SETI Shuts Down Allen Telescope Array
Posted by Ryan on April 26th, 2011
SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) is out of money and is no longer listening for alien signals. Aliens, you win this round; you may commence snooping around the solar system and broadcasting at will.
In an April 22 letter to donors, SETI Institute CEO Tom Pierson said that last week the array was put into “hibernation,” safe but nonfunctioning, because of inadequate government support.
The timing couldn’t be worse, say SETI scientists. After millenniums of musings, this spring astronomers announced that 1,235 new possible planets had been observed by Kepler, a telescope on a space satellite. They predict that dozens of these planets will be Earth-sized — and some will be in the “habitable zone,” where the temperatures are just right for liquid water, a prerequisite of life as we know it.
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