This is coolbert: Some of you are undoubtedly familiar with Project SETI. SETI - - [Search For Extra Terrestrial Intelligence]. A cooperative computing on-line World-Wide-Web project to search for intelligent life outside our own solar system. Click here to see the SETI site. You download and install software from the project web site. Then you register and download/process/upload data sent by the same project web site. This is data obtained from the radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Data from recorded signals which when processed may indicate the possibility of intelligent life at the point of origin. Intelligent life that exists outside our solar system, many light years away! With about 4 million current users involved in the SETI project and countless recordings processed, however, to date no processings have revealed any indication of intelligent life.

[In 1977 a radio telescope did seem to find on one occasion a signal that was demonstrative of intelligent life, but this was never replicated].

[The SETI recordings are made at about a frequency of 1.4 gigahertz [UHF range]. What the processing software is looking for is what they call a gaussian response involving frequency/power/time. I cannot describe exactly what this response is. What I believe is being looked for here is a man-made [intelligent life form] like signal, that displays repetitiveness].

Keep in mind that previously mentioned frequency of 1.4 gigahertz!

And it is generally assumed in the world of academia and astronomy that there are other intelligent life forms out there in our galaxy as well, searching in a similar fashion as we are with SETI. Radio telescopes of the aliens tuned to frequencies that are "naturally" conducive [1.4 gigahertz?] to the transmissions of other intelligent life forms.

"the AN/FPS-108 radar [Cobra Dane] operates in the 1215-1400 MHz [1400 MHZ=1.4 GHZ] band" [This is the frequency of operation for Cobra Dane. SETI monitors the "natural" frequency of 1.419 GHZ!!].



And there is an amazing IRONY here!!

The IRONY is that it would seem that aliens, if they have their own SETI project, would be most likely, perhaps only likely to receive transmissions from earth that would be from high power military radar transmitters. Specifically, those radars that are used as part of early warning systems for ballistic missile attack. The very radars that would detect the launch of missiles carrying the weapons of "armageddon" are the very same radars that intelligent life forms on other planets would be most likely to detect!

For a period of over forty years now, powerful military radars of the U.S. and the Soviet Union have been transmitting signals into outer space.

These include, but are not limited to, the U.S. BMEWS, Pave Paws, Cobra Dane.



And the Soviet Hen House series of radars.



Click here to see a site about BMEWS. Click here to see a site about Pave Paws. Click here to see a site about Cobra Dane. Click here to see a site about Hen House [this site has a good map of coverage of the sites].

Other sources of electromagnetic radiation emanating from the earth would either not be hearable at all, or stand just too poor a chance of being heard. Military radars of the types mentioned above are probably the only way at present humans could make their presence know to other intelligent beings in our galaxy!!

In the movie "Contact", based upon the novel by Carl Sagan, and starring Jodie Foster in the movie, aliens establish contact with the human race by transmitting to earth a radio telescope message. A television broadcast from the Berlin Olympics of 1936 is retransmitted to earth by the aliens. Evidently the aliens have picked up this signal and realized it was send by an intelligence. This is absurd. The television signals from earth being beamed into space would be attenuated so much that after traveling one light year, even the most sensitive of earth's radio telescopes could not pick out the attenuated signal from among the background noise. Considering that the closest star is about four light years away, picking up a TV signal emitted from earth is totally infeasible. [That such an eminent astronomer as Carl Sagan would have included this in his book is beyond me. Perhaps he was taking literary license?].

Other than military radars, radio telescopes are the only other means to transmit "intelligent" signals to other worlds, in the hope that they might be "heard". And here the odds against such a signal being heard are slim. If you point your radio telescope and transmit a message at say a star that is thirty light years away, not really knowing if there is a planet orbiting that star with intelligent life on it, you will have to wait sixty years for a reply! And that assumes that the other intelligent life on that far-away planet will have their own radio telescope trained on our star and planet at the exact time the signal you have sent arrives at their home world. The odds against this are very long!

So this leaves us with the high power military radars. I do find it ironic that the systems that would detect missile launchings that would lead to what people have believed may be the "armageddon" of global thermonuclear war could also be the systems that would allow aliens from other worlds to "discover" us.

coolbert.