UCLA SETI Group newsletter 2019-03-14

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March 14, 2019

Dear friends,

I hope you are enjoying your stay on the blue planet. We have traveled about 175 million miles around the Sun since my last newsletter and I am eager to share our news with you. The manuscript that UCLA graduate student Paul Pinchuk submitted to the Astronomical Journal is now published. Paul gave an excellent presentation about the results described in this article at the January 2019 meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Seattle, WA. I gave a talk in the same session and described the difficulty of establishing meaningful upper limits on the prevalence of transmitters in the Galaxy. If the SETI detection algorithms were perfect, we could perhaps attempt to quantify how many transmitters are out there on the basis of the fraction of the search volume that we sample in any given search. However, most detection algorithms inadvertently eliminate some of the very signals that could reveal extraterrestrial transmissions, making the upper limit calculation unreliable. We are working on minimizing this problem with better algorithms and simulations.

At the AAS meeting, we met with other technosignature experts to discuss the white papers that were being prepared for the Astro 2020 decadal survey organized by the National Academy of Sciences. Our paper titled "The radio search for technosignatures in the decade 2020-2030" (with Steve Croft, Joe Lazio, Jill Tarter, and Eric Korpela) is now available online. Our paper describes the scientific context and importance of the search, four advantages that radio searches provide compared to the well-funded searches for biosignatures, the fraction of the search volume that has been sampled to date (roughly a bathtub's worth of water out of the Earth's oceans), opportunities for increasing the sampled fraction in the 2020-2030 decade, and the hardware, software, and human resources necessary to enable the search. We hope that the Astro 2020 decadal survey committee will read the paper with interest and extract some of the key messages for its final recommendations.

The Astro 2020 decadal survey report will contain recommendations about science and funding priorities for the next decade. Approximately 600 science white papers were submitted for evaluation by the various committee panels.

Approximately 20 undergraduate students and 5 graduate students are enrolled in the Spring 2019 UCLA SETI course, which starts in a few weeks. Some of the students got together to design and promote a UCLA crowdfunding campaign to raise money to purchase telescope time and a new data storage server, and to enable presentations at scientific conferences. One advantage of the crowdfunding site is that it facilitates small gifts that we might not otherwise receive. If you are excited about our search, please consider giving and please consider spreading the word about our campaign to your professional and social networks. The smallest possible donation is $1 and every dollar counts! Click here to make a gift.

Students contributed art to promote our crowdfunding campaign.

A friendly alien assisted us with promoting our crowdfunding campaign on social media.

I am thrilled to report that we received a generous $9,000 gift from Michael Thacher and Rhonda Rundle. Their gift was the impetus for the crowdfunding campaign and it empowered us to purchase the new computer that we will be using for many years to come. With the increased enrollment, we will definitely make good use of the 20 additional CPU cores. Our total data storage capacity now exceeds 250 terabytes.

Michael Thacher and I after the installation of our new rack-mounted storage server. This server includes 24 8-terabyte disks and 20 CPU cores.

Next week, I am off to Hong Kong and Tokyo to describe our search efforts. I will be giving five talks to both general and scientific audiences. I am looking forward to my trip.

Warm regards,

Jean-Luc Margot