NET RESULTS:Searching for alien civilisations is a serious business, as a satellite dish project funded with a $25 million donation from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen illustrates
MAYBE IT'S because they are a generation raised on Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Trek, but technologists seem to have an abiding love of space exploration, aliens and science fiction.
I've asked many researchers what drove their initial interest in technology, and a startling number will say two things: the talking, sentient, on-board computer on the original television series of Star Trek; and Hal, the talking control-freak computer in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Those flip-open communicators on Star Trek - which, surprise, inspired the first clamshell mobile handsets from Motorola - often get an honourable mention too.
Many a late-night geek conversation stumbles into a discussion of science fiction writers who envision futures involving space exploration, alien cultures and sometimes disturbing technologies: Arthur C. Clarke, Bruce Sterling, Neil Stephenson, Ursula Le Guin, William Gibson and others.
So it only surprised me a little to read last week that a growing field of satellite dishes in a remote part of northern California, scanning the skies for signals from alien civilisations, is called the Allen Telescope Array.
That's Allen, as in Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder and billionaire, who has significantly funded this massive project in Hat Creek Valley to create a dedicated alien intelligence search unit (though it's also used by University of California astronomers for general space radio research). There are 42 dishes at present, but eventually 350 dishes will be listening for a hoped-for radio signal from a galaxy far, far away - though nearby will do nicely, too.
I knew some dishes were out there, but I didn't know Allen had given $25 million (€16 million) to help fund them. Chip developer Xilinx is another major contributor towards the project, which is part of Seti, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
Many people are familiar with Seti thanks to the Jodi Foster film Contact, about an alien radio signal picked up by, yes, an array of satellite dishes in a remote location. The woman on whom Foster's character was based, Seti director Jill Tarter, must be looking forward to this summer, when the dishes will start to be used for the project. Over the next 20 years they will investigate about one million stars for signs of intelligent life.
As with all other areas of technology, the hardware costs of the satellite dishes keep coming down while capability and functionality expand. For Seti, that means it is easier to keep adding more dishes, while also increasing the computing power used to analyse the data churned out by the dishes night and day.
Lest you be tempted to snigger and think this is just one of those wacky projects that could only be viable through the support of well-heeled geeks, think again. Many astronomers are involved in the hunt for signs of intelligent life and other mainstream observatories have related projects. Looking for that big hello from space is serious stuff for serious researchers. You can watch a short television feature on the Allen Telescope Array here: http://tinyurl.com/6b8xmp.
Another area in which the snigger factor operates is in discussions of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. Many people over, say, 35 are prone to thinking of such sites as something kids do but no self-respecting adult would go near.
Well, again, you'd be surprised. A lengthy USA Today article this week focused on the (potentially) multi-billion-dollar question of whether such sites can "monetise" their huge communities or, in plain English, use their millions of members to generate actual income. Even Facebook, with 70 million active members and valued at $15 billion, "barely turns a profit", says USA Today.
For those under the assumption that the members are only college students with too much time on their hands, a recent survey by Nielsen Online of 36,000 American users of the sites over the age of 18 shows that the average MySpace user is 38 with a $72,129 annual income, the average Facebook user is 34 with an income of $76,756, and the average LinkedIn user is 42 with an income of $102,539. That suggests there's definitely gold in them there users - if anyone can figure out how to mine it.
Blog: www.techno-culture.com
