CURRENT STATUS OF RESEARCH AND FUTURE PROSPECTS

Clearly the SETI project has no obvious hunting ground or no clear route to discovery. In 40 years of data collection, actual experimental evidence has been missing. We still have not detected any undebatable signals from the extra terrestrial intelligence that we presume is somewhere out there. With 400 billion stars in the Milky Way itself, the search is analogous to seeking a needle in a haystack. Also the astronomical distances that signals need to cover before they reach earth causes them to diminish in intensity.

At present Project Phoenix uses the Arecibo Telescope to examine nearby, Sun-like stars for narrow band microwave signals. Other SETI searches also sweep wide areas of the sky in the hunt for such signals. Over the years of observation we have found evidence that planets are abundant, but we still do not know about the existence of life-supporting conditions on them. Also over the decades we have developed powerful lasers and supercomputers.

Today research involves studying both radio and optical signals for extraterrestrial signals. Recent developments include an improved detector for targeted optical SETI that reduces the number of false alarms from typically once a night to once a year! Radio SETI searches too benefit from the technology leaps. The ideal SETI radio telescope would monitor every point on the sky, in every radio channel from one end of the microwave window of the earth to the other all the time. This projects called the Omnidirectional Search System, or OSS.

The Moore's Law in computing predicts a thousandfold improvement in computational power in 15 years. If this happens then OSS can be a reality at the end of that time period. Presently the most sensitive project is Phoenix. But the Phoenix is not sensitive enough to even pick up leakage satellite and television signals from the earth at a distance equal to that of the Alpha Centaur (the nearest star to earth.) For sheer sensitivity, SETI's dream instrument is the proposed Square Kilometer Array, or SKA. This grand radio telescopes would be a mammoth device with a total collecting area of one square kilometer. No one can predict the ultimate outcome the search. However the powerful next generation instruments will surely raise the probability of a finding if such extra-terrestrial intelligence actually exists.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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