Over the last several weeks, I fine tuned the software, ironed out several bugs, and generally made the interface more user-friendly. Not surprisingly, the LAF found nothing except a few false returns from some communication satellites, muon showers, and stray cosmic rays. The results were logged to a text file on an SSD, and I inspect the log each night after work.  If it is empty for three or four days straight, I sometimes tweak LAF’s search strategy.  This may be a lot harder than I thought.

Exactly two days ago, I came home, ordered a pizza, and turned on the TV.  Zoe (my girlfriend) came over a bit later and we watched some old Star Trek episodes for a bit.  Eventually I got up to check my email in my office and noticed my computer was dead. Well, it wasn’t exactly dead. It just wouldn’t boot. I try everything. At first it looked like it was just a hosed OS. Luckily, I had a Linux box handy, and I mounted the drive with LAF as a secondary.  After about an hour of checking and fiddling with recovery software, I finally got some information off the disk.  I could see the filenames and their structure, but their contents were corrupt. At first, nothing seemed unusual.  Zoe suggested that I check the LAF log directory. All the correct filenames were present. The odd part was the log file sizes. All together, the logs were nearly 1.5 terabytes in size!

I think I can now fit the pieces together. Looks like LAF locked onto a signal and wouldn’t let it go.  Apparently, the LAF thought this was the real deal.  The data was captured to the log file which eventually filled up the disk.  The OS then collapsed without any temporary storage to write to and eventually corrupted itself.  What a mess.

At first I was devastated. But Zoe reassured me.  The LAF had found something! But, what had it found?  Was it significant? An alien intelligence, or just radiating sun spots?  If it was significant, maybe it could change the world. I thought about sending the corrupted hard drive out to get it properly salvaged, but decided against it when Zoe looked up the current recovery rates. They want two grand! I didn’t even spend one grand on the home-built computer, and I certainly wasn’t going to spend twice as much on fixing it.

But the data is definitely toast. I can see the log file times and sizes, but the records aren’t formatted the way they should – consist of all zeros.  They must have been corrupted when the computer ran out of space.  There is no way to figure out what LAF found with what I have.  Still, there is some good news. I have a recent printout of the code for LAF software, and I even have another computer.  The only thing I needed to know now is where in the sky LAF was looking, and the exact time of the failure.  After poking around the recovered directory listings, I can see that there are valid time stamps on the files. The main log has a modification time listed as 3:13pm and 44 seconds. Now all that was left is to figure out where it was pointing.

The answer to that question may be easier to figure out than I first thought. We just went outside and circled the dish. To me it looks like it is pointing straight up. Maybe the dish was trying to return to its “stowed” position after the crash.  But Zoe says it isn’t exactly pointing straight up.  This is really puzzling…

Hi.  My name is Adam, and I’m an astrophysicist living in the desert of New Mexico, just west of Socorro. Well, actually I’m working as a computer jockey for a local tech firm because being an astrophysicist doesn’t pay. I don’t mean it isn’t worthwhile, I just mean there isn’t a lot of money in it. Ok, it does pay, but I’m not willing to live on pasta for the rest of my life, even if my girlfriend and I are both vegetarian.  And, this way we can dine out once in a while, and still have room for my expensive hobby.

I’m 41, and five years ago I built a 15 foot amateur radio telescope in my back yard. I call it God’s Ear. Using low noise amplifier circuitry modifications, I can now pick up radio waves which range from 1 centimeter to 10 meters in length. I’m mostly interested in recording local emissions, like those from Jupiter, but recently I’ve become interested in reaching beyond our solar system – capturing binary star radio waves. Recently, astronomers have discovered a black hole only 1,600 light years away from earth by watching a radio wave outburst caused by magnetic fields in an accretion disc near a binary system. 1,600 light years sounds far away, but actually it isn’t. This got me thinking, though. What if there is a closer black hole? Our closest star is only 500 light seconds away. Why couldn’t there be a black hole only 1,000 light years away? How about 500 light years?  There are a lot of questions that black holes raise.  I’d want to see if I can answer at least one of them.  If a black hole is that close, my telescope just might be able to investigate the region on a clear night.  It’s wishful thinking.  I know, but I’ve always been called a dreamer.

The world is so complex and beautiful.  It would be nice to know if we are the only ones observing and aware of nature’s wonders.  No one has found proof of extraterrestrial intelligence, but I’m betting this will change in my lifetime.  There is life out there.  Not just a patch of bacteria on a distance ice filled planet.  Real intelligence.  An intelligence that easily rivals our own.  I’m sure of it.  The problem is distance.  At this point, given our current understanding and limitations, the existence of life 10,000 light years away does us little good.  Our civilizations have only recently been looking towards the skies with eyes that can see in nearly every spectrum.  But, for long distances, our conversation with an intelligent life form would end up sounding something like this:

Earth:  Hey, we’re here.  Anyone else here too?

Earth: (after 600 years, several large explosions vaporize the surface)

Distant planet 10,000 Years later:  TODK NE IFPA UKOLEDO?

Earth: (Silence)

If the direction we are taking doesn’t change soon, it’s more than likely humans will not inhabit the earth 10,000 years from now.  The earth may, indeed, be uninhabitable.  We are only a global war away from perishing at our own hands.  Hopefully, many of us will have the opportunity of moving on to bigger and better rocks circling other celestial fusion devices.  This is exactly why I need to look closer.  Closer than 10,000 light years away.  Closer than 1,000 light years away.  Anything further is revealing, but mostly academic.

I’m writing this log to capture my thoughts and observations with God’s Ear.  Over the few years, I’ll be searching for black holes and other interesting celestial objects within a reasonable radius of our solar system.

There is a lot of sky out there, and a dizzying array of formats that signals can arrive in Arizona after a long journey through space.  Whatever form the signal comes in, we can be sure of one thing.  The signal will be weak and arrive at the most inopportune time.  A good way to visualize this is to imagine throwing a football which will be caught 100 years later by someone you do not currently know.  Further, when you release the ball, the catcher your throwing the ball to does not yet exist, nor do his ancestors have the ability to catch it.  Even if you make an intelligent guess, you are likely to be off in time or space.  A lot can happen in 100 years.  Unless, of course, you send your football faster than the speed of light.  But, hey, if you can do that, you might as well hand the ball to the receiver in person.

Since I’m smart with computers, I decided to write some custom software to scan sections of the night’s sky and look for ETs and stuff. The trick isn’t moving the dish. The dish has a 360 degree azimuth view, and everything 15 degrees above the horizon is fair game. The hard part is deciding which frequencies to scan, and detecting when an extraterrestrial communication is coming over the line. This is where my programming skills come in. I figured astronomers have already tracked most of the visible stars in the sky, but they probably haven’t been as thorough looking elsewhere for “darker” matter. So, I fired up my compiler and wrote several thousand lines of Z++ (my own extension to C++) to take the dish on a grand tour of the sky’s darker side looking at frequencies between about 1.4 and 1.7 gigahertz. I called the program “Lost-and-Found” or LAF (pronounced laugh!) for short. LAF was given a star catalog with places in the skies to avoid.

If all goes well, LAF will find some sign of intelligence from somewhere beyond our solar system.  If not, there may at least be a dissertation in here somewhere!  I will be updating this log with my findings in either case.  Wish me luck!