you
other wife do you start the MCSA frames
sink and then they remember oh I saw
well this you know it's halfway through
the process how can they get back you
know there isn't a legitimate way out of
this because we're using the file
interface rather than the shared memory
because right now what I'm having Terri
do is as he gets in a frames worth of
data spectra the polarity and the power
along with Ben number that it's going
everything we've learned in our modern
studies of astronomy a biology of
evolution of life have showed that the
steps which led to our being here
including our high technology using
civilization are completely normal steps
in the evolution of a star and its
planets and therefore the steps which
led to our existence should have
occurred in many many places and
therefore there should be many
technology using civilizations in space
he channels at once it takes the
incoming energy and sorts it out into
those 15 million channels and then a
computer looks at the result to see it
if whether in any of those channels
there are indications of the presence of
a signal if such indications are present
it notifies an operator who takes over
and then takes whatever steps are
appropriate to determine what the origin
of that signal is and of course in
particular whether it is an intelligent
signal of extraterrestrial origin the
goals of our project are to
systematically searched through the
microwave region of the spectrum to
attempt to find evidence of another
technology out there by picking up radio
signals that they may have generated in
order to attract our attention or for
their own purposes NASA is interested in
this project because it's interested in
understanding the universe and life as
we know it is a planetary phenomenon and
from what our scientists tell us is a
natural part of the universe and so
we're just looking for other evidences
of the outcome of the laws of physics
and chemistry and just trying to
understand our place in the universe
oh not only NASA is interested in
looking out there to find other
technology and therefore other
intelligence but everyone is interested
and we've been as we've been interested
since as long as we've had recorded
history the ancient Greeks and Romans
used to wonder about who lived up there
we used to ask the question to the
priests and philosophers from and we
took whatever answers they gave us right
now
NASA is interested because scientists
and engineers actually have the
technology to make an experimental test
and we may be successful in answering
this age-old question if our if our
equipment finds a signal and then tells
us about it we'll spend a lot of time
trying to verify that this is really
what we think it is it's really a signal
that's coming from someplace on the sky
that moves the way the Stars do and then
after we've done that verification and
if possible and independent confirmation
then we'll tell the world and we'll tell
the world as quickly as we can
and as openly as we can and we'll we'll
make all the data from the discovery
site and the subsequent verification
available to the public or to other
scientists so they can make their own
decisions
we know so little about the potential
out there for extraterrestrial
technologies that we're actually trying
to search simultaneously in two
different ways one is that we pick out
locations like our own we find stars
that are nearby they're very much like
our Sun and we spend a lot of time
trying to get the weakest signals that
might be coming from these nearby stars
this is because a star like our Sun has
an earth at least in one case that we
know about and so we look for similar
locations the other way we search is to
say that might be right
we might be right in guessing that it's
a solar-type stars that we want but it
might be the right star might be a long
way away it doesn't show up in our
catalogs so but it might have
a really strong technological signal
that we could detect if we were only to
look in that direction so we do an
all-sky survey at the same time and we
use smaller telescopes so that we can
move them rapidly across the sky
covering all directions we never stay at
any one direction and any frequency very
long so the signal intrinsically has to
be stronger for us to find it
but we could find it that way where we
might miss it if we only looked at the
thousand nearest stars