Dancing With Extraterrestrials at Hat Creek
Posted on October 12, 2007
Artist's Illustration, Allen Telescope Array - Issac Gary
There are events from your early childhood that stick with you. My earliest memory was when at age four my mother, in a rage, tossed out most of my toys, which I had cast randomly about the house, an act that immediately erased any Oedipal urges.
The second was in the fall of 1957 when on a cool evening at twilight, my father walked me out into a wheat field in northern Minnesota. I had been out there before to see the eerie ballet of the Aurora Borealis. My father said the Northern Lights reminded him of the shelling he saw on the horizon as he navigated a troop ship during WWII. But what we saw that night was not of nature: not the fireflies dancing themselves into a mating frenzy nor the planets or stars that held their marks like bit part actors. It was not the shooting stars doing their Swan Song. What we strained to see was a tiny speck moving across the horizon, in reality a beach ball-sized sphere called Sputnik.
I was too young to worry about the Russians and the Cold War (diving under my desk for air raid drills was great fun) and the notion of Sputnik as a potential weapon of mass destruction. I was too young to have heard of or cared about Jack Kerouac, who had just published “On the Road,” or the “Howl” of Allen Ginsberg or San Francisco Columnist Herb Caen’s mashup of science and art in the term “beatnik,” which turned a cultural movement into a joke. I didn’t read Ginsberg until college, but I did know Maynard G. Krebs.
What my innocent, impressionable eyes saw that moment was that there was a world far beyond my room. Later we turned on the shortwave. The tubes glowed orange, frying the dust that had accumulated on top of them. 20 megahertz was Sputnik’s address on the dial, its flea-power transmitter bleeping through the static as it passed overhead.
Yesterday, fifty years later, with satellites and space junk as commons as coathangers, scientists at Hat Creek, California, near Mt. Shasta, threw the switch on the first of 350 radio telescopes that may once and for all prove that human beings are indeed insignificant twerps in the universe, that there is other life out there.
The Allen Telescope Array, named for Microsoft co-founder and big time investor Paul Allen, has begun its sweep of the universe in search of intelligent beings…lord knows we need a few of them.
This is a for-real deal. The project is being run by the Seti Institute and the Radio Astronomy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. These radio telescopes, mashed together with a computer program and their data analyzed by networked computer volunteers around the world, will act like one big powerful dish to scan where no man will likely ever go.
I have always been skeptical about these beings, whether they spread like cream cheese or walk like Charlie Chaplin, whether they actually had any idea of the concept of radio as we knew them. Do we assume that that they communicate with iPhones rather than, say, spitting green gunk at one another. And if they do manage to communicate, would they be curious about us and, looking at our mixed track record as a species, really want to be our friends. I don’t know,
Scientists do say the telescopes have a multiple role. They say they will also look for other new space phenomena like black holes that eat each other…which sounds like a real lose-lose proposition.
But then, I am open minded and curious and hope they do make their goal of 2025 to actually find someone out there.
The Allen Telescope array is, by the way, located in a place which has a long history of viewing extraterrestrials. I call the Mt. Shasta are Jerusalem for the Weird. Check out my previous story and podcast titled Herbert Hoover in Atlantis: Mt. Shasta Inside and Out on ConnectedTraveler.com
» Filed Under Audio, California, Tech & Science
