20 February 2009

From TED2009! The SETI Institute's Jill Tarter makes her TED Prize wish: to keep looking for cosmic company. Using a growing array of radio telescopes, she (and all of us) can listen for patterns that may be a sign of intelligence elsewhere in the universe. (Recorded February 2009 in Long Beach, California. Duration: 21:23.)



Jill Tarter: Astronomer



SETI's Jill Tarter has devoted her career to hunting for signs of sentient beings elsewhere, and almost all aspects of this field have been affected by her work.

Why you should listen to her:



Astronomer Jill Tarter is director of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute’s Center for SETI Research, and also holder of the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI. She led Project Phoenix, a decade-long SETI scrutiny of about 750 nearby star systems, using telescopes in Australia, West Virginia and Puerto Rico. While no clearly extraterrestrial signal was found, this project was the most comprehensive targeted search for artificially generated cosmic signals ever undertaken.



Tarter serves on the management board for the Allen Telescope Array, a massive new instrument that will eventually include 350 antennas, each 6 meters in diameter. This telescope will increase the speed and the spectral range of the hunt for signals from other distant technologies by orders of magnitude.



Tarter is committed to the education of future citizens and scientists. Beyond her scientific leadership at NASA and the SETI Institute, Tarter has been actively involved in developing curriculum for children. She was Principal Investigator for two curriculum development projects funded by NSF, NASA, and others. One project, the Life in the Universe series, created 6 science teaching guides for grades 3-9. The other project, Voyages Through Time, is an integrated high school science curriculum on the fundamental theme of evolution in six modules: Cosmic Evolution, Planetary Evolution, Origin of Life, Evolution of Life, Hominid Evolution and Evolution of Technology.



"'Are we alone?' Humans have been asking [this question] forever. The probability of success is difficult to estimate but if we never search the chance of success is zero."

Jill Tarter

1. Stephen Hawking: Asking big questions about the universe
2. Brian Greene: The universe on a string
3. Garrett Lisi: A beautiful new theory of everything
4. Brian Cox: What really goes on at the Large Hadron Collider
5. George Smoot: The design of the universe
6. Patricia Burchat: The search for dark energy and dark matter
7. Jill Tarter: Why the search for alien intelligence matters