Is there life out there? That question has been fodder for a lot of movies and novels. But it's also driving astronomers, such as those with the SETI Institute, to look deep into space for an answer. Tonight's "Tech Live" reports.

"The answer could be we are alone," said Jill Tarter, director of the Center for SETI Research. "The answer could be we are one of many in the cosmos. Either way the answer is incredibly profound and important."

And she's already planned for the moment when SETI detects a signal. "I have a bottle of champagne on ice when I observe," she said.

One of Tarter's partners in the search is her husband, Jack Welch, a professor of astronomy and electrical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley.

"So far we've got no signal, so what does that imply? Well, it implies that it's not easy," Welch said. "It implies that there aren't lots of people transmitting from all the stars out there."

Tarter and Welch study radio frequencies or scan the skies looking for extraterrestrial signals, but they have to share time at observatories such as Arecibo in Puerto Rico to conduct their search.

"I'm at the telescope only 5 percent of the time," Tarter said. "Even though it's the world's largest telescope and that's great, what about the other 95 percent?"

Allen Telescope Array

SETI and the University of California at Berkeley decided they needed their own instrument, so they started developing the Allen Telescope Array.

The team started with a seven-dish test site in the hills east of Berkeley. The prototype setup let researchers plan for the final array and hammer out software. SETI is now ready for the next step -- 350 dishes planted across a two-acre site near Mount Lassen in Northeastern California. Tarter says the first three dishes were installed in the past month.

The dishes were designed to cut down on interference caused by everyday gadgets such as cellphones and even by heat from the ground.

"The ones for the Allen Array actually have two mirrors," Welch explained. "They have a secondary mirror and this enables them to pick up less noise from the ground and less interference."

The Allen Telescope Array -- named for Microsoft co-founder and TechTV owner Paul Allen, a major donor to the $26 million project -- will open a vast expanse of space to study. Currently, SETI researchers can scan only 1,000 stars at a time. The Allen array will increase that to at least 100,000, perhaps as many as 1 million. The facility should be ready for use by 2005, pending local approval of land use and permits.

"If we contact somebody, we'll be getting a view of our future, because we're very young in the technical sense," Welch said. "Anybody out there that we might contact must have been around for hundreds or thousands of years. And if they are there to transmit, we'll get a glance at where we might be after that length of time. And the first point of course is we'll see that somebody else has succeeded in surviving for a long time after getting to this level of technical capability."

Does that mean all their questions will be answered? Probably not. But Tarter remarks that such a contact will tell us something important about our own future.

"If you detect a signal from a distant technology, you know that they made it," Tarter said. "They got there, so even if they don't send you the Encyclopedia Galactica, even if they don't give you the answers to all your questions and solve your problems for you, you know that a solution is possible. You know that you can make it as a technological civilization and last for a long time."

Source: www.techtv.com