The SETI League - A Brief Personal Recollection*

The SETI League Will be Discontinuing Operations at the End of 2024

"Discontinuing operations" isn't entirely accurate, since operations were discontinued on our behalf by the loss of our Secretary, Heather Wood, earlier this year. What we are truly discontinuing is the SETI League itself. We are surrendering our non-profit corporate charter, donating our assets to other SETI endeavors, and our remaining staff will be undertaking different pursuits and activities. Just as Carroll's Cheshire Cat left behind only a grin, the remainder of the SETI League will be its December 2024 Web Site final update.

Why?

The inexorable passage of Time. I've made it clear, at least to the extent I have been able to wield English, how much I hate The System. It got Heather, and it's after Paul Shuch, our Executive Director Emeritus and after me, our President. We were all within a year the same age when this started in 1994, and, with one exception, remain thus today. Despite Paul's and my great good fortune in remaining extant, SETI does nothing if not give one perspective. If we did not go out gracefully, out eventually we would have gone with a push. We're denying The System at least that degree of volition. But I'm pretty sure I'll have Time to finish this recollection and perhaps a bit more as well. What do I remember?

Our Founding

An unsung heroine of the SETI League is one Victoria A. Navarra. When NASA and the United States Congress disengaged from SETI, I decided to pick up the antenna, as it were. But before singing The SETI League Hymn, we had to exist. One doesn't start an organization, collect members and their dues, and undertake organized activity without government involvement. Vicki was the only person I knew (or am ever likely to know) to have the patience and legal knowledge to navigate the byways of non-profit organization organization. She did it. Paul and I, without Vicki or Heather, hope to navigate our disorganization, a much simpler process, while retaining what's left of our sanity. I should also mention and thank Orville Greene, my late business partner and patent attorney, for whom Vicki was legal secretary and who generously provided initial funding for the league.

Our Early Years

The NASA Project Cyclops report came to me from the dissolution of an unlamented library at which I exercised my pack-rat skills. I believe it was in the late 1980s when I read it and marveled at the genuine possibility of finding extraterrestrials. When NASA was forced to abandon SETI and we started our own SETI League, I realized that Cyclops would be an invaluable introduction to the field for our members. Having no way at the time to obtain copies over the internet, we located a pristine copy with the help of the SETI Institute and, along with them, reprinted the report and added our own preface. The new material, including introductions by Barney Oliver, Paul Shuch, and me appears here.

Our Executive Director, Paul Shuch

I knew Dr. Paul Shuch from our mutual interest, both business and personal, in aviation. It occurred to me that he might have an interest in SETI as well, and was I ever right! We had a nice chat and I recommended that he give up his full professorship to "work" as the Executive Director of the SETI League. He took me up on it, as he explains here. He went emeritus (not in the Vancean sense) when our budget and our ages dictated that necessity and he retains that position to this day, albeit not for much longer. Despite my nominal presidentship, Paul ran the organization, fulfilled the legal requirements, provided almost all of our technical proficiency, and even wrote our official song book. My personal thanks to Paul for making the SETI League the organization it has been. Without his efforts it is unlikely to have been much more than a web site comprising my own silly theories and blandishments for others to go forth and Search..

Jill Tarter

What is my favorite memory from the early years? Surely it must be the day when the doyenne of SETI, Dr. Jill Tarter paid us a visit in New York City. Jill and I possibly attended the same astronomy class in college. She turned her interest in the subject into a doctorate and worldwide acclaim. Beyond the astronomy class, we shared another attribute: We both consume food. Over a pastrami sandwich at the now-defunct Carnegie Deli we discussed some of the methods and pitfalls of building large antennas and receivers intended to operate in mildly forbidding terrain outdoors. At one point I delivered myself of the opinion that running cryogenic fluids through long and complex piping might not be the best idea. I then realized that I was giving stupid advice to one of the world's great experts on the subject, admitted to same, and shut up. Which did not prevent either of us from finishing our pastrami sandwich.

Contact!

The movie Contact with Jodi Foster playing the part of Jill Tarter and the Eventide DSP4000 Harmonizer playing the part of the ET signal receiver gave the SETI League an enormous boost in membership. At our peak, right after the movie, we had almost 1000 paid members. Alas, almost none of them really understood what they were signing up for. Only a handful renewed, but for that brief period of peak-SETI we got a lot of publicity*** and felt interest was strong enough to have our own conventions!

Our Moonbounce Beacon

One of the few genuine contributions I feel I made to the SETI enterprise was the creation of the W2ETI Moonbounce Beacon A big problem with looking for signals from space aliens is knowing when you've found one. For example, the reliable and predictable signal from the first-discovered pulsar gave rise to the guess that it was of deliberate and intelligent origin. By creating such a signal that anyone with the right equipment could discover, and which was clearly artificial (unless the stars know Morse Code), a searcher could verify that his equipment was working correctly.

And it was fun for me! I'm a hardware guy with a penchant for eBay, and had room for an antenna. The system is off the air and will remain so, having been shut down about 15 years ago. But it was valuable and received reception reports from individuals and even from the Arecibo radiotelescope facility when it was still extant. It would be fairly easy for another organization or individual to resurrect a more sophisticated version of the beacon. Perhaps it's being scoped right now!

Our SETICons

The interest in SETI after Contact was so great and our membership so augmented that we felt it would be possible to have a "convention" of our members and others to discuss ideas, findings, and research implementation, with hardware, software, and theoretical talks. The late Al Katz (K2UYH) graciously volunteered the facilities of the Technical College of New Jersey at which he was a professor as a meeting venue, and Paul and Heather put enormous effort into organizing these events. We even had volumes of Proceedings printed. We did this for several years but circumstances and dwindling attendance intervened. Our 2001 - 2004 SETICons were quite the highlight of our 30-year tenure.

Our Success/Failure

The SETI League was founded on the premise that life existed elsewhere in the universe and that it would be detectable by scientific means, most likely by the reception of communication by electromagnetic means. Recognizing that ET might not think as "we" do, and especially not as orthodox** scientists do, Paul and I felt that individuals, with disparate theories and resources might have as good a shot as the professionals with their kilobucks and eventually megabucks. We were successful in creating a somewhat coordinated group of such individuals. With only one false alarm, nobody made any claims of detection or reception.

Were we successful? In the limited sense of encouraging the group to search for signals, yes. In another sense we were as well: As we like to put it, we were just as successful as NASA and other groups with larger and smaller budgets. Unfortunately, as of this writing we and they were all failures. No space aliens have been discovered by any means at all.

Are we optimistic? Not so much for myself individually, but much more so for the SETI enterprise. At the time of our founding, the "little green men" hypothesis was in disrepute, in the Senate and elsewhere. At present, almost nobody doubts that there is intelligent life in the universe, perhaps even on earth!

And, of course, Heather

As appreciated here, Heather embodied the genius of Organization. Without her, we would have had to be bureaucrats instead of, arguably, as Paul puts it, SETIzens. Thank you in absentia, Arielle Heather Wood.

Too Many Others To Mention

No point in trying! Over the three decade history of the SETI League, we've had thousands of members, a number of advisors, hundreds of contributors, all of their time and many of modest to significant sums. The few current members who will read this personal note will hopefully forgive us for getting old and shutting down the organization. Paul and I remain very interested in SETI, the League is donating its remaining funds to SETI activities, and I at this very moment have LASER SETI receivers on my roof. We're still hopeful and unbowed. We hope you are, too.

Administrivia

The RIKLblog and SETI League server was down for several days due to a combination of hardware failure and holiday madness. The 16-year-old server has now been replaced with a much newer and more power-efficient unit. It is our intention to keep it operating indefinitely, although the SETI web site isn't expected to be updated beyond the end of 2024. RIKLblog additions will retain their adventitious ways.

* Not as brief as I expected it to be, but at least it's haphazard and chronologically impaired.

** Talking about orthodox, SETI, and the practitioners thereof in the same sentence is practically the definition of oxymoronic.

***One publicity item was an interview with a big-city newspaper, the Newark Star-Ledger, whose front page I graced. What expectations I had were dashed when I received a phone call from a woman who had seen the article weeks earlier and had this question for me: Can I get a job for her son?