Breaking Good
The biggest science news in recent days has been the unveiling of Breakthrough Initiatives, a funding program founded by billionaire investor Yuri Milner, the man behind the Breakthrough Prize that rewards scientific achievement. The major project that was launched as part of this program is ‘Breakthrough Listen’, a $100-million, 10-year long effort in the field of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Breakthrough Listen will be spearheaded by the Berkeley SETI Research Center (BSRC), the group behind the popular SETI@home distributed computing citizen science program. The $100 million pot will provide members of the project access to two of the largest radio telescopes in the world — the 100-m diameter Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia, and the 64-m Parkes Telescope in New South Wales — and the ability to build electronic and computer systems that will be used to search the skies for signs of extraterrestrial technology, along with the funds to hire engineers and scientists to work on various aspects of the project. This is great news for various reasons.
Firstly, the field of SETI has been languishing for decades due to a dearth of interest from astronomers and an even greater paucity of funding. Mainstream astronomers have consistently looked upon the field, as Michael Crichton once put it, with ‘bemused tolerance’. It is true that the hypothesis that extraterrestrial intelligent life exists is neither supported by mathematical proof nor empirical evidence. But science can work with hypotheses that are quantified by the statistical notion of likelihood. For example, prior to the discovery of extrasolar planets, there was no evidence to suggest that they existed, but given the fact that there are billions of other Sun-like stars in the Galaxy, it was unlikely that the Solar System was special. True enough, the first extrasolar planets were discovered in the 1990s, and as of today, there are hundreds of confirmed detections. Had we let ignorance constrain our guesses, we might not have detected any. The existence of intelligent life is an even harder hypothesis to test, with many more unknowns, but the number of intelligent civilizations in the Galaxy can be, and has been quantified, albeit with uncertainties large enough at this point to make the results unusable. It is, however, a legitimate start, and conforms to the scientific method. Experiments are required to test this hypothesis, and funding is finally available to perform them. It is not guaranteed — in fact, it is unlikely — that Breakthrough Listen will result in the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence, but this will be our best attempt at detection so far, and probably for decades to come.
Secondly, the facilities at Green Bank and Parkes have suffered from a funding crunch, and there was danger of them, especially the GBT, being shut down. The new funds will partly be used to keep these observatories afloat, in return for SETI astronomers getting some amount of time on the sky.
In general, thanks to the second point noted above, radio astronomers have welcomed the new development, but it is not without its critics. One of the criticisms is about a Russian billionaire using his money to bypass telescope time allocation committees — the group of astronomers tasked to judge an observing proposal by merit, to allot time on the telescope — to give SETI astronomers an unfair amount of time on the sky. Funding being used to ‘buy time’ on telescopes is not unprecedented. West Virginia University has, in the past, spent $1 million over two years to keep the GBT running, in return for its researchers getting 500 hours. Precedent certainly is no excuse, but the fact is that Milner’s millions would be used to lengthen the useful life of these important scientific facilities and would effectively increase the sky time available for everyone, not just SETI astronomers. Additional factors, such as the development of ‘commensal’ instruments — instruments that enable astronomers to collect data for multiple experiments in a single observing session — will have a multiplicative effect on the time available, and hence, on scientific output.
A second criticism that I have heard is that governments perceived as anti-science may use private funding as an excuse to reduce spending on science. It is an unlikely scenario, but even if it turns out to be the case, the blame would squarely lie on the populace that elects such governments to power, not on private individuals who care about science.
All said, Breakthrough Listen is a fortunate development not just for SETI, but for radio astronomy in general.
Disclosure: As a graduate student at West Virginia University, I was one of the beneficiaries of the time that university researchers obtained to use the GBT. I am also a BSRC collaborator.
