COKid Posted April 29, 2011 Share Posted April 29, 2011 (edited) If aliens come calling, we might not hear them. The San Jose Mercury News reports that the SETI Institute ? the one made famous by the movie Contact ? has put its program to find alien life on hold. In an April 22 letter SETI sent to significant supporters, Tom Pierson, SETI's CEO announced that beginning this week, the Allen Telescope Array "has been placed into hibernation due to funding shortfalls for operations of the Hat Creek Radio Observatory (HCRO) where the ATA is located." The Mercury News reports: The timing couldn't be worse, say SETI scientists. After millenniums of musings, this spring astronomers announced that 1,235 new possible planets had been observed by Kepler, a telescope on a space satellite. They predict that dozens of these planets will be Earth-sized ? and some will be in the "habitable zone," where the temperatures are just right for liquid water, a prerequisite of life as we know it. Scientific American reports that SETI would have liked to use the radio telescope array to listen in on any radio waves coming from the extra solar planets found by Kepler. They report SETI is not the only institution that listens for alien life, "but it is probably the instrument most committed to the task." Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/04/27/135746059/budget-cuts-shutdown-setis-alien-seeking-telescopes Edited May 2, 2011 by Growled Shortened article length Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ToneKnee Posted April 29, 2011 Share Posted April 29, 2011 There is already a thread on this.. :/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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