One of the World's Biggest Radio Telescopes is Hunting for Signals From Extraterrestrial Civilizations - by ScottyJ_PhD
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence has the unenviable position of rarely receiving government research funding. NASA has largely avoided SETI research since the cancellation of its planned High Resolution Microwave Survey back in 1993.
Importantly, Breakthrough Listen’s software on MeerKAT enables them to operate in ‘commensal mode,’ meaning they piggyback onto the telescope and can carry out their search for technosignatures without interfering with the observing time of other astronomers.“Such a large field of view typically contains many stars that are interesting technosignature targets,” says Breakthrough Listen’s Principal Investigator Dr. Andrew Siemion.
One of the first targets Breakthrough Listen will observe with MeerKAT is Proxima Centauri, a nearby star with two known rocky planets in the habitable zone. Astronomers have competing opinions regarding whether there are technological civilizations out there to find. One camp suggests that if they were out there, we would have seen them already. That is the premise of the Fermi Paradox, which proposes that life is likely common elsewhere in the Universe, so it is strange we’ve yet to see any. The famous Drake equation, formulated in 1961, tries to mathematically distill the Fermi paradox into concrete probabilities for finding life elsewhere.
The Drake equation.
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