If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I often focus on the possibility of extraterrestrial life. This includes astronomers’ search for exoplanets, those that orbit other stars, with a particular focus on planets that could support life. I’ve discussed what conditions scientists believe a planet must have to support life and where, even in our own solar system, such conditions might exist.
Another aspect of this search for
extraterrestrial life, known as SETI, involves actually looking for signals
from other technological civilizations. Although various technologies have been
tried, the most common involves searching for radio signals transmitted by
other intelligent species. Since our own invention of radio technology, more
than 100 years ago, we have been broadcasting our existence to the universe. SETI
researchers look for possible signals broadcast by aliens.
The sheer amount of data is
overwhelming. The Breakthrough Listen Initiative, just one of several SETI
organizations, uses two radio telescopes, one in Australia and one in Virginia.
They recently released their second round of data, a total of two petabytes of
data. That’s a billion, billion bytes of data, and that’s just two years of
data from only two telescopes.
The sheer quantity of data is overwhelming. So UCLA SETI astronomers are asking for your help. They started a citizen scientists program through the Zooniverse website. Zooniverse is a site where scientists request help from citizens in sorting through collected data. The site contains research projects from of study from many disciplines, ranging from art, history, language, medicine, and many scientific studies. Anyone can sign on with the Zooniverse site and pick any study that interests them.
UCLA SETI has a project titled “Are
We Alone in the Universe?” Citizen scientists get a tutorial on how to evaluate
the data, get some practice runs, and then get to evaluate real scientific data
collected by SETI researchers. Go to https://www.zooniverse.org/, sign up, and
chose this project.
But if this project doesn’t
interest you, Zooniverse has hundreds of projects in many different disciplines
that may interest you. Even if you don’t care to hunt for alien civilizations,
the site has so many options for you to study, you can surely find some area
that interests you. Look over the site and find one you like.
And, who knows, you just might be the
first person to discover an alien civilization.
