Dear friends,
It is graduate school application season, and I have received several inquiries from prospective graduate students about research opportunities with UCLA SETI. I encourage qualified students to apply, but I also warn them that SETI funding remains challenging. Although we are fortunate to have received generous donations from friends and alumni, most recently two generous gifts from Joe and Andrea Straus and from the Rattray Kimura Foundation, we do not have sufficient funds to support an additional graduate student at this time. It is always heartbreaking to decline admission to outstanding students because of insufficient funds. If you wish to partner with us to support any aspect of our research, teaching, and outreach program, please get in touch with UCLA Development Officer Loida De Leon or me or visit the online UCLA Giving site. We are grateful for your support!
Our collaborative project, "Are we alone in the universe?", has reached an exciting new milestone. Approximately 30,000 volunteers have submitted over one million signal classifications to date! UCLA graduate student Megan Li is using these classifications to design and train a machine learning application to accelerate our search. She will describe her preliminary results in an oral presentation at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society next month. When we first proposed this science collaboration to potential funding partners (NASA and The Planetary Society), we described a nominal goal that would require 300,000 classifications and a stretch goal that would require 1.5 million classifications. We are thrilled that our volunteers have accomplished so much in the short 10-month period since our launch. The work continues. The 10th batch of UCLA SETI data with 5600 signals obtained in 2022 and 2023 has been uploaded to the platform. Thanks to volunteer translators, we now offer a French version (by Louis Verhaeghe) and a Portuguese version (by Fernando Nogal).
The Fall quarter at UCLA is ending this week. I enjoyed teaching an introductory Astrobiology course to 440 students with my colleague Professor Tina Treude and four teaching assistants. Over the course of 10 weeks, we touched on every aspect of the search for life in the universe, covering enough basic physics to talk about the Big Bang, the formation of the atoms that we are made of, the formation of stars and planets, planetary climates and habitability, exoplanet detection and characterization, SETI, relativity, and interstellar travel. My colleague covered enough basic chemistry and biology to talk about biomolecules, cells, metabolism, evolution, early Earth, extremophiles, and mass extinctions. We also reviewed key search locations in the Solar System, including Mars, Europa, Titan, and Enceladus. Astrobiology is a fun course in which I have opportunities to describe aspects of my research, including our UCLA SETI work.
I heard an interesting talk yesterday during which University of Rochester Professor Adam Frank argued that a certain oxygen level might be required to enable the evolution of intelligence and technology. Although this idea sounds plausible enough, I noted in the Q&A session that advanced civilizations presumably have no trouble establishing radio or optical beacons on oxygen-poor worlds. Therefore, it would be ill-advised to limit our searches to oxygen-rich worlds. Immediately after this talk, I presented our estimates of transmitter prevalence at the Green Bank Observatory Science Community Webinar.
I was honored to receive the 2023 UCLA Excellence in Science Outreach Award. I am grateful to you as subscribers of this newsletter for joining me on this outreach journey.
Warm regards and best wishes for the holiday season!
Jean-Luc Margot
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