Looking Up

Perhaps it takes a very rich person to ignore very small things. In a week in which most of us were concentrating on such snack-size fare as whether Fred Thompson stumbled in his first presidential debate or how many hours Joe Torre, the weary manager of the New York Yankees, has left on the job, Paul Allen was concerning himself with decidedly larger matters--life in the cosmos, to be exact.

Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, owner of the Portland Trail Blazers and the Seattle Seahawks, and one of the developers of the first private spacecraft, has never lacked for ways to stay busy, but in 2001 he joined with the University of California, Berkeley, and the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute to install a set of 42 dish antennas in Hat Creek, Calif. The so-called Allen Telescope Array (ATA), which was scheduled to go live on Oct. 11, does what conventional radio telescopes do. That is to say, it listens to the faint whisper of radio signals from celestial objects like quasars, which make up the collective voice of the universe. But the ATA can listen on a private line too--the one on which suspiciously regular pulses emanating from the vicinity of sunlike stars would be carried. That's how our broadcasts would sound to beings out there, and that's how their broadcasts--if they exist--would sound to us.

Allen's financial contribution to the project was laundry money to the likes of him--$25 million, a bargain price made possible by increases in computing power and the small (18 ft., or about 5 1⁄2 m) size of each dish, which makes them easy to mass-produce. But $25 million is still hard to come by when you have to tell your banker that you're using it to hunt for aliens, which is why it's nice to be a man who doesn't need a banker.

"I'm someone who likes to invent what the future of science and technology looks like," Allen says. Grandiose maybe, except that he and a Seattle school pal did that once before. The ATA could grow to 350 dishes, but it may not have to. If it gets us asking questions that go beyond the usual noise of the news, it has done its job even before its switch is thrown.