to read the signals they take in. Says Dan Werthimer, director of the Berkeley SETI program, "It's a tech-limited game. The computers are doing the listening, and the more computer power you have, the better job you can do at this." Long term, SETI's Science and Technology Group is tackling this issue. Short term, Werthimer thinks he might have found the key to finding processing power. Born from a brainstorm by a former Sun and Starwave employee, and promulgated by astronomers at UC-Berkeley and the University of Washington, Werthimer's SETI@Home project plans to process these signals using a distributed network of idle computers: personal, home computers. Your computer, if you like. It works like this. SERENDIP is a SETI system that "piggybacks" on Arecibo Observatory, a 1,000-foot dish in Puerto Rico (a dish so big, I'm informed, that it would hold 10 billion bowls of corn flakes). SERENDIP records 20 gigabytes of information every day and stores it at the SETI@Home server. People around the world will be able to get a copy of the SETI@Home screensaver and download a .25-megabyte chunk of data from the SETI@Home server. During the computer's down time, an educational screensaver will run in the foreground while in the background the data is searched for alien frequencies. When finished, the screensaver will log back in to SETI@Home, upload the processed data and download a new chunk. So far, 92,000 people have signed up to test out the SETI@Home screensaver. If those volunteers actually turn out when the project launches next fall, the processing power of the SERENDIP project should increase tenfold from its current 168 million-channel processing capacity. What Werthimer is talking about is the world's biggest scientific distributed computing project -- a fact that has caused the computer industry to sit up and take notice. Arthur C. Clarke, author of "2001: A Space Odyssey," has become a project spokesman. Sun, which has already experimented with distributed networks for science (a 120-machine network at Berkeley), has donated multiple machines to the SETI@Home project. Sun is also considering contributing the down time of its entire network of company machines (30,000 of them) to the project. "Distributed computing is our model, so we are very pleased to see it being demonstrated in such a visible way," says Jean Griffin-Holst, director of marketing for Sun's educational grants program. Sun in particular seems bitten by the SETI bug. SETI astronomers like Shostak regularly give lectures at the campus, which are heavily attended by awestruck Sun employees. The meetings are "like going to church," says Griffin-Holst, and most attendees come away eager to get involved. She explains, "It's the unknown -- it's adventure, it's the new frontier, it's something we haven't cracked. Everybody's still wondering, and whoever figures it out is going to be an important person in history." - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - That Silicon Valley's technical executives -- the übergeeks of the high tech world -- would get involved in the search for little green men is actually quite natural. The stereotype of the techie-wiz who grew up building his own ham radios, reading back issues of sci-fi magazines and futuristic comic books and reciting the plot twists of every "Star Trek" episode ever made isn't that far off. Even the older generations of CEOs experienced the post-World War II alien crazes, when cinemas packed seats with B-movie fare like "It Came From Outer Space." "It can fairly be said that all of us, when we were children, were science-fiction buffs, and some of us still are. What happened with each of us is that we matured and realized science fiction was exactly that -- fiction," explains SETI's Pierson. "But the science still existed, and our fascination remained and in fact intensified -- but to the real science, and not the fiction side." Perhaps the computer-industry execs don't hang out in alt.tv.x-files. But wouldn't the natural extension of mature geekdom be an interest in the more real-world -- and scientifically interesting -- search for intelligent life? After all, we're talking radio waves, not spaceships. Put it this way: After you've spent your life both imagining and building what was once considered science fiction (global information networks! Virtual worlds and avatars! Computers that can beat human grand masters at chess!), the natural next step is to ponder an even further-flung future -- alien technology, intergalactic transmissions, extraterrestrials who could be even more brilliant than we are. "Technologists in general are visionaries -- they're really thinking about how science and technology can affect the future, how it can make life different in positive ways," says SETI's Klerkx. "Because of the nature of that mind-set, they see SETI as something like that -- a larger-than-life visionary endeavor that, when it's successful, will really change the world." Contacting aliens may turn out to be no more laughable than cyberspace
was to our parents. As Griffin-Holst puts it: "We work on technologies that
20 years ago people would have said, 'You're crazy' if you'd said this was
possible. Where is the line between fact and fiction?" - - - - - - - -
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"Contact" Reviewed by Robin Dougherty.
Humanity's surrogate space program Arthur C. Clark believes that if we can't cruise
outer space ourselves, "Star Trek" is the next best thing to being there.
By Jeff Greenwald. |
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