SETI 2020: A ROADMAP FOR THE
SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE

NASA knows all about planning for visionary projects, and recently the SETI Institute has borrowed a page from the NASA manual to construct a roadmap for the next two decades of SETI research. The Institute sponsored four 3-day workshops on SETI Science and Technology over a 36-month period. Their charge was to take a fresh look at the rationale for SETI, the challenges of attempting to detect evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial technological civilizations, the potential opportunities offered by early 21st century technologies, and the arguments for an active (transmitting), as opposed to passive (remote sensing), strategy.

Participants in these workshops included many of the individuals and disciplines that have historically been involved in SETI activities (astronomers, physicists, and engineers) along with some of the brightest and most influential technologists from the Silicon Valley and beyond. The workshop reaffirmed the feasibility and importance of conducting SETI programs with foreseeable technology, and recommended three specific projects; 1) continue microwave searches with a dedicated SETI array having a collecting area of at least one hectare, 2) begin optical SETI searches for short (micro- to nano-second) broadband pulses, and 3) begin prototyping an omnidirectional microwave array for transient signals that will become economically viable toward the end of two decades, as the result of MooreÕs Law exponential growth in computing capacity. The results of the workshop were published in 2002 as SETI 2020, but long before publication implementation had begun on each of the proposed projects.

This talk is an update on the state of SETI research today, with an emphasis on the Allen Telescope Array being built in northern California, by the SETI Institute and the University of California Berkeley. SETI is a different kind of astrobiology than is normally discussed at NASA HQ, but as Goal #7 of the revised Astrobiology Roadmap and the new NASA Strategic Plan make clear that it is timely to consider a public-private partnership for this exploratory field of science.