Scott Stride
Scot Stride is a senior engineer at NASA JPL in Pasadena, CA. Mr. Stride holds a BSEE in Computer Engineering. Scot began his career at JPL in 1982 and has worked on flight telecommunications and radar hardware for several NASA missions including Galileo, NSCAT, Mars Pathfinder Rover, Mars 2001 Lander, CloudSat , Deep Impact and currently MRO. Since watching the Cosmos series in 1980, Mr. Stride has always been interested in SETI. He became active in SETI research in 1996 and has authored 3 papers on the subject. Copies of the papers can be downloaded at his website http://www.interstellar-probes.org/SETI Scot's main focus is studying alternatives to the traditional SETI method of searching for artificial microwave or optical signals originating far outside the solar system. The alternatives he calls SETV (Search for ET Visitation) and S3ETI (Solar System SETI). Both strategies postulate that robotic spacecraft, or probes, from highly advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, as of yet undetected by traditional SETI efforts, have launched interstellar probes which may have entered our solar system. Traditional SETI has not searched the solar system because it's been assumed that ET space probes cant get here. Indeed, even at cruise velocities of 0.1C interstellar travel is slow, but for civilizations that have the energy and patience to explore interstellar space, the laws of physics don't forbid it. SETV defines visitation as from robotic probes, not vehicles with living entities. SETV is a strategy to search for evidence of ET probes using ground-based autonomously run observatories. The search space is between Earth and the moon. S3ETI is a strategy to search for evidence of ET probes using radio telescopes or antenna arrays. The search space is the volume of space within a 50 AU heliocentric radius. This search space encompasses all the known planets and part of the Kuiper belt. S3ETI searches for artificial microwave signals or phenomena originating within the solar system. If manmade sources are eliminated then the detection of artificial signals may give indirect evidence for the presence of a robotic probe. Both strategies are practical and contain testable hypotheses. They compliment traditional SETI methods by covering the regions within the solar system. Mr. Stride will discuss these strategies and the prospect of using the Allen Telescope Array to carry out future piggy-back S3ETI experiments."