It was a project that launched a thousand interstellar dreams.
Fifty years ago, NASA published a 253-page book entitled “Project Cyclops.” He summarized the results of a NASA workshop on how to detect alien civilizations. What was needed, concluded the assembled group of astronomers, engineers and biologists, was Cyclops, a wide range of radio telescopes with up to a thousand antennas 100 meters in diameter. At the time, the project would have cost $ 10 billion. According to astronomers, it could detect alien signals from as far away as 1,000 light-years away.
The report began with a quote from astronomer Frank Drake, now Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz:
At this very moment, with almost absolute certainty, the radio waves sent by other intelligent civilizations are falling to the ground. You can build a telescope that, pointed in the right place and tuned to the right frequency, can detect these waves. Someday, from somewhere among the stars, answers will come to many of the oldest, most important, and most exciting questions that humanity has ever asked.
The Cyclops report, long out of print but available online, would become a bible for a generation of astronomers drawn to the dream that science could answer existential questions.
“For the first time, we had technology where we could do an experiment instead of asking priests and philosophers,” said Jill Tarter, who read the report as a graduate student and has dedicated her life to researching intelligence. extraterrestrial license. he said in an interview a decade ago.
“Project Cyclops” summarized the results of a NASA workshop on how to detect alien civilizations. Credit … NASA
It reminded me of Cyclops and the work he inspired this week when it was said around the world that Chinese astronomers had detected a radio signal that had the characteristics of being an extraterrestrial civilization, that is, it had a width of very narrow band with a frequency of 140,604. MHz, a precision nature does not usually achieve on its own.
They did the detection using a new giant telescope called the five-hundred-meter spherical aperture radio telescope, or FAST. The telescope pointed in the direction of an exoplanet called Kepler 438 b, a rocky planet about 1.5 times the size of Earth orbiting the so-called habitable zone of Kepler 438, a red dwarf star hundreds of times light years from here, in the constellation of Lira. It has an estimated surface temperature of 37 degrees Fahrenheit, making it a candidate for life.
Just as quickly, however, an article in the state-run Science and Technology Daily reported the discovery. And Chinese astronomers were pouring cold water on the result.
Zhang Tong-jie, the chief scientist of China’s ET Civilization Research Group, was quoted as saying by Andrew Jones, a journalist who monitors China’s space and astronomical developments, saying: “The possibility that the signal “Suspicion of some kind of radio interference is also very high. High, and more needs to be confirmed or ruled out.
“These signals come from radio interference; they are due to radio pollution from earthlings, not from ET, “he wrote in an email.
This has become a family affair. For half a century, SETI, or the pursuit of extraterrestrial intelligence, has been a mole-playing game, finding promising signals before tracking them to orbiting satellites, microwave ovens, and other terrestrial sources. Dr. himself Drake aimed a radio telescope at a pair of stars in 1960 and soon thought he had touched the gold, only to discover that the signal was a lost radar.
More recently, a signal that appeared to be coming from the direction of the sun’s nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri, was spotted by radio interference in Australia.
Like NASA’s announcement last week that it would make a modest investment in the scientific study of unidentified flying objects, it was intended to bring rigor and practicality to what many criticized as an illusion. so was the agency’s Cyclops workshop held at Stanford for three years. months in 1971. The conference was organized by John Billingham, an astrobiologist, and Bernard Oliver, who was the head of research at Hewlett-Packard. The men also edited the conference report.
In the introduction, Dr. Oliver wrote that if there was anything about Cyclops, he would consider this the most important year of his life.
“Cyclops was, in fact, a milestone, in large part to bring together a consistent SETI strategy and the clear calculations and engineering design that followed,” said Paul Horowitz, a professor emeritus of physics at Harvard who designed and start your own listening. campaign called Project Goal, funded by the Planetary Society. Film director Steven Spielberg (“ET” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”) attended the official opening in 1985 at Harvard-Smithsonian Agassiz Station in Harvard, Massachusetts.
“SETI was real!” Dr. Horowitz added.
But what Dr. Oliver initially received only a “Golden Fleece” award from Wisconsin Democrat Sen. William Proxmire, who made a crusade against what he considered a government waste.
“In my opinion, this project should be postponed for several million light years,” he said.
On Columbus Day 1992, NASA launched a limited search; a year later, Congress canceled it at the behest of Nevada Democrat Richard Bryan. Denied federal support since then, SETI’s efforts have been lame, backed by donations to a nonprofit, the SETI Institute, in Mountain View, California. Recently, through a $ 100 million grant, Russian businessman Yuri Milner created a new effort called Breakthrough Listening. Dr. Horowitz and others have expanded their research into what they call “optical SETI,” controlling the sky to detect laser flashes from distant civilizations.
Cyclops was never built, which is fine, Dr. Horowitz said, “because by today’s standards it would have been a huge, expensive monster.” Technological developments such as radio receivers that can listen to billions of radio frequencies at a time have changed the game.
China’s new large FAST telescope, also nicknamed the “Sky Eye”, was built in 2016 in part with SETI in mind. Its antenna occupies a hole in Guizhou, southwest China. The size of the antenna eclipses what was the iconic Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, which collapsed ignominiously in December 2020.
Now FAST and its observers have experienced their own trial by false alarm. There will be many more, say SETI astronomers.
Those who endure profess not to be discouraged by the Great Silence, as it is called, from out there. They’ve always been looking for the long term, they say.
“The Great Silence is not nearly unexpected,” Dr. Horowitz said, including because only a fraction of one percent of the 200 million stars in the Milky Way have been studied. No one ever said that detecting that rain of alien radio signals would be easy.
“It may not happen in my life, but it will,” Dr. Werthimer said.
“All the signals detected by SETI researchers so far are made by our own civilization, not by another civilization,” Dr. Werthimer murmured in a series of emails and telephone conversations. Earthlings, he said, may have to build a telescope at the back of the moon to escape the growing pollution of radio on Earth and the interference of constellations of orbiting satellites.
The current moment, he said, could be a unique window into pursuing SETI from Earth.
“A hundred years ago, the sky was clear, but we didn’t know what to do,” he said. “In a hundred years, there will be no sky left.”