SETI Saved by Microsoft?
01/09/2000 . Source: Jessica Martin 

We have said a lot of bad things about Microsoft in the past, but we take them all back now (well, most of them anyway).

Why? Because good old Paul Allen, Microsoft billionaire and co-founder, along with Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft's head of technology, today pledged to invest over eleven million dollars in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute.

The Institute plans to spend the money on a new super-telescope dedicated to their cause, to be named the Allen Telescope Array or ATA for short.

Rather than constructing a single telescope, they are going to employ some new science to build a network of over a thousand intelligently linked radio telescopes.

Prior to this, they have been spending over $4 million a year on renting time on other organisation's radio telescopes. The new installation - to go live in 2005 - is to be co-run by the University of California at Berkeley.

These are the chaps who came up with the excellent idea of releasing a shareware screensaver that not only looks nice, but allows SETI to run telescope telemetry across a distributed network of millions of SF fan's PCs.

Siting of the new facility has been narrowed down to a remote area 300 miles north of San Francisco, where radio pollution can be minimised.

The Institute are narrowing the odds too, by concentrating their research on stars now known to possess planets, thanks to the recent advances in gravity shift detection (for those who don't follow this field, new planets are being discovered around stars at a phenomenal clip, thanks to recent scientific developments).

One thought that occurs to us - and may be something that one of you peeps out in reader land can answer for us.

Could this technology also be used to catalogue the millions of near earth objects in the solar system, to help stop a Deep Impact scenario happening?

One of the sights of the last century that really scared the bejesus out of us here at the 'Nest was those massive asteroids showering Jupiter with an impact that - if it had been Earth - would have sent the state of evolution on Earth back to the mono-cellular level.

If it can happen to Jupiter, it can happen to us. Extinction level event. Ouch

So here's the question. Could this technology be used in parallel to help stop that happening?

Is there a SETI@Home style screensaver crunching data scanning near-space for a dinosaur killer, that anybody out there knows about? Is it indeed possible to catalogue such objects?

If anyone has answers to any or all of these questions, then please drop us a line.

We'd really like to look at this subject in more depth in future issues.

Meanwhile, you can visit SETI over here at the SETI Institute.