SETI Pioneer Jill Tarter Retires 82
ananyo writes "After 35 years, astronomer Jill Tarter is retiring from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) — a field she helped pioneer and popularize, most recently at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Tarter, who inspired the late Carl Sagan to create the fictional character Ellie Arroway, heroine of the book and movie Contact, says she will instead focus her efforts on what she calls 'the search for intelligent funding.'"
Intelligent spending (Score:2, Interesting)
I respect what Jill Tarter has helped accomplish in terms of constructing a (half-finished) radio telescope optimized for SETI, but overall I must say that the quest she had been entrusted with is in shambles - and her successor likely won't do much better. We're at a point in time in which both human and computer resources are more abundantly available on the internet than ever before. SETI Institute, on Jill Tarter's watch, has chosen to forego the opportunity to utilize these resources to vastly expand the amount of search space [skyandtelescope.com] covered by the Allen Telescope Array, instead opting to keep the real-time data produced by the telescope under wraps and sharing it only with a few, select partners - presumably, to be able to keep the winnings to themselves, if they ever happen upon their big discovery. Is it really any wonder that such a self-interested and greedy scheme is struggling to find support from private benefactors?
Re:Results? (Score:5, Interesting)
Unless we find intelligent life living on Saturn, they're going to be a very long ways away. Far enough to be extremely useful in the "stop being solar-centric, stop thinking some magical God invented man, everyone grow the fuck up" kind of way. But so far there's no plausible possibility of external risk at all. I'd be more worried about the religious zealots (of all denominations) and how they're going to react to having their minds forcefully opened to a bigger world.
The three scenarios you listed have essentially zero possibility of happening. Science rules the universe, not science fiction.
It breaks my heart (Score:5, Interesting)