Crowd-Funded Radio Beacon Will Message Aliens 196
astroengine writes "In the hope of uniting people around the globe in a long-duration project to send a radio 'message in a bottle' METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence) signal, a crowd-funded project utilizing a refurbished radio telescope in California has begun its work. Lone Signal is a project initiated by scientists, businessmen and entrepreneurs to set up a continuous radio beacon from Earth. To support the operations of the Jamesburg Earth Station radio dish in Carmel Valley, Calif. (a dish built to support the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969), a crowd-funding effort has been set up so that for a small fee, users can send images to the stars. If you're content with sending a text message, your first message is free. The radio dish's first target is Gliese 526, a red dwarf star 18 light-years from Earth, but the project will be considering other stellar targets believed to be harboring habitable worlds."
Re:Proper lead account for? (Score:2, Informative)
It's a 30-metre antenna. If they're transmitting radio waves with (say) 3 cm wavelength, the beam will be 0.001 radians ~= 0.05 degrees across. For the star to get out of this beam before the signal arrives, it needs to be travelling at over 0.001 of the speed of light, which is ridiculously fast for a star. So, pointing straight at the star isn't a problem.
Doppler shifting isn't a problem, either. It's only important if your transmitter and receiver have been tuned to exactly the same frequency; and aliens aren't going to know the frequency of our transmitter anyway. (That is, they'll have to sweep across a wide range of frequencies to find it anyway, so a small Doppler shift isn't going to make a difference.)
Re:We should stop this (Score:5, Informative)
Those radio broadcasts are unlikely to even make it to Alpha Centauri with reasonable sized recieving antennas. With planetary scale antennas it might be possible. The military radars are another story, but they would be randomly aimed and relatively infrequent and not transmitting any sort of coherent message.
This wouldn't be the first attempt at METI. Alexander Zaitsev has sent a number of messages to various stars including Gliese 581 using his 70 meter RT-70 radiotescope located in Yevpatoria, Ukraine. He is the chief advocate for METI among professional astronomers and makes his case well [arxiv.org] I think.
His messages were relatively brief however and are unlikely to be noticed even if there is an intelligent civ at one of his chosen targets. What would new is the idea of a full time, dedicated transmitter sending messages out 24/7/365 aimed for long periods, like say 6-12 months, at a single target so that if anyone is there listening there would be at least some chance of them noticing our signal.
Re:I sure do hope.... (Score:4, Informative)
That is a myth more or less. Those transmissions would be damn lucky to make it to Pluto let alone another star. Maybe to Alpha Centauri if there is a kilometer scale dish there.
Transmitting a signal to another star is non-trivial, uses a huge amount of power, and isn't likely to happen with unintentional leakage. You pretty much have to either aim a beam at a target or have an omnidirectional transmitter with truly immense power.
James Benford, along with his twin brother Gregory Benford (Timescape etc) has written some fascinating papers on the subject from the POV of the sender [arxiv.org] and the receiver. [arxiv.org] Very well thought out stuff and required reading for any amateur METI projects. But this won't be the first intentional METI transmission anyway. Alexander Zaitsev [wikipedia.org] has sent a number of messages at various targets already using a 70 meter radio telescope in the Ukraine. Those were relatively brief transmissions though. This project will be transmitting continuously. A pretty big difference, although one that would only matter to a pathetic, cowardly species.