The Beginnings of SETI
SETI began in 1959 with the publication of an article in the journal Nature. Two Cornell physicists, Giuseppi Cocconi and Philip Morrison, suggested a project in which the presence of extraterrestrial life could be detected with radiotelescopes tuned into the microwave band (3 - 30 GHz). However, such an endeavour was already being planned by a young astronomer, the now famous Frank Drake, who in the spring of 1960 scanned sun-like stars for signs of ETI (extraterrestrial intelligence) with an 85-foot dish in West Virginia. Drake hypothesised that a more advanced ETI somewhere out there would be transmitting a signal to catch our (or anyone else's) attention. If so, then they would use one particular frequency of significance. Drake thought that 21 cm (1.4 MHz), the neutral band of hydrogen, would be it. After scanning for some time on this frequency, the young astronomer found nothing, and so ended what he called Project Ozma.The first government-funded SETI-type project was not in America but in Soviet Russia. During the 1960s, the Russians set up omnidirectional antenna stations to listen in on the heavens in search of signals that might be of intelligent origin. While Drake used a highly directional antenna system, the Russian system would pick up radio emissions from all directions. This strategy meant that if a signal were found, it would be difficult to determine from which direction it originated. On the other hand, the Russian astronomers would never make the mistake of looking in the wrong direction!
It was not until the beginning of the 1970s that the United States government gave any serious thought to searching the Universe for radio signals of ETI origin. The first move was made at NASA's Ames Research Center, Mountain View, California, where several projects were set up to study the technical considerations involved. A team of outside experts was assembled -- including Bernard Oliver, who was on leave from the Hewlett Packard Corporation -- to produce a detailed report, known as Project Cyclops. By the late 1970s, NASA's Ames Research Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, were engaged in projects studying the technical aspects of any SETI-type endeavour. Ames concentrated on examining 1,000 sun-like stars for intelligent life, much like Drake's original Project Ozma, in what was known as "targeted search" using sensitive equipment to detect weak or sporadic signals. Meanwhile, JPL was concerned with systematic sweeps in all directions in a complete sky survey.
It was not until 1988, after a decade of study, that NASA HQ had the go-ahead and in 1991 started scanning the cosmos for intelligent life. A year later, Congress terminated funding! It seems very strange that after so many years of developing the technology, the US government should suddenly terminate funding when the actual search was only just beginning. But is there more to this than meets the eye?
Back in the early 1990s, the author had contact with an individual who claimed to be a former KGB officer involved in infiltrating the US National Security Agency (NSA). While serving his home country, a former Soviet state, he was involved in assessing the NSA's signals analysis techniques. Since the Soviet Union's collapse, he has had no authority to answer to and so speaks freely on such subjects. He says that SETI was no more than a cover for a more subversive program. Like the launching of Sputnik was no more than an exercise in deploying nuclear weapons, SETI was about eavesdropping on the enemy. This makes a lot of sense, as the technologies involved are very similar indeed.
For a practical SETI program, one requires a system that can scan at high resolution a huge bandwidth of frequencies. Not only this, but it must be able to detect the presence of intelligent transmissions. The latter requirement is achieved using powerful algorithms -- code-breakers -- which use probability mathematics to analyse the incoming data. Another requirement is that the system should be able to pick out weak signals buried deep within the background noise. Described here is no more than the perfect eavesdropping system -- a system that would give a government a great advantage over another.
SETI was the perfect cover and means of drawing in the country's brilliant minds: radio engineers, mathematicians and computer systems experts. SETI was a means of gaining the people's support, a project into which they could freely pump money. Meanwhile, the technology developed could be controlled and siphoned off for more subversive applications.
All the governament wanted was the technology; the discovery of intelligence elsewhere in the Universe would at best be an inconvenience, so funding was terminated. But what of today? As there is no USSR, is there any use for such technology? The answer is yes, for now we are the enemy. It is our communications which are being tapped into, using the technology developed for
>> See SETI in a Parallel Dimension.
posted by Frank Da Silva at 2:09:00 AM
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