AssetID: 55382301
Headline: RAW VIDEO: Broken 'James Bond' telescope and 2 million volunteers have almost finished the hunt for E.T.
Caption: Scientists have narrowed down their search for aliens down to 100 “signals of interest” - thanks to the now disused telescope made famous by the James Bond film GoldenEye. The crowd-sourced SETI@home project, launched in 1999, enlisted more than two million volunteers to help scan radio data for signs of advanced alien civilisations. The effort relied on observations from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, once the world’s largest radio telescope, which collapsed in 2020 following a cable failure. Before its collapse, the telescope was also famously featured in GoldenEye - with Pierce Brosnan’s 007 and Sean Bean’s villain Alec Trevelyan duking it out on its huge antenna. Over 21 years, volunteers loaned spare computing power from their home computers to analyse vast quantities of data from Arecibo. In total, the project identified more than 12 billion potential signals - brief spikes of radio energy from specific points in the sky. Researchers have now narrowed those detections down to the 100 most promising candidates. These are being studied using China’s Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope, known as FAST, which is now the largest single-dish radio telescope in operation. So far, none of the signals has provided clear evidence of alien transmissions. Even so, the researchers say the project has pushed the limits of what such searches can achieve and will help shape future efforts. "If we don't find ET, what we can say is that we established a new sensitivity level. If there were a signal above a certain power, we would have found it," computer scientist and SETI@home co-founder David Anderson said in a statement. "We have a long list of things that we would have done differently and that future sky survey projects should do differently." Arecibo played a central role in SETI history. In 1974, scientists including Carl Sagan and Frank Drake broadcast a famous message from the telescope towards a nearby star cluster. The so-called Arecibo Message, sent in binary code, included simple representations of a human figure, DNA, a carbon atom and the telescope itself. Between 1999 and 2020, SETI@home became one of the most popular crowd-sourced science projects of the early internet era. Volunteers downloaded software that analysed radio data collected at Arecibo while the telescope was being used for other astronomical observations. The analysis produced around 12 billion detections, described by Anderson as “momentary blips of energy at a particular frequency coming from a particular point in the sky”. “Until about 2016, we didn’t really know what we were going to do with these detections that we’d accumulated,” Anderson said. “We hadn’t figured out how to do the whole second part of the analysis.” The winnowing required a computing cluster with a large amount of storage and memory, which was provided by the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hanover, Germany. After a decade of additional work, the research team reduced this vast dataset to about a million candidate signals, and then to the final 100 now being followed up by FAST. Although the new observations are still being analysed, disappointingly, Anderson says he does not expect them to reveal evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence. Two scientific papers published last year in The Astronomical Journal instead focus on what the project has learned about how such searches should be conducted. According to astronomer and project director Eric Korpela, large SETI surveys inevitably detect billions of apparent signals, most of which turn out to be interference rather than evidence of alien technology. Sources of radio frequency interference include satellites, radio and television broadcasts and even household microwave ovens. The challenge, he says, is filtering out these false positives without discarding genuine signals. “There’s no way that you can do a full investigation of every possible signal that you detect, because doing that still requires a person and eyeballs,” he said. Korpela explained that most SETI efforts assume an advanced civilisation would transmit a powerful, narrow-band signal to attract attention, possibly near the 21-centimetre radio wavelength used by astronomers to map hydrogen in the galaxy. “This powerful narrow-band beacon would be something that’s easy to detect. Then, once someone had detected that, they would dedicate more observing to try and find signals near it in frequency that might be lower power and wider band that contain information,” he said. “If we saw an extra-terrestrial narrowband signal somewhere, we would probably have every telescope, radio telescope and optical telescope available pointing at that point on the sky, searching in all frequencies for anything else. So far we haven’t had that. If we had, I think we would all know about it.” Despite the lack of a confirmed detection, Anderson believes SETI@home far exceeded its original goals. “I’d say it went way, way, way beyond our initial expectations,” he said. “When we were designing SETI@home, we tried to decide whether it was worth doing, whether we’d get enough computing power to actually do new science. Our calculations were based on getting 50,000 volunteers. Pretty quickly, we had a million volunteers. It was kind of cool, and I would like to let that community and the world know that we actually did some science.” The project also helped pioneer large-scale distributed computing, breaking complex problems into smaller tasks processed by millions of personal computers worldwide. The final analysis of the 100 remaining signals is still under way. While few expect a historic discovery, the researchers say the legacy of SETI@home lies in the methods it developed - and in the millions of people who took part in one of the longest and most ambitious searches for life beyond Earth. Despite the disappointment, Korpela still holds out hope. “There’s still the potential that ET is in that data and we missed it just by a hair,” adding that in an ideal world with unlimited money, he'd reanalyse the Arecibo data.
Keywords: space,science,nasa,feature,photo,video,seti,james bond,et
PersonInImage: Footage of the 2020 collapse of the telescope.