ET, will you please call Harvard

Press, 3 July 1985, Page 41

ET, will you please call Harvard

NZPA-Reuter Harvard, Massachusetts Deep in thick woods near the small New England town of Harvard stands an installation with a wildly ambitious goal: contact between Earth and civilisations elsewhere in the galaxy. “It is no exaggeration to say that communication with an extraterrestrial intelligent species would be the single greatest discovery in the history of mankind,” says the project’s director, Professor Paul Horowitz, a Harvard University physics professor. “Project Sentinel,” funded by the United States Planetary Society and backed by Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution, is seeking such contact through radio signals other civilisations might have beamed at earth and elsewhere. The search for the signals starts at the centre of Oak Ridge astrophysics observatory, 50km north-west of the Harvard University campus. Incongruously set against the leafy green background towers a 26m metallic dish aimed at the heavens. Just beyond is a singlestorey building housing a deceptively modest bank of micro-computer signal-pro-cessing devices linked to the radio telescope. Here, 24 hours a day, Professor Horowitz’s com-puter-linked project is tuned to. 128,000 separate radio frequencies. jj

Covering four-fifths of the cosmos, the installation automatically reports abnormal findings and accomplishes more in one minute than would have been done in 1000 years when the first receiver for such work was designed 25 years ago. No extraterrestrial signals have yet been found, but the chances will increase vastly later this year with an increase to 8.4 million channels which will allow detection of any signals not beamed directly at Earth. The determination of Professor Horowitz — and of other scientists worldwide who specialise in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (5.E.T.1.) — is based on a conviction that other intelligent civilisations do inhabit our galaxy. The scientists advance a host of theories concerning planetary formation and chemical and biological evolution. “These are based on observations of complex organic molecules in space, in meteorites and in lab experiments that simulate the primitive Earth environment. They point to a suitable habitat for life,” Professor Horowitz says. The scientists were formidably strengthened in their views two years ago by the discovery of a planet system forming around Vega, a star 26 light years (150 trillion miles) from Earth. Professor Horowitz §£ys

it was the first direct evidence of planetary systems existing around other stars than our Sun. With perhaps 200 billion stars in our galaxy, he says, the possibilities are immense. “In all of nature’s variety, we have never seen an example of a phenomenon that has happened only once,” he said. “... It would be astounding if we turned out to be the sole example of intelligent life.” What would extraterrestrials look like? “You can imagine anything, perhaps even crystalline or chemical forms of life. It doesn’t have to be biological. . . It’s extremely improbable that they will be warm-blooded, bipedal and have stereoscopic sight,” he said. The S.E.T.I. programme is designed to receive signals, not to transmit them. Signals received by Earth might take 500 years to reach here, making dialogue impossible. Professor Horowitz expects any contact made to be with a more advanced civilisation, since one less advanced would not have the hardware to beam signals. Any first contact is hardly likely to contain a message easily understood by us, along the lines of “we’re green and we’re hairy,” Professor Horowitz says. “The first thing that might happen is that we

will note that there is a transmitter up there and it’s not a natural phenomenon,” he said. “Maybe a month later we will have isolated a second signal and it’s trying to tell us something but it’s obscure. Perhaps a year later we’ll have a repeating pattern and we can figure some of it out.” Decoding, based largely on mathematics, might take a decade to reach a significant understanding of the alien language and it might take a further century to understand their culture. Interstellar travel appears excluded for the time being, since a round trip within a single human lifetime would use as much energy as the total accumulated power consumption of the United States for the next half million years, Professor Horowitz says. ■ The search for signals will be powerfully reinforced in 1988 by the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration, whose own multi-year programme will be launched on an initial annual budget of SUSI.S million. Even then, the search conducted at Harvard will probably retain the good humour typical today. On the wall of the Oak Ridge observatory is a cartoon drawing of the extraterrestrial hero of the Hollywood film ET with a telephone in his hand. The caption reads: “ET, call |Jarvard.”