Britain Ramps Up its Efforts to Find Extraterrestrial Life

Britain will be joining the ranks of avid extraterrestrial life seekers with a new concentrated effort utilizing seven major telescopes that will sift through radio broadcasts looking for a message from another planet.

"We now have the capability to collect radiowaves across a wide swathe of the radiowave spectrum, and that allows us to look at the possibility of searching for the sorts of signals that might be created by ET civilizations," said deputy director of Jodrell Bank Tim O'Brien at a Royal Astronomical Society meeting on Friday.

The effort, for which astronomers are asking $1.5 million a year, will make Britain a major player in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Currently, most SETI-related research comes out of the United States.

"If we had one part in 200 - half a percent of the money that goes into astronomy at the moment - we could make an amazing difference. We would become comparable with the American effort," said U.K. SETI Research Network coordinator Alan Penny in a BBC report.

"I don't know whether [aliens] are out there, but I'm desperate to find out. It's quite possible that we're alone in the Universe. And think about the implications of that: if we're alone in the Universe then the whole purpose in the Universe is in us. If we're not alone, that's interesting in a very different way."

The array of seven telescopes, dubbed eMerlin, will play a key role in providing a vast amount of data that could potentially house evidence for extraterrestrial. The telescopes will use extra sensitive radio receivers to look for signals that could have originated from another life form. With more money, the astronomers say that they can concentrate their efforts on planets known to be within a star's habitable zone.

"Ask astronomers do they think ET exists and most will tell you yes," O'Brien told the Guardian. "We don't know what the nature of life would be, or whether it wants to communicate with us, but since we're collecting all this data anyway, it seems rather remiss not to search for ET signals."