One day, in the spring of 2018, professor of astrophysics Jason Wright set a difficult task for his students: to get serious results on the problem of communication with extraterrestrial civilizations (SETI) and at the same time keep within one semester. Typically, such tasks drag on a Ph. D. thesis, which takes many years of hard work.
Still, Wright gave this task to students in one of his groups at Pennsylvania State University - the first graduate group in the Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations (SETI) course - because he believed the task was very feasible; it seemed to him that we were still in the nineteenth century, when a naturalist in order to discover some kind of living creatures unknown to science, it was enough to wander through the tropical forests and find the unknown. Even now, young scientists dealing with the SETI problem need only reach out to pick juicy fruits from the branchy branches. Although humans have been searching for extraterrestrial civilizations for almost 60 years, SETI is still a small and immature field of scientific research, which exists mainly outside of big science. And so,Pennsylvania State University wanted to fix this.
That first group of students was experimental, but now SETI is placed on the official list of university courses - one might say, this is the first small step in the development of research on the problems of extraterrestrial civilizations. A giant leap forward will be the creation of the Pennsylvania State University Center for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (PSETI Center), an official science center that will fund research, hold conferences, educate students, and educate the next (and future) generations of scientists looking for extraterrestrials. If all goes well, Wright plans to make PSETI the main theme at the first SETI symposium at Pennsylvania State University in July.
Bumping into SETI
At the helm of this yet to be built ship is Wright, an affable, well-versed guy who until recently studied mainly exoplanets and did not at all search for life in space. His interest in the exploration of extraterrestrial intelligence is the result of a confluence of circumstances, a collision between the past and the present, and this, like any collision, prompted Wright to make a U-turn in a new direction. One day in 2012, he heard Michael Cushing of Toledo University in Toledo, Ohio, USA, talking about brown dwarfs - small spheres of stars, sometimes colder than the human body. To detect these space objects, it was necessary to rake a heap of data obtained by the WISE infrared space telescope. “And he found one or two such space objects,their temperature was room temperature,”says Wright with undisguised amazement.
Hearing about the relatively cold temperature of these space objects, Wright immediately remembered his years in graduate school, when his supervisor invited him to look for Dyson spheres (hypothetical engineering structures that could be created by aliens to collect the energy emanating from the stars and the subsequent transmission of heat). using the data obtained in the framework of the 2MASS project. Wright did not undertake this project because 2MASS could only detect unrealistically hot Dyson spheres. However, in reality, the temperature of these structures, if they really exist, should approach room temperature - this is what Wright realized then during the colloquium on brown dwarfs, which took place in 2012; it was this data that could be in that heap of information obtained by the WISE telescope. “So, here's the thing!Wright thought. "It's all about the data." Together with Steinn Sigurdsson, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University, he conceived a project called G-HAT (Glimpsing Heat from Alien Technologies). In an effort to identify signs of life, the two scientists began sifting through the data obtained by the WISE telescope.
They didn't find anything. But in the process, Wright came up with another idea: Dyson spheres could also be detected with an optical telescope - when the sphere surrounds a star, it blocks starlight. And then one day, while Wright was thinking about this hypothetical idea, astronomer Tabetha Boyajian stopped at the door of his office. She had some interesting data about a certain star, the luminosity of which periodically decreases by more than 20 percent, as if there was some kind of large obstacle like the Dyson sphere between the observer and this star. And some time ago, Wright just presciently mentioned his hypothesis in an interview with a reporter for The Atlantic. And as is often the case with ET headlines, the Atlantic headline spread rapidly,what made Wright, this guy who just did a little bit of research on the SETI project, suddenly got a lot of fame.
Promotional video:
And shortly thereafter, when reporters needed a comment for an article titled “I’m not saying these are aliens, but…”, they turned to Wright. And he decided to come to terms with fame - both with its outer side and with its scientific benefits. Wright realized that SETI research ran into difficulties right from the start: since the 1990s, money from federal sources such as NASA (which astronomers usually depend on) to fund SETI, usually, did not arrive. There were no tutorials. Only seven people have earned a PhD in SETI research. In addition, there will always be those who would call the study of extraterrestrial life an undertaking stupid, wasteful, overblown and inappropriate within the university walls. Therefore,When the former chairman of the board of directors of the SETI Institute, John Gertz, suggested the idea of creating an academic center that could nullify all of the aforementioned claims, Wright jumped at the idea and decided to ponder the matter. This is how the idea of creating PSETI came about.
Seeking respect
Today PSETI boasts of its scientific advisors, such as Professor Natalie Batalha, who participated in the Kepler space telescope research, and Aleksander Wolszczan - and he was just one of those two scientists who discovered exoplanets for the first time in history. Together, they hope to turn SETI into a full-fledged field of scientific research. Astronomer Jill Tarter, who has dedicated her scientific career to finding extraterrestrial civilizations, but has worked largely independently of universities and funding agencies, is also very excited that the center can do research in the field of extraterrestrial civilizations. “We need to make the quest for extraterrestrial intelligence become a respected area of scientific research,” says Tarter. And this will only strengthen other scientific disciplines. "This is a great way to take advantage of the vast knowledge that has accumulated in many other more traditional scientific fields, such as engineering and mathematics."
The first thing to do with PSETI is to find out which of the important scientific studies have already been done to date. “And that has to be done in science, too,” explains Wright. - Research must first be formalized, a list of fundamental cited works must be created, and a general corpus of fundamental knowledge must be formed, on which one can subsequently rely. This is what SETI lacks. Despite the fact that there are several good review articles on radio observations for the search for extraterrestrial civilizations, only a few articles combine the entire spectrum of research. “And all these hidden gems - all these articles that I discovered and that no one cited at all, still existed,” adds Wright. Thus, scientists over and over, without even realizing it, use the same approaches.
And so, first-year graduate student Alan Reyes, as part of his graduation project, has created a detailed library covering SETI research. Other participants in this course also proposed their own approaches: William P. Bowman and Caleb Cañas created a research database dedicated to the search for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations; their research was included in the SETI Institute's "techno-characteristics" catalog, which can already be used. Christian Gilbertson worked with a privately funded ($ 100 million) Breakthrough Listen project to create a third-party application written in Python. And Sophia Sheikh found a way to search for signals distorted by motion around the stars,given the lack of information about the nature of this movement.
Sheikh plans to write his doctoral dissertation and further work on the SETI problem as one of the team members of the PSETI center. True, this center has not yet been created, since it should receive approval from the vice-president of the university for scientific work. PSETI supporter Douglas Cavener, dean of the Eberly College of Science at Pennsylvania State University, is confident that approval will be obtained. "The president of the university is already on our advisory board, even though our center has yet to be established," Cavener says. And wealthy sponsors have pledged about $ 3.5 million in donations. PSETI funds will support and support Pennsylvania State University scientists; money will be allocated for research by visiting scientists, for a symposium;they will also provide material support to professors and graduate students. The PSETI center must become the same reliable partner capable of supporting research in the search for extraterrestrial civilizations that NASA, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other agencies are for other scientific fields. And this is very important for such long-term research as the search for life in the universe. “We're really ready to embark on this long journey,” says Cavener.“We're really ready to embark on this long journey,” says Cavener.“We're really ready to embark on this long journey,” says Cavener.
No one knows what the future holds - what discoveries will be made, what innovations will appear, and what signals have yet to be analyzed. Wright believes that even after astronomers come into contact with extraterrestrials, the PSETI center will still not lose its purpose, however, the meaning of the letter "S" in the abbreviation SETI will no longer be interpreted as "Search" (search). but as "Study" (study).
Sarah Scoles