You can help search for aliens with an open access release of SETI data

By Georgina Torbet Published June 22, 2019

SETI

The Breakthrough Initiatives, a program founded in 2015 to search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), recently submitted two papers covering the analysis of its first three years of radio telescope data. Using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, the team searched for evidence of technological activity out among the stars such as radio signals or laser flashes. As a part of the Listen project, a sample of 1702 stars were observed, making this one of the largest such projects in history.

Although the team didn’t find any evidence of alien life yet, there is a reason to take interest in the Breakthrough Listen project: all of the data collected is being made publicly available in an open data archive.

Recommended Videos

“This data release is a tremendous milestone for the Breakthrough Listen team,” Dr. Danny Price, Breakthrough Listen Project Scientist for Parkes, said in a statement. “We scoured thousands of hours of observations of nearby stars, across billions of frequency channels. We found no evidence of artificial signals from beyond Earth, but this doesn’t mean there isn’t intelligent life out there: we may just not have looked in the right place yet, or peered deep enough to detect faint signals.”

If you want to help out with the search for extraterrestrial life, the Breakthrough Listen project is recruiting the public’s assistance. The data which Price and colleagues examined has now been made publicly available on the project’s website, and can be downloaded in the .csv format.

“It is the team’s hope that the data will be used for other kinds of astronomical investigations in addition to technosignature searches, and also that those with relevant expertise can help the program develop better and faster algorithms to detect and filter potential candidate signals,” a note on the project’s website announced.

This is the first time the project has released this much data, which includes scans of the interstellar asteroid ‘Oumuamua and visual data from the Automated Planet Finder, a robotic telescope at the Lick Observatory in San Jose, California. In total there is nearly 1 petabyte (that’s 1 million gigabytes) of data available, a mammoth trove which you can search through using the Open Data Archive page.

Topics

Georgina Torbet

Space Writer

Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…

Cars

Range Rover’s first electric SUV has 48,000 pre-orders

Land Rover Range Rover Velar SVAutobiography Dynamic Edition

Range Rover, the brand made famous for its British-styled, luxury, all-terrain SUVs, is keen to show it means business about going electric.

And, according to the most recent investor presentation by parent company JLR, that’s all because Range Rover fans are showing the way. Not only was demand for Range Rover’s hybrid vehicles up 29% in the last six months, but customers are buying hybrids “as a stepping stone towards battery electric vehicles,” the company says.

Cars

BYD’s cheap EVs might remain out of Canada too

BYD Han

With Chinese-made electric vehicles facing stiff tariffs in both Europe and America, a stirring question for EV drivers has started to arise: Can the race to make EVs more affordable continue if the world leader is kept out of the race?

China’s BYD, recognized as a global leader in terms of affordability, had to backtrack on plans to reach the U.S. market after the Biden administration in May imposed 100% tariffs on EVs made in China.

Cars

Tesla posts exaggerate self-driving capacity, safety regulators say

Beta of Tesla's FSD in a car.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is concerned that Tesla’s use of social media and its website makes false promises about the automaker’s full-self driving (FSD) software.
The warning dates back from May, but was made public in an email to Tesla released on November 8.
The NHTSA opened an investigation in October into 2.4 million Tesla vehicles equipped with the FSD software, following three reported collisions and a fatal crash. The investigation centers on FSD’s ability to perform in “relatively common” reduced visibility conditions, such as sun glare, fog, and airborne dust.
In these instances, it appears that “the driver may not be aware that he or she is responsible” to make appropriate operational selections, or “fully understand” the nuances of the system, NHTSA said.
Meanwhile, “Tesla’s X (Twitter) account has reposted or endorsed postings that exhibit disengaged driver behavior,” Gregory Magno, the NHTSA’s vehicle defects chief investigator, wrote to Tesla in an email.
The postings, which included reposted YouTube videos, may encourage viewers to see FSD-supervised as a “Robotaxi” instead of a partially automated, driver-assist system that requires “persistent attention and intermittent intervention by the driver,” Magno said.
In one of a number of Tesla posts on X, the social media platform owned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a driver was seen using FSD to reach a hospital while undergoing a heart attack. In another post, a driver said he had used FSD for a 50-minute ride home. Meanwhile, third-party comments on the posts promoted the advantages of using FSD while under the influence of alcohol or when tired, NHTSA said.
Tesla’s official website also promotes conflicting messaging on the capabilities of the FSD software, the regulator said.
NHTSA has requested that Tesla revisit its communications to ensure its messaging remains consistent with FSD’s approved instructions, namely that the software provides only a driver assist/support system requiring drivers to remain vigilant and maintain constant readiness to intervene in driving.
Tesla last month unveiled the Cybercab, an autonomous-driving EV with no steering wheel or pedals. The vehicle has been promoted as a robotaxi, a self-driving vehicle operated as part of a ride-paying service, such as the one already offered by Alphabet-owned Waymo.
But Tesla’s self-driving technology has remained under the scrutiny of regulators. FSD relies on multiple onboard cameras to feed machine-learning models that, in turn, help the car make decisions based on what it sees.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s technology relies on premapped roads, sensors, cameras, radar, and lidar (a laser-light radar), which might be very costly, but has met the approval of safety regulators.