Inside the 'golden age' of alien hunting at the Green Bank Telescope

The Manila Times

Inside the 'golden age' of alien hunting at the Green Bank Telescope  Nestled between mountains in a secluded corner of West Virginia, a giant awakens: the Green Bank Telescope begins its nightly vigil, scanning the cosmos for secrets. If intelligent life exists beyond Earth, there's a good chance the teams analyzing the data from the world's largest, fully steerable radio astronomy facility will be the first to know.   AFP VIDEO   Subscribe to The Manila Times Channel - https://tmt.ph/YTSubscribe  Visit our website at https://www.manilatimes.net    Follow us:  Facebook - https://tmt.ph/facebook  Instagram - https://tmt.ph/instagram  Twitter - https://tmt.ph/twitter  DailyMotion - https://tmt.ph/dailymotion    Subscribe to our Digital Edition - https://tmt.ph/digital    Check out our Podcasts:  Spotify - https://tmt.ph/spotify  Apple Podcasts - https://tmt.ph/applepodcasts  Amazon Music - https://tmt.ph/amazonmusic  Deezer: https://tmt.ph/deezer  Tune In: https://tmt.ph/tunein   #TheManilaTimes  #worldnews  #alien  #solarsystem

Transcript

00:00People have been asking themselves the question, are we alone in the universe since they've

00:29first looked up at the night sky, and one that if there were other worlds out there,

00:34other minds, other beings like here on Earth, and we in the last half century or so have

00:40developed the technology to attempt a scientific answer to that question.

00:45How could we search for life?

00:46Well, we know on Earth that biology has modified its environment in ways that give rise to

00:52what we call biosignatures.

00:54So essentially if you had a powerful telescope and you pointed it at a planet with biology,

00:59you might see evidence of oxygen in the atmosphere, you might see evidence of carbon dioxide,

01:03you might see evidence of methane or other processes by which biology has modified its

01:09environment.

01:21So these are, we call these our compute nodes.

01:23They actually have a lot of disks in them, and they have a graphics processing unit inside

01:28that we use to do number crunching as well, and so it's kind of like a big gaming rig

01:34with a huge hard drive.

01:59The signals from space are very faint, and so we need a lot of numerical processing to

02:05pull the signals out from all the rest of the noise, the static, most of what we get

02:09is static, and so we have to really reach in and pull out the signals, and it's a little

02:15bit of, it takes a little bit of computing power to do that.

02:20And now we are in the driver's seat, so to speak, and we have to choose where to look.

02:26We have far more bandwidth available to us, far more hardware resources available to us,

02:32and just better, you know, modern technology, and so our search capacities have greatly

02:38expanded.

02:39The number of facilities that we're engaged with has greatly expanded, and it's just an

02:44exciting time to be doing this work.

02:46We only know what our own technology looks like, right?

02:50We don't know what alien technology might look like in our data.

02:53We can make some assumptions based on our own technology.

02:56And so we build analytical techniques looking for similar kinds of technology, but there

03:03might be some anomalies in there that we don't quite understand that we have to figure out

03:07how to find those.

03:09And machine learning techniques are getting better and better at just straight-up anomaly

03:12detection, things that we might not think to look for, basically.

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