Puerto Rico SETI Research: 'Earth's Ear' Arecibo Telescope Nears Shut Down, No More Extraterrestrial Life Messages?

Puerto Rico's Arecibo Telescope is at risk of being shut down for good, affecting the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), a nonprofit institute dedicated to finding alien life. The Arecibo Observatory is one of the most important tools in SETI research.

Erik Kopela, director of SETI@home, said that if they will lose Arecibo they will be losing about two-thirds of the volume of the galaxy they can search through using all the other telescopes operating now.

The Arecibo telescope functions like Earth's giant ear. It listens to messages sent by extraterrestrial life. At present, it is known to be the largest fast radio telescope that mostly picks up cosmic noise from stars and interstellar gasses. Kopela said that if it will be assumed that an ET has some sort of technology level and is broadcasting at some distance, whether they can be seen or not depends on the size of the telescope they will be using.

The Arecibo telescope allows researchers to look deeper into space than any other telescope. It can scan larger segments of the sky than most newer radio telescopes which are better at highly detailed readings. While the smaller telescopes are great for investigating a potential ET location, researchers need to scan larger sections to find regions of interest, for which they need Arecibo, Space reported.

In 1974, Carl Sagan and his colleague Frank Drake used Arecibo on behalf of humans to send the first message to a nearby cluster of stars called M13, Vice reported. The message contained information about human DNA and our number system, as well as pixelated drawings of our solar system, human, and the Arecibo telescope.

Arecibo telescope is located in Puerto Rico and was originally built to track airborne Soviet warheads. It was used to research the atmosphere of Earth's planet in the past and was also used to hunt for giant asteroids that may be in a coalition path with Earth in 1963.