Eponymously Yours, W. Skeffington Higgins

Posting from the National Radio Quiet Zone, thanks to the miracle of Ethernet cable.

I arrived at Green Bank on Sunday afternoon for the SETI workshop. Met extremely interesting people. This was followed by a fabulous day which included a visit to the Green Bank Telescope.



Here is Hannah House, where I am staying. The GBT is on the horizon, near the center of the photo. Its dish is over two acres in area.

(Webcast of Tuesday and Wednesday's SETI sessions will be readily decoded by any civilization in the galaxy which has developed Windows Media Player. See here for details of the sessions and attendees.)

Speaking of history, the other day I mentioned the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Their original site was in Green Bank, West Virginia, though today they operate radio telescopes in other locations as well. Green Bank is a beautiful spot, so I hear-- I've never been there.

In the autumn of 1962 a photographer for Life, Michael Rougier, visited NRAO. 138 of the photos he shot are now available from Google Images. Rougier's outdoor shots in color are particularly nice.


Sheep graze along dirt road within view of the 300-foot radio telescope


Workers atop the 300-foot transit telescope. Note automobiles visible on the ground far beneath the dish.

This 300-foot radio telescope operated for 26 years, but collapsed in 1988. Its successor, the Green Bank Telescope, began operation in 2001.


A smaller radio telescope, seen against the mountains that surround Green Bank, sheltering the observatory from terrestrial radio interference.


Radio astronomers in a Green Bank control room, 1962. Second from right is Frank Drake, known for his work on the search for exterrestrial intelligence. The others pictured are not yet identified.

Issues of Life are also searchable online; as far as I can tell, Michael Rougier's photos were never used in a story.* (Perhaps they were used in one of the Life Science Library books?)

NRAO had been mentioned in Life two years earlier, as a blaze of publicity accompanied Project Ozma, the first attempt to detect signals from extraterrestrial civilizations using radio telescopes.

For its October 24, 1960 issue, Life assigned Ray Bradbury (who celebrated his 90th birthday a couple of weeks ago) to write about Project Ozma. God bless Ray Bradbury, but he has not often played the role of science writer. I thought he did a decent job, but Otto Struve, eminent astronomer and director of the observatory, felt it necessary, in a letter to the editor in the November 14, 1960 issue, to straighten readers out about the work of NRAO.




* The Voyager record was a message to extraterrestrials encoding pictures and sound onto a disk aboard the two Voyager spacecraft departing our solar system. Interestingly, one of Rougier's photos (unrelated to his Green Bank shoot), of a Chinese family eating dinner, was included in the Voyager collection.

I can't recall in whose Livejournal I read about Richard Carrigan's recent paper. He speculates about the dangers of inimical software possibly buried in SETI signals.

All the discussion on the Web seems to be coming from an article in The Guardian.

You can read more about his ideas in "Do Potential SETI Signals Need to Be Decontaminated?" (it's in Word *.doc format).

( Some excerpts: )