One year ago, Congress defunded public media. Now that we're 100% community funded, please become a sustaining member or increase your existing membership today.
Help Find Extraterrestrial Life. Really
An example of the radio waves that UCLA's SETI needs help sorting through.
(
Courtesy UCLA SETI
)
Just in case you haven’t had enough talk about a UFOs and aliens in the past few weeks, now may be your chance to help figure out whether intelligent life actually exists in outer space. Not by obsessing over some pixelated video from flat-Earth Twitter, but by helping some scientists over at UCLA.
About the project
For the past seven years, the world’s largest full steerable telescope has been scanning the cosmos, hoovering up all kinds of radio signals from across the Milky Way.
The assumption is that another civilization is transmitting radio waves at high power.
— Jean Luc-Margot, UCLA
Now, UCLA’s SETI (which stands for “search for extraterrestrial intelligence“), says they need your help digging through the data to find out if one of those signals came from another civilization. The team is monitoring a narrow band of radio waves that they say would come, not from nature, but from an engineered device.
“The assumption is that another civilization is transmitting radio waves at high power,” said Jean-Luc Margot, the UCLA professor who’s leading the program. “If we can identify one of these signals and show that it comes from an extraterrestrial location, it’ll be pretty compelling evidence that there’s another civilization out there.”
Sponsored message
Why they need your help
The problem is that there's a lot of noise in the dataset from human made crafts, like GPS satellites. So, they need people like you to review images of the signals to help classify them. They’ll then use the dataset to train AI to more swiftly process images in the future.
What happens if you find ET?
If you do manage to find an exceptional signal, the team at UCLA will then review it, and if it warrants further investigation, the broader scientific community will get involved.
“We’ve all seen signals that got us excited for a few minutes, but very quickly we find out that the signal doesn’t survive additional scrutiny,” said Margot.
How to help
There are about 7,500 images uploaded right now, but the team hopes to classify as many as 100,000 of them over time.
Sponsored message
To pitch in, head on over to AreWeAlone.Earth, because who knows … maybe we have evidence of an alien civilization sitting on a web server somewhere.
Corrected February 15, 2023 at 6:37 PM PST
A previous version of Jean-Luc Margot's name was misspelled. We regret the error.
One year ago, Congress voted to defund public media, eliminating a critical $1.7 million from our budget every year going forward. But they couldn’t silence us, and we’re not going anywhere. LAist is now 100% community funded and that means we’re taking our future into our own hands and turning to you to keep local reporting strong.
You come to LAist because you want independent reporting and trustworthy local information. Our nonprofit newsroom doesn’t answer to shareholders looking to turn a profit. Instead, we answer to you and our communities. We are free to follow facts wherever they lead and to hold power to account without fear or favor. Our only loyalty is to our readers and listeners and our mission: to inform, engage, and strengthen Southern California’s communities.
If this story helped you, please become a monthly member today to help sustain this mission. It just takes 1 minute to donate below.
You come to LAist because you want independent reporting and trustworthy local information. Our nonprofit newsroom doesn’t answer to shareholders looking to turn a profit. Instead, we answer to you and our communities. We are free to follow facts wherever they lead and to hold power to account without fear or favor. Our only loyalty is to our readers and listeners and our mission: to inform, engage, and strengthen Southern California’s communities.
If this story helped you, please become a monthly member today to help sustain this mission. It just takes 1 minute to donate below.
Senior Vice President News, Editor in Chief
