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MICHAEL HOLSTINE: We're standing on top of level four
of the Green Bank Telescope, the largest fully steerable
radio telescope in the world.
We're standing directly under the reflector for the main
structure, which is 2.4 acres in size.
KAREN O'NEIL: Radio astronomy started back in
the 1920s and '30s.
It really got its start when people were surveying the
radio sky to understand noise that they were seeing within
their own radio observations.
And they began to realize that that radio noise was actually
coming from outer space, from the sun, from the stars, and
from the distant galaxies that we see out there.
And so with that became the field of radio astronomy.
And that grew and grew until eventually, in the 1950s--
1956--
the United States realized that if we were going to be a
player in this new field of science, we needed to build a
national radio astronomy facility.
When they decided to build a national radio astronomy
facility, they began looking around the country to
determine where the best site for that facility would be.
And they had a lot of different
criteria in that decision.
But one of the biggest, and possibly most important in the
long run, was they wanted an area where radio frequency
interference was minimal.
MICHAEL HOLSTINE: You can imagine, in 1958 there were no
wireless communications to speak of.
But in the last 10 to 15 years, wireless
technology has exploded.
Everyone has a cell phone.
And now simply because the telescope is so sensitive
that, for instance, your cell phone that you're so attached
to, if it, alone, that single cell phone, were placed on
Mars, for instance, it would be the brightest radio object
in the sky to us.
So we have to figure out a way to allow communications,
particularly for emergency medical purposes, and still
protect the data that the observer is trying to receive.
So from this point on, beyond this gate, we require that a
diesel engine only travel down here.
And you can see the "no spark plug" sign.
We design, build, and run these extremely
technologically advanced instruments.
But here, on site, we can't use the technology that
everyone else is used to using.
We don't have cellphones.
We don't have microwave ovens.
There are a few people that are upset that they can't have
the conveniences that maybe their aunt and
uncle in Ohio have.
But again, we try to find a way to work with those people
to provide them what they would like to have without
having the wireless be part of it.
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KAREN O'NEIL: When the GBT came along, it's not just very
sensitive, but it has a very wide frequency range.
That is, we can look at wavelengths from many, many
meters down to things that are just three millimeters in
wavelength, so very, very small.
And with that came the idea of well, let's just use this
incredibly sensitive telescope with its incredibly wide
frequency range and go see what we could find out there.
So they pointed the telescope into areas where you can
expect to find complex molecules, like
star formation areas.
And they found very, very complex molecules, more
complex than anybody would have imagined, up to very
basic sugars in space.
So that tells us that the building blocks of life are
everywhere out there.
As Douglas Adams said, the universe is huge.
It's mind-bogglingly huge.
And we're already discovering stars that have other
planetary systems, very much like our own Earth, here in
our own galaxy.
There absolutely is life out there.
I would even go as far to say as I think there's intelligent
life out there.
KAREN O'NEIL: The bigger question is, even if the
universe is teeming with intelligent life, are we going
to be able to detect it in our lifetime?
That's an incredibly difficult feat to do.
MICHAEL HOLSTINE: We are, with a certain suite of instruments
here right now, at least trying to reach back to
milliseconds after the Big Bang occurred.
And we're looking at the epic of re-ionization, when there
started to be a coalescence of material.
Once you have star creation, you have a long laundry list
of things that, at least for us, end up into human
creation, because we're all made of the stuff that the
stars produce.
So it's a very interesting thing to watch.
I really think there was something before
the Big Bang, too.
I think that there may have been many big bangs, because
the logic, for me, is there that it occurred.
Every day, people here think about those possibilities, not
just whether it's possible, but how do I go about proving
that that's a possibility?
And the instruments that are here allow a lot of that work
to be done.
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