Hunt for extra-terrestrial life starts in California

By Agence France-Presse SAN FRANCISCO, California--The most far-reaching search for extra-terrestrial life ever undertaken began Thursday as an array of radio telescopes that will trawl deepest space were activated in northern California. A total of 42 radio dishes started collecting scientific data from the furthest reaches of the universe, part of the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) in Hat Creek, around 270 miles (432 kilometers) north of San Francisco. The dishes will be part of an eventual army of telescopes numbering around 350 that are being deployed to help advance radio astronomy, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute and the University of California, Berkeley said in a statement. "The ATA's technical capabilities exponentially increase our ability to search for intelligent signals, and may lead to the discovery of thinking beings elsewhere in the universe," said astronomer Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. "It is the first major telescope in the world built specifically for undertaking a search for extraterrestrial intelligence," he added. Shostak has compared the project to the 1997 Hollywood film "Contact", in which Jodie Foster plays a scientist based at a remote monitoring station trying to decipher signals from a distant civilization. "The Allen Telescope Array will be like 200 million Jodie Fosters sitting out there listening," Shostak said. The project is named after Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist Paul G. Allen, who donated funding in 2001. Allen joined scientists from SETI and Berkeley on Thursday to launch the telescopes, which are able to monitor radio waves emitted by objects in space, allowing scientists to create a picture of astronomical bodies at distances not possible by telescopes operating at other wavelengths. "They're like souped-up, old-style TV dishes that, gathered together using state-of-the-art electronics and computing, create a very powerful and flexible radio telescope," Allen told the Seattle Post Intelligencer. "SETI is the long-shot of long shots, but we can also use this for regular radio astronomy."