GRCon20 - Are We Alone? How GNU Radio Can Help Us Find ET

Presented by Steve Croft and Alexander Pollak at GNU Radio Conference 2020 https://gnuradio.org/grcon20 The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has recently been reinvigorated, in large part due to the development of high-throughput digital signal processing backends for radio telescopes, the availability of powerful new big data analytics and machine learning approaches, and new investment from donors including the Breakthrough Initiatives. A major goal of modern SETI is to crowdsource the search, drawing in expertise from the tech community, adopting open-source and open-platform approaches, and making large amounts of data available for public inspection. We will highlight two key projects currently underway, describe the roadmap for SETI in the 2020s, and outline ways in which GNU Radio contributions are helping to accomplish the goal of community engagement. Firstly, we will give an overview of the Breakthrough Listen project, which has now made over 2 PB of spectrogram data from some of the world’s largest radio dishes publicly available (spanning 1 – 12 GHz with resolutions as fine as 3 Hz), along with associated analysis software. Secondly, we will describe a project to deploy GNU Radio hardware and analysis pipelines at the Allen Telescope Array, our efforts to construct a public dataset of satellite pass captures, and the chance for the community to get time on the array for testing and development.