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what kind of looking for uh... a flute player next the niagara falls if you
will just that that that poland at the trace the presence of a transmitter
details hilton
could be coming from anywhere in the universe
so her listening bill for twenty eight million channels at once in the
direction of this particular star system
bt gets five minutes in which to produce a signal that we can detect
remove those twenty eight million channels apa dot missing for another
five minutes
no signal
move those twenty eight main channels up the dialer farther
we do this
for twelve hours long and by that point it covered
to billion channels
they still haven't heard e_t_
we move on to the next hour
the billions of travels picked up by the telescope
are converted into digital data and fed into a computer
got a little bit of the radio dial displayed here
sort of going from a low frequency or someone higher frequency in the date are
coming in couple of times a second year
and you can see some signals here
the signals there are always at one frequency intel actors there vertical in
other words they're not going up and down the dollar rock steady that's
clearly transmitted it
bolted to the er somewhere in
but no great interest to us the signal somewhat more interesting it slowly
drifting down
uh... the dial a little bit
and uh... in this case is just a telecommunications satellite but that's
the kind of signal that would tell us that
we're in touch with that
cosmic reading
but are we ready yet to hear a message
from our cosmic record
sometimes i think about what happens if we succeed i mean you know spent a lot
of time thinking about that actually been on those occasions when i have
experts and scary anyway
it obviously would change my life dramatically and change everybody's
lives somewhere
tied up in the mountains of northern california
another kind of technology is being employed in the hunt for team
damn wertheimer isn't listening for aliens he's looking
revengeful civil science para
we're looking for signals
sent by laser beams were using this telescope collision observatory hunt for
pulsing lasers
engineers now filled lasers so powerful
that they're inviting reached halfway across the galaxy
quick ichi also be using this method to communicate
first weekly till scope to start
starlight it's pretty constant we don't see any flashes from a typical star but
if there were another civilization on that starr sending us a laser signal
might get brighter
and that's what we're looking for with their equipment
if it finds a very bright flash it sends a signal to our computer
and that's displayed on the screen that's what gets our attention
the detector that's looking for these bright flashes counts how many flashes
it sees and it also tells us what time each of the flashes comes in
we're looking for a regular pattern
kind of a flip flip flip flip that's what would be very exciting that would
tell us that there's another civilization out there
uh... *** we tried to do use to the east pleased
the idea behind off the coast city
his seventeen civilization might use laser beams to communicate
if there are civilizations up there
the distances are fast and it's going to take a long time to get messages back
and forth
even near civilization maybe a hundred thousand light years away
we might communicate with civilizations that are million light years away that
means it'll take a message and million years traveling speed of light
to get their and a million years to hear the reply
so this is a kind of communication between civilizations it's not a
communication between individuals
i'm optimistic
our universe is teeming with life there are four hundred billion stars
intermittently galaxy billions of galaxies
we prolly still have a long way to go
but by think earthlings will make contact with another civilization in our
lifetimes
there are more stars in the universe
membranes of sound content three d truong are
parnell numbers of those stars
planets
when you think about numbers like that
there's no doubt in my
there has to be like the other and given
five to ten billion years that uh... life could develop into places at this
probably intelligent life out there
contacting it is another matter
i think it's out there
huh