I am ham radio operator who is at the same time curious about radio astronomy. I wonder if I were at the surface of Pluto and had 23cm amateur radio with me and pressed PTT button, will my transmission be noticed by any huge radiotelescope at the Earth?
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
As most of us I'm hoping to get the proof we are not alone during my lifetime. Computing power and radio sensitivity have improved greatly since the time the project started. So, we are much better equipped these days then the guys 20 years ago. Having not found any repeatable extraterrestrial signal so far is also a noticable result. This means that at a distance of 200-300 light years around us there are no civilizations capable and willing to broadcast messages in the waterhole.
But the Universe is enormously vast even for the speed of electromagnetic waves. Some day we may catch a signal of a civilization that existed even before our Solar system came into existence and disappeared long before we started to listen.
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.
