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If we have not had the slightest chance in six decades of searching for foreign signals, we would be forgiven for thinking, "Where is everyone?"
A new calculation shows that if the space is an ocean, we are hardly immersed in a toe. The amount of observable space combed for ET is comparable to finding the volume of a large hot tub to find traces of fish in the Earth's oceans, say Penn State astronomer Jason Wright and his colleagues. colleagues in a paper published online September 19 at arXiv.org.
"If you looked at the amount of seawater in a hot tub at random, you would not always expect a fish," says Wright.
That said, it's a lot more space research than expected in 2010 for the fiftieth anniversary of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI. In this work, SETI's pioneer, Jill Tarter, and her colleagues imagined a "cosmic haystack" of natural radio waves that she could scan to find the proverbial needle of an artificial alien beacon. (SN Online: 5/29/12). His haystack went beyond physical space to include factors such as the duration, frequency, variations, and strength of a signal, as well as the sensitivity of radio telescopes on Earth to detect a signal.
She concluded that the research had focused on a glass of seawater, which is scarcely enough to conclude that the ocean is without fish.
Wright and colleagues Shubham Kanodia and Emily Lubar updated Tarter's calculation by designing a slightly different haystack, including factors such as the frequency and bandwidth in which extraterrestrials could spread. (SN Online: 20/07/15).
By converting the volume to liters for analogy, the researchers concluded that SETI covered the equivalent of 7,700 liters of water over 1.335 billion trillion liters of water in the Earth's oceans.
"We finally get to the point … that we have a chance to find something, depending on what there is to find," says Wright.
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