Anybody Out There?

Many astronomers argue that only colossal pride prevents men on Earth from concluding that there are other people on other planets. In the Milky Way alone, there are probably billions of planets revolving around stars similar to the sun. A conservative guess is that 100,000 of the planets support some form of life. It is an easy step from there to conclude that they support rational creatures and a civilization.

Lecturing last week at M.I.T., Dr. Otto Struve, director of the new National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, W. Va., announced a project that aims to bring earthlings out of their isolation. Starting New Year's Day or soon thereafter. Green Bank will point the observatory's 85-ft. parabolic reflector antenna at the most likely stars, listen for radio signals from planets around them.

Razors, Trolleys. Radio astronomers have long tried their hands at listening for artificial signals from space, but have only recently developed the equipment necessary for the job. Receivers, once confused by electric razors, passing trolleys and their own crackling vacuum tubes, can now be built to block out all conflicting interference. Antennas are being built ever larger: Green Bank already has a 140-footer under construction, has hopes for others 300 ft. and 1,000 ft. wide.

In direct charge of the project is Harvard-trained Astronomer Frank Drake, 29. His assumption is that if other civilizations do exist, some must be more advanced than the one on Earth. "We would expect," says Drake, "to find scattered throughout our galaxy, planets from which radio transmissions more powerful than ours are radiated."

"A New Society." To support their hunches. Drake and other radio astronomers cite a closely reasoned paper published this fall by Cornell Physicists Philip Morrison and Giuseppe Cocconi, who postulate an advanced society not far away (as space distances go) that has long been "expecting the development of science near the sun." Wrote Morrison and Cocconi : "We shall assume that long ago they established a channel of communication that would one day become known to us, and that they look forward patiently to the answering signals from the sun which would make known to them that a new society has entered the community of intelligence.

"Since the object of those who operate the source is to find a newly evolved society, we may presume that the channel used will be one that places a minimum burden of frequency and angular discrimination on the detector . . . The wide radio band from, say 1 mc to 10,000 mc, remains as the rational choice. For indisputable identification as artificial, one signal might contain, for example, a sequence of small prime numbers of pulses, or simple arithmetical sums."

Morrison-Cocconi refuse to concede that their speculations belong to science fiction. "We submit, rather . . . that the presence of interstellar signals is entirely consistent with all we now know, and that if signals are present, the means of detecting them is now at hand . . . We therefore feel that a discriminating search for signals deserves a considerable effort. The probability of success is hard to estimate; but if we never search, the chance of success is zero."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.