The search for evidence of intelligent life on other planets -- along with the mainstream quest of answering more precisely how the universe came to be, what it's made of and where it may be headed -- got a substantial boost yesterday from Paul Allen.
The Microsoft Corp. co-founder and fifth-richest person in the world announced a gift of $13.5 million, in addition to his earlier donation of $11.5 million, to begin construction of an unprecedented new radio astronomy telescope in Northern California primarily dedicated to SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
"We're pushing the technology of radio astronomy with this," Allen said by telephone from Palo Alto, Calif., where he and others announced the groundbreaking for construction of the Allen Telescope Array. "This will be fascinating."
The telescope, in the shadow of Lassen Peak in a remote high-desert region known as Hat Creek, will be a network of 350 small radio-frequency dishes spread across about 2.5 acres of land linked by a sophisticated computer system.
When completed, experts say, the Allen Telescope Array should represent the state of the art in radio astronomy. For SETI, the increased power of observation is intended to improve the odds of spotting radio frequencies that could hint of advanced civilizations elsewhere in our vicinity of the Milky Way galaxy.
The first phase of the project, intended to get 32 dishes up and running, will be completed later this year. The entire 350-dish network is to be completed by decade's end.
"We've spent the past decade looking at slightly less than a thousand stars," said Jill Tarter, director of research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., and the model for Jodie Foster's character in the movie "Contact." "With this, we'll be able to explore from 100,000 to a million stars over the next decade."
Allen, along with other luminaries in the software and computer industry such as David Packard, William Hewlett and Gordon Moore, played a critical role in keeping alive this sometimes controversial field of scientific inquiry.
When Congress pulled the plug on funding for SETI in the early 1990s, Tarter said, Allen and other private donors financed it and "resurrected it from the ashes."
This new telescope, Allen and Tarter said, represents a major advance for other scientific pursuits in radio astronomy -- a field that "looks" into space using the radio frequency portion of the electromagnetic spectrum rather than the more traditional visual light portion.
"SETI wants to know if we're alone," said Leo Blitz, an expert on the formation of galaxies and director of the Radio Astronomy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. "I want to know how we got here."
Blitz, whose Berkeley lab is a partner with SETI on the project, said the telescope will open the door to advances on a number of fronts in radio astronomy. He's particularly interested in using the device to dig deeper into how galaxies evolve.
Those studying the perplexing problem of the universe's missing or "dark" matter -- a theoretical prediction in physics that contends most of the universe's matter hasn't yet been identified -- may also benefit from the project, Blitz said. A more powerful radio frequency telescope, he said, could provide new information on just how "dense" the universe was when it was only 10 minutes old, he said.
"I think we'll get a lot of important new information about the evolution of the universe from this project," Blitz said.
"We're also changing the way radio telescopes are going to be built," added Tarter. Many astronomers, she said, regard the Allen Telescope Array as a prototype for a much larger -- but still only proposed -- telescopic array called the Square Kilometer Array.
The National Science Foundation has given $1.5 million to the Allen Telescope Array and is reportedly in discussions with SETI to provide further operational funding to assure that the instrument is widely accessible to many other scientists. Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft technology chief, has also donated $1 million to the telescope project.
SETI Chief Executive Thomas Pierson said his organization will still need to raise $16 million from other sources to expand from 32 dishes to the second-phase goal of 206 dishes. Allen wants the project to have a diversity of sources of money. SETI had originally offered those who donate $50,000 to have a dish named after them.
"We've changed the price tag to $100,000," Pierson said. He noted they already have three dishes up from the earlier feasibility study phase of the project.
Allen said he has been supportive of SETI because of the group's willingness to take risks and continue its efforts in the face of criticism and skepticism. With this telescope project, he said, there will be a payoff for mainstream radio astronomy and, perhaps, for SETI.
"If they get that signal, it would be incredible," Allen said.
Tarter said the signal they hope to find with the Allen Telescope Array would be some radio frequency transmission unlike any known signal produced in nature or by known astrophysical phenomena.
"Of course, even if we find this it could turn out to be due to some form of astrophysics that we haven't yet discovered," she added. "But that wouldn't be too bad a booby prize."
P-I reporter Tom Paulson can be reached at 206-448-8318 or tompaulson@seattlepi.com