By rights, SETI — the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — should be entering its golden age. After decades of begging or borrowing time on other people’s telescopes to scan the skies for repetitive radio signals suggesting intelligent life, SETI scientists finally got their own equipment a few years ago: the Allen Telescope Array in California. The Kepler satellite, which has found more than 1,200 possible planets around other stars so far, has handed the ATA a bonanza of promising new targets, with more to come. And there is no shortage of powerful electronics and computers to analyze any incoming data — information-processing muscle that SETI pioneer Frank Drake couldn’t have imagined when he first started listening to the heavens back in 1961.
So it was especially distressing to SETI fans when a letter went out a couple of days ago from Tom Pierson, CEO of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. “Effective this week,” he wrote, “the ATA has been placed into hibernation due to funding shortfalls for operations of the Hat Creek Radio Observatory where the ATA is located.” Admits Jill Tarter, the Institute’s research director, “We’ve been in better shape.” It’s not the first time SETI has faced funding challenges. In the early 1980’s, Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire ridiculed the whole idea of looking for ET and forced NASA to stop funding the project. In the end, a personal visit by Carl Sagan got him to reverse course. But then in 1993, Nevada Sen. Richard Bryan did it again, pointing out that “not a single Martian has yet been found.” Since then, SETI searches have relied mostly on private money — notably, on the nearly $25 million donated by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen to help build the ATA, on the grounds of the University of California’s Hat Creek Observatory.
But Allen’s donation, along with money from the SETI Institute, were sufficient only for the construction of the array, not for its ongoing operations. That responsibility went the University of California — and like most public institutions in California, the University is more or less broke
