SETI legend Jill Tarter is not one to engage in conspiracy or secrecy when it comes to alien contact. "Information is the property of all humanity," the director of the SETI Institute said at a recent presentation. "If a message came to us, it would be our duty to share it with the rest of the world." Tarter concedes that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence may well be the proverbial needle in a haystack, but believes that we must search nevertheless. And she says that our capacity to do so is now greatly enhanced with the recent unveiling of the SETI's own Allen Telescope Array - a purpose-built array of 500 radio telescopes whose working Tarter explains through the analogy of a "fly's eye". Another advancement in SETI's resources is Project Argus, a large-scale project done on an individually small scale. Argus will consist of 5,000 members who will place satellite dishes in their own backyard to survey the sky in a distributed sky scan.

Tarter describes SETI as "archaeology of the future", meaning that any possible extraterrestrial signal intercepted would be a message from a culture that existed many years previous - due to the time taken for communications to travel interstellar distances.

View: Full Article | Source: Phenomena Magazine