This week, the SETI Institute announced that it would have to shut down its large radio telescope facility, called the Allen Telescope Array, near the California mountain town Hat Creek. For over a decade, SETI has used the 42 radio dishes in its array to scan the skies for possible communications from extraterrestrial intelligence.
2011 was expected to be a banner year for the group, because recent space probe missions have revealed the locations of over 1000 possible Earthlike planets – and with them, regions of space where the array could scan for signs of the civilizations we hope to find on planets like our own.
Over the years, SETI has been funded by NASA, the National Science Foundation, and donations from philanthropists like Paul Allen. This year, the NSF cut its funding to SETI to ten percent of what it had been…
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