A note from TED Prize winner Jill Tarter…

At TED last February, Chris Anderson told the audience that without a White Knight stepping up to support my SETI observing program on the Allen Telescope Array, the antennas would soon be put into a safe hibernation mode in preparation for shutting down the array. That’s because our University of California Berkeley partner was no longer able to find federal and state funds to pay for operations of the Hat Creek Observatory where the array was built. No White Knight materialized; hibernation commenced April 15. Since April, the cryogenics have been kept running to protect the delicate low noise amplifiers in the innovative feed/receiver systems on the antennas, physical security has been maintained, our extraordinary computing equipment has been stored in our Mountain View lab for safekeeping, but the weeds on site grew unchecked, and no data were taken from the sky.

But we never lost the dream of re-starting. Recovery was a three-part process: first, working with UC Berkeley to forestall the immediate site remediation activities that would be required at the cessation of the US Forest Service land use permit; second, find a new task for the array and a partner to maintain and operate it while sharing time with SETI; and third, find support for my SETI team to restore our observing capabilities and once again begin exploring the sky. It hasn’t been easy, and the future is still a bit uncertain, but as of September 1, we were back on site, greasing antenna bearings, reinstalling computers, rewriting software to accommodate new modes of operating, fixing a frozen compressor on the old HVAC system, and yes, mowing down the weeds. We have a short-term contract to assess the utility of the Allen Telescope Array as part of the US Air Force’s important space situational awareness mission, and we hope this will turn into a long-term partnership. We are working with the Forest Service to have the land use permit transferred. We also experimented with crowdfunding to raise the money needed for my team to do the work involved in getting the array and our SonATA signal detection system up and running again -– thousands of wonderful SETI Stars from around the world came to our aid on SETIStars.org, meeting the 40-day funding challenge we set -– WOW!

In a delightful coincidence, we were finally ready to relaunch our SETI exploration of the 1,235 exoplanet candidates announced last February by the Kepler mission (the worlds that we had been targeting prior to hibernation), and the date of our relaunch was yesterday; the opening day of the First Kepler Science Conference! We started observing again and the Kepler team announced the discovery of Kepler 22b, the first Earth-size planet in orbit within the habitable zone around a star like our Sun -– not quite Earth 2.0, but getting close. And by the way, they also gave us another 1000+ exoplanet candidates to explore.

So for the next two years or so, we know exactly what we need to do, and where we want to look. Planets are real, planets are plentiful, and some of the systems are starting to look a bit familiar. What a great time to be doing SETI! Federal and institutional funding sources have brought the search for life elsewhere in the galaxy to an exciting threshold. My astrobiology colleagues will be trying to search for biosignatures from exoplanets circling other stars, and at the Center for SETI Research we are moving forward with the public’s quest to know whether there is any intelligent, technological life on these worlds. As always, the funding for the SETI effort needs to be found: about $100,000 a month, every month, every year. We are going to repurpose and evolve SETIStars.org to allow supporters to more closely follow our progress, to interact with us in ways that keep them involved and motivated. The setiQuest community that launched as part of my 2009 TED Prize wish is already helping us with the technical challenges of our work. This is humanity’s search, and we cannot do it without global support — some of which I hope will come from the TED community.

Watch Marco Tempest’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.

Watch Anna Mracek Dietrich’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.

Having been on the TED stage, it’s like introductions precede you. People know about you before meeting you in a way I have not experienced before. People say, “I’ve seen your TEDTlk!” Oh, OK then, I don’t have to introduce myself! People already know answers to the first questions, so that we can move right on to the important things that we want to talk about.

What have you been doing since your first TEDTalk? What’s new?

My 2009 TEDTalk on surgery was primarily about abdominal surgery and making it better. Since then, we have been going from hair follicles to toenails, looking at all the different places in the body where we can bring robotic surgery. It is a really interesting and fun thought process, and it led to my current thinking, which is what I tried to articulate in my TEDMED talk yesterday: Places where we are looking for a gap between what we can do currently with our existing technologies and what we’d like to be able to do for the patients IF ONLY — if only we had better diagnostic tools, if only we had better therapeutics, better drugs. Putting everything into that framework allows you to really make a decision on where technology like robotics could make a real difference in patients’ lives.

You were an engineer for a while and then you went to medical school — was it a complete change? And are you looking forward to moving on and taking the next stage, and if so what is it?

I would actually not say that it was so much of a complete change, because I took my engineering knowledge with me to med school, and I applied it. One of the things I talked about in my TEDMED talk yesterday was how experts gather a lot of expertise and they get a worldview that is very, very good at filtering between what they do and what they see as irrelevant. And once you’ve build up that filter for a while, you also get very good at filtering out disruptive technologies, things that don’t currently fit the way you think treatment should happen. Thinking about that, eventually I will be stale in what I am doing. I will be too highly trained to be able to be responsive to new things that will happen. So I will need to retrain in some way. I don’t know what it will be. I still feel like I am on a steep part of a learning curve, and you know, in medicine, there is always more to learn.

What’s happening with your green house, which you gave a TED U talk about?

We moved in! We’re doing a lot of stuff in permaculture and landscape gardening, and finally had our rainwater caching system, and the greywater wetlands, so everything is up and running. We’ve been in the house for almost a year now; at a year, I am going to analyze all the data on the house for the first year, and I’ll update the blog at that point with: ‘Well, I had these assumptions on what the house was going to be like, and what is it now compared to the assumptions.’ It will be really interesting to do analysis after a year and project what the house is going to be like. Will I get the payback that I calculated in my talk?
One of the interesting things for me is, I saw all kinds of projections and analysis, but nobody ever closed the loop and actually said how much did it really save you compared to what you had estimated.

How does it feel to live in that house? :)

It’s lovely. It certainly has something to do with sustainability and the feel-good aspect of it. And it is the space we’ve created for our family and it is designed the way we like to live.

Watch Malcolm Gladwell’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.

As Steven Levy writes today in Wired.com’s Gadget Lab:

Fadell explained his concept: Untold tons of carbon were being pumped into the air, with people losing billions of dollars in energy costs, all because there was no easy, automatic way to control the temperature. But what if you could apply all the skills and brilliance of Silicon Valley to produce a thermostat that was smart, thrifty and so delightful that saving energy was as much fun as shuffling an iTunes playlist?

The dialable interface comes courtesy of Mike Matas (watch his TEDTalk).

Read more in this New York Times piece on Nest Labs >>

… and at Nest.com >>

Watch Todd Kuiken’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.

Watch video >> Kevin Stone: A new method for escaping tall buildings

Exclusive video from TED2011: We’ve been building high-rises for a hundred years. But there’s still no good way, in an emergency, to get people out of tall buildings quickly. Kevin Stone asked: Why? At TED2011, he shares what his “Why?” led him to: the Rescue Reel. It’s an example of ingenuity driven by curiosity and passion.

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Watch Edward Tenner’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.

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