SETI : ' Signals expected now'

On Wednesday, January 10, at the American Astronomical Society Meeting, theorist Dr. Avi Loeb from Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics led a press conference on the search for ET. “Soon, we may be eavesdropping on signals from Galactic civilizations,” said Loeb. “This is the first time in history that humans will be capable of finding a civilization like ours among the stars.” Loeb asserts that the proposed search will find “leakage” from transmissions equivalent to our broadcast television or military radars. SETI Institute’s Project Phoenix and UC Berkeley’s SERENDIP have both had the technical capability to detect intentional signals—beamed at Earth—with the equivalent power to military radars. Loeb’s search would expand the frequency range over which searches are conducted.
Loeb and his co-author Matias Zaldarriaga (CfA) suggest looking for accidental leakage from an alien civilization. They point out that the new Mileura Wide-Field Array’s Low Frequency Demonstrator (MWA-LFD), which is designed to study frequencies of 80-300 Megahertz, will pick up the same frequencies used by Earth technologies. On Earth, military radars are the most powerful broadcast sources, followed by television and FM radio. If similar broadcast sources exist on other planets, facilities like MWA-LFD might detect them. A SETI program at the MWA-LFD would complement other SETI projects. It will observe a larger area of the sky over a longer period of time and in a different frequency range.