In 2016 Paul Horowitz talked about SETI at Google. Fascinating stuff. Paul did an especially good job of weaving in a lot of radio/electronic and computer info.
— I was pleased to learn that one of the early radio astronomy antennas used plywood covered with copper. I hope it was copper tape!
— I didn’t know that the Fast Fourier Transform was something developed in the 1960s.
— Parkes Telescope! Yea!
— Paul’s “chirping” of receivers to screen out targets that are NOT doppler shifting (i.e. terrestrial signals).
— Paul tells the group that “amateur” does not mean unprofessional — it means that the person is doing it for the love of doing it. Amen.
— SETI at Home.
— Tube op-amps! (was that two 12AX7s?)
— A variometer! Wow! I have two here — one in the ET-2 regen receiver (a gift from Pericles HI8P), and another that I homebrewed using a 35mm film can.
Great stuff from Paul.
I love Talks at Google. They usually have such interesting guests. I haven’t really thought about SETI in quite a while, but I used to be pretty interested in the idea that we might detect intelligent life out there. I had the SETI @ home screensaver that allowed SETI to use the unused computing power of my desktop while I wasn’t using it so they could process the data they were pulling in from their antennas. Pretty neat idea. I wonder if other projects are still doing distributed computing stuff in a similar way.